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Welp, it’s January. That special time of year where everyone is simultaneously recovering from the holidays and trying to kick off the new year by putting their best foot forward. TV shows that have been on break will soon return and mid-season premieres quickly follow thereafter, but for film, January is often looked at as slow period for new releases, with offerings like “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” Leigh Whannell’s “Wolf Man,” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence” being unveiled. Films that have had awards-qualifying runs like Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths” and Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl” will also expand wider, boosting their profiles in time for Oscar voting, but generally, there’s not much going on to excite the average movie-goer this month. So what better time to say, “Out with the new, in with the old!”

Repertory theaters in New York and Los Angeles have...

Catherine Deneuve will preside over the 50th edition of the Cesar Awards, France’s equivalent to the Oscars.

As part of her honorary role as president of this milestone edition, Deneuve will be delivering the opening speech at the ceremony. The gala event will take place on Feb. 28 at the Olympia concert hall and will be broadcast on French pay TV group Canal+, a media partner of the Cesar Awards.

“Who better than an extraordinary actress to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Césars? Thanks to exceptional talent, a unique career and timeless grace, Catherine Deneuve embodies the very essence of the seventh art,” said the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma.

The French star, whose career spans nearly seven decades, has starred in a raft of iconic films directed by some of the world’s most revered filmmakers, from Luis Buñuel (“Belle de jour”) to François Truffaut (“Le Dernier Metro...

A throwback, of sorts, to the kinds of animated kids flicks that existed before the advent of Pixar and CGI, Chicken for Linda! (Linda veut du poulet !) is a lovingly hand-drawn ode to the whims and wills of capricious children: specifically, one very stubborn little French girl who won’t take no for an answer when it comes to her favorite meal.

This new collaboration from directors Chiara Malta (Simple Women) and Sébastien Laudenbach (The Girl Without Hands) is a simple and even silly story on the surface, following an action-packed day in the life of its titular heroine as she tries to get her mom to cook a family poultry recipe for dinner. But as the plot — or is that the sauce? — thickens, the film begins to probe deeper, exploring how kids and adults can be affected by the death of a loved one, and how they can eventually try to move on.

A gorgeously discordant pairing of image and sound depicts the killer of women Émile (Jacques Perrin) as he stalks his prey in the late writer/director Paul Vecchiali’s distinctly autumnal “The Strangler” — or “L’Étrangleur.” He pursues them from a distance, a sinister but jazzy interlude sometimes underscoring his menacing shadow-like presence.

The 1970 French arthouse giallo didn’t receive a release in the United States upon its premiere a half-century ago, despite being celebrated at Cannes. Distributor Altered Innocence brings the winking, melodramatic psychosexual thriller — anchored in the intersection of four strangers’ warring amoral main character syndromes amid Émile’s gendered murder spree — to American audiences this fall. This comes after showing at Austin’s Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival in September. It is restored with the help of Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (Cnc).

Vecchiali died earlier this year at the age...

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.

First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.

Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.

The Pitch: Once Upon a Time, in a Far Away Land, the Vibes Were Fucked

I’m a simple man with simple political views: I believe the United States government should take all of its pageantry cues for state events from the film “Donkey Skin.” Dead presidents should be laid to rest inside a giant glass Christmas ornament. White House staffers should be required to paint themselves red or blue to reflect the party in power. And the Speaker of the House should preside over congress while sitting on a giant stuffed cat.

A slight but satisfying choice to open Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, Pietro Marcello’s “Scarlet” isn’t quite a fairy tale, although it certainly feels like one at times. For example, roughly midway through the movie, a woman who might be a witch meets the film’s fanciful young heroine, Juliette (Juliette Jouan), in the woods and predicts her fortune, explaining that one day this girl — who’s destined for greater things than the provincial Normandy farm where she’s dutifully passed her adolescence — will be whisked away by a ship flying scarlet sails.

Set in the years just after the Great War, this charming French-language fable — which hails from the celebrated Italian doc maker whose epic narrative debut, “Martin Eden,” was a critical success on the festival circuit just pre-covid — is smaller, sweeter and more sensitive than Marcello’s earlier work. The movie’s sense of reality-based romance,...

‘Adorable charmer’ of 1960s French film who worked with Jacques Demy and Costa-Gavras and later appeared in the Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso

At the heart of Jacques Demy’s delirious, gaily coloured musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is the cherubic sailor and artist Maxence, who has painted his “feminine ideal” and is now searching for the flesh and blood equivalent, hardly suspecting that she lives nearby in the form of Catherine Deneuve. With his mop of bright vanilla hair and his white bachi hat with its cherry-like pom-pom, Maxence personifies the film’s wistful, ingenuous spirit. He was played by Jacques Perrin, who has died aged 80.

Perrin was already established as a bright young thing of French and Italian cinema before Demy cast him in this big-budget extravaganza alongside Gene Kelly, George Chakiris and Françoise Dorléac, Deneuve’s sister. His roles for Demy – he also played a handsome prince in the...

French actor, director and producer Jacques Perrin, a fixture for decades in both French and Italian cinema — where he was best known for his role in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning “Cinema Paradiso” — has died. He was 80.

“The family has the immense sadness of informing you of the death of filmmaker Jacques Perrin, who died on Thursday, April 21 in Paris. He passed away peacefully,” Perrin’s family announced in a statement sent to news agency Agence France Press by his son, Mathieu Simonet. The cause of death was not specified.

Born in Paris on July 13, 1941, Perrin, starting in the 1950s, starred in more than 70 films and co-directed others, including the Oscar-nominated “Winged Migration” (2001), in tandem with Philippe Labro, about the voyage of migratory birds which used in-flight cameras and was a box office hit.

The soft-spoken thesp had landed his first leading role starring opposite Italy’s Claudia Cardinale in Valerio Zurlini...

The Max Kade lecture Therapeutic, Toxic, and Skin Deep: The Dark Magic of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar presented by the German Department of Hunter College Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the second instalment with Maria Tatar (John L Loeb Research Professor at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows) on The Heroine With 1,001 Faces we discuss Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and male anxiety, the meaning of clothing in All Fur, Donkey Skin and an Egyptian variant of the tales, boys in search of fear and girls in haunted houses, eating disorders and the appetite of tricksters in The Hunger Games and David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig), Louisa May Alcott and Little Women paving the way for Anne Of Green Gables and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking and the home front,...

Hi readers. I know I got lost in the weeds a bit in November. It's that damn International Feature Oscar race. It really brings out my Ocd qualities with those Oscar history overviews so I skimped on other stuff. Anyway, here are some of key posts of November in case you missed any. There's one day left but it's the holiday weekend so we're doing the wrap up early ;)

Highlights from the Month That Was

• Ethan Hawke at 50 -an appreciation. The definitive Gen X actor?

• Home for the Holidays -deserves to be a better remembered!

• "Gay Best Friend" -a delightful new series kicked off with My Best Friend's Wedding and Under the Tuscan Sun

• Netflix has too many Oscar contenders - considering the possibilities

• Nicole Kidman in The Undoing -giving us eyeball acting!

• Joan Crawford -Criterion's curated collection

• Cher in 1987 -how she ruled the world that year

• Gene Tierney -...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Bad Boys For Life (Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah)

Much has been made in retrospect how quaint the original ‘95 Bad Boys plays in comparison to its ‘03 follow-up. It rode on the rapport of its leads through only a handful of gunfights and fisticuffs, culminating in an airport climax Bay had to front his own money to finish. The second installment contains not one but two extended car chases with trucks emptying obstacles onto our heroes, and an entire slum being obliterated by a Hummer with little regard for human life–all across a gratuitous two and a half hours. In short, eight years apart, the...

Philippe (Benoît Magimel) and Andres (Nuno Lopes) with Calypso (Clotilde Courau) in Rebecca Zlotowski’s An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile)

At the UniFrance and Film at Lincoln Center’s 25th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, just days before the announcement came that Rebecca Zlotowski’s An Easy Girl (Une Fille Facile), co-written with Teddy Lussi-Modeste, and starring Mina Farid, Zahia Dehar, Benoît Magimel and Nuno Lopes would be the last screening of the festival, I met with the director at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Governor Andrew M Cuomo announced at that time (March 13) that he was limiting gathering in public spaces due to the coronavirus pandemic in New York, which eventually led to the closing of all cinemas by March 16.

Rebecca Zlotowski on Benoît Magimel: “There’s something about him being very melancholic, very sad.”

In the second half of my conversation with Rebecca Zlotowski, André Gide, Marguerite Duras,...

On the heels of Edgar Wright’s list of 100 favorite comedy films comes a more niche deep dive into the movie musicals of the 1970s, courtesy of Wright’s friend and fellow filmmaker Rian Johnson. The “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and “Knives Out” writer-director published a list on Letterboxd citing his 10 favorite movie musicals from the 1970s, from “Cabaret” to “All That Jazz” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

“When you think of the movie musical, the 1970s are not the first decade that comes to mind,” Johnson wrote in a statement. “But I love how that funky vital wilderness between the fall of the studio system and the ascent of the modern blockbuster manifested itself in this genre. One of cinema’s most classic forms was taken up by New Hollywood directors. It resulted in nostalgia as often as innovation, but more often than not the two...

This diverse mix of composer Michel Legrand’s work for film is by no means comprehensive, Legrand’s phenomenal career spanned over sixty years. He scored over 200 films as well as theatre and musicals, won Oscars, Golden Globes, and Grammys (to name a few), and worked with a myriad of famed popular musicians. He made jazz records with Miles Davis and collaborated with the directors of the French New Wave. Later in life (and by no means slowing down), Legrand focused his time on classical music, creating concertos, sonatas, and ballet. He died this February at the age of 86 just a few months after the release of Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, whose score he composed. When reminiscing on Legrand’s work I was taken back to two performances that have always resonated with me; I mused on how in both performances it is the score...

Many filmmakers have taught me how to look at the world, but Agnès Varda is teaching me how to age. She died this week at the age of 90, leaving behind an example we should all strive to meet as we get on in years.

One of the legendary filmmakers who made up the Nouvelle Vague, France’s influential cinematic New Wave of the 1960s, she continually embraced life and a changing world, even after losing her beloved husband and fellow New Wave icon, Jacques Demy, in 1990. In the years when one might have expected her to grow more home-bound, perhaps venturing forth to publish a memoir or pick up the occasional award, she instead continued to plunge into the ever-changing technology of cinema.

As a filmmaker, she constantly experimented with digital cameras and editing, never afraid to step into the arena of the young and always open to completely upending...

Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Michel Legrand, and Catherine Deneuve on the set of The Young Girls Of Rochefort Photo: Agnès Varda

Three-time Oscar-winning composer Michel Legrand has died today in Paris at the age of 86. Legrand's first Oscar was for the song The Windmills Of Your Mind, lyrics by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman, from Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair and he won again with the Bergmans for the score of Barbra Streisand's Yentl. On his own he won a best original score Oscar for Robert Mulligan's Summer Of '42.

Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand at the harbour Photo: Agnès Varda

Michel Legrand's most famous collaborations were with Jacques Demy for Lola, Bay Of Angels, The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, The Young Girls Of Rochefort, and Donkey Skin and Agnès Varda's Cleo From 5 To 7 (Cléo de 5 À 7).

Upon hearing of the great composer's passing, Agnès...

The French movie star of French movie stars turns 75 today. She's won two prizes at Cannes, two at Berlinale, and two at the Césars (with 12 additional nominations) in her career that's been as lustrous as the famous golden hair. Catherine Deneuve hasn't been as celebrated in recent years as Isabelle Huppert (who is 10 years younger) but her list of classics, hits, and indelible experiments is long: Belle de Jour (BAFTA nomination), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Repulsion, Mississippi Mermaid, Tristana, Donkey Skin, The Hunger, The Metro (César win), Indochine, East/West, Pola X, Dancer in the Dark, 8 Women, and Kings and Queen among them.

The last eight years have been quiet but it wasn't so long ago that the one-two-three punch of voice work in the Oscar-nominated Persepolis (2007 -- she voiced both the French & English versions), an amazing performance in Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash)

That there’s a fair chance you’ve never seen Daughters of the Dust — full disclosure: I am among these people — should be taken as a failure of distribution and exposure, not the film’s quality and impact. There’s also a fair chance that the closest you’ve really come to Julie Dash‘s 1991 film is Beyoncé’s Lemonade, which paid a direct visual tribute that,...

A forgotten oddity from the early 1970s is Jacques Demy’s English language mounting of The Pied Piper, a rather bleak but mostly unequivocal version of the famed Grimm Bros. fairy tale about a titular piper who infamously lured the children of Hamelin to their assumed deaths after being rebuffed by the townsfolk when he similarly rid the town of plague carrying rats.

Set in the 1300s of northern Germany, this UK production blends bits of Robert Browning’s famed poem of the legend into the film, but the end result is unusually straightforward and unfussy, considering Demy’s predilection for inventive, colorful musicals, such as the classic confections The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. The stunt casting of Donovan as the piper generates a certain amount of interest, although he’s whittled down to a supporting character amongst a cast of master character actors like Donald Pleasence, John Hurt, Peter Vaughan, and child star Jack Wild.

Notably, The Pied Piper is one of the few Demy films not to be built around a strong, beautiful female lead, which may also explain why there’s no center point in the film. Cathryn Harrison (daughter of Rex, who starred in Louis Malle’s Black Moon) and a gone-to-seed Diana Dors (though not featured as memorably as her swarthy turn in Skolimowski’s Deep End) are the tiny flecks of feminine representation. It was also not Demy’s first English language production, as he’d made a sequel to his New Wave entry Lola (1961) with 1969’s Los Angeles set Model Shop. So what compelled him to make this departure, which premiered in-between two of his most whimsical Catherine Deneuve titles (Donkey Skin; A Slightly Pregnant Man) is perhaps the film’s greatest mystery.

Cultural familiarity with the material tends to work against our expectations. At best, Donovan is a mere supporting accent, popping up to supply mellow, anachronistic music at odd moments before the dramatic catalyst involving his ability to conjure rats with music arrives. Prior to his demeaning, Demy’s focus is mostly on the omnipotent and aggressive power of the corrupting church (Peter Vaughan’s Bishop) and Donald Pleasence’s greedy town leader, whose son (a sniveling John Hurt) is more intent on starting wars and making counterfeit gold to pay his gullible minions than stopping the encroaching plague. Taking the brunt of their violence is the Jewish alchemist, Melius (Michael Hordern), who is wise enough to know the rats have something to do with the spread of the disease. Demy uses his tragic demise to juxtapose the piper’s designs on the children.

While Hurt and Pleasance are entertaining as a toxic father and son, Demy seems estranged from anyone resembling a protagonist. Donovan is instantly forgettable, and the H.R. Pufnstuf and Oliver! child star Jack Wild gets upstaged by a wild mop of hair and a pronounced limp (which explains why he isn’t entranced along with the other children), and the film plays as if Donovan’s role might have been edited down in post. The script was the debut of screenwriters Andrew Birkin (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 2006) and Mark Peploe (The Passenger, 1975; The Last Emperor, 1987) who would both go on to write a number of offbeat auteur entries.

Disc Review:

Kino Lorber releases this obscurity as part of their Studio Classics label, presented in 1.66:1. Picture and sound quality are serviceable, however, the title would have greatly benefitted from a restoration. Dp Peter Suschitzky’s frames rightly capture the period, including some awesomely creepy frescoes housing Pleasence and son, but the color sometimes seems faded or stripped from some sequences. Kino doesn’t include any extra features.

Final Thoughts:

More of a curio piece for fans of Demy, The Pied Piper mostly seems a missed opportunity of the creepy legend.

Film Review: ★★½/☆☆☆☆☆

Disc Review: ★★★/☆☆☆☆☆

The post The Pied Piper | Blu-ray Review appeared first on Ioncinema.com.

Jacques Demy’s international breakthrough musical gives us Catherine Deneuve and wall-to-wall Michel Legrand pop-jazz — it’s a different animal than La La Land but they’re being compared anyway. The story of a romance without a happily-ever-after is doggedly naturalistic, despite visuals as bright and buoyant as an old MGM show.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 716

1964 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 92 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Les parapluies de Cherbourg / Street Date April 11, 2017 / 39.95

Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey, Jean Champion.

Cinematography: Jean Rabier

Production design:Bernard Evein

Film Editors: Anne-Marie Cotret, Monique Teisseire

Original Music: Michel Legrand

Produced by Mag Bodard

Written and Directed by Jacques Demy

What with all the hubbub about last year’s Oscar favorite La La Land, I wonder if Hollywood will be trotting out more retro-nostalgia, ‘let’s put on a show’ musical fantasy fare.

Taking a look at the French director’s fascinating filmography.

One of the biggest films of 2016, La La Land, owes a thing or two to French director Jacques Demy. The bright, colorful musical visually mirrors Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), and director Damien Chazelle was able to capture something of the melancholic sweetness of Demy’s musicals. Demy is not one of the most famous French directors, however his films have a specific charm and intelligence that no other filmmaker could match. The way he blended Hollywood style with French culture was unlike any other filmmaker at the time.

Demy began his career in 1960s France, during the time of the “Nouvelle Vague” or French New Wave. This was the time of films such as Breathless, Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows, and Le Beau Serge. However, Demy lies a little bit outside of this group of filmmakers, and...

Say hello to your new obsession: A spellbinding homage to old pulp paperbacks and the Technicolor melodramas of the 1960s, Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch” is a throwback that’s told with a degree of perverse conviction and studied expertise that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. Shot in velvety 35mm and seen through the lens of a playfully violent female gaze, the film follows a beautiful, narcissistic young sorceress named Elaine (Samantha Robinson, unforgettable in a demented breakthrough performance) as she blows into a coastal Californian town in desperate search of a replacement for her recently murdered husband. Sex, death, Satanic rituals, God-level costume design, and cinema’s greatest tampon joke ensue, as Biller spins an archly funny — but also hyper-sincere — story about the true price of the patriarchy. There hasn’t been anything quite like it in decades.

Entrancingly self-possessed, “The Love Witch” announces itself with rare authority...

Moviefone's Top DVD of the Week

"Dom Hemingway"

What's It About? Jude Law dons impressive chops and gold teeth to play a sleazy

safecracker fresh out of jail. Dom took the fall without ratting out his boss (Demián Bichir), and now it's time to pay the piper. Richard E. Grant co-stars as his best friend, whom Dom enlists on his quest to get paid. Emilia Clarke (the mother of dragons!) plays Dom's estranged daughter, Evelyn.

Why We're In: We love darkly funny crime thrillers, and it's cool to see Jude Law back in action.

Moviefone's Top Blu-ray of the Week

The Essential Jacques Demy (Criterion)

What's It About? This box set comes with the most beloved movies by the French auteur: "Lola," "Bay of Angels," "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," "The Young Girls of Rochefort," "Donkey Skin," and "Une Chambre en Ville."

Why We're In: In addition to the digital restorations of these delightful classics,...

Walking to the castle in Unrelated: "Anna wears that looks like a maternity dress. It belonged to Kathryn Worth's mother."

In part 2 of our conversation Joanna Hogg and I discuss the influence of Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli on Archipelago, how Edith Head would not have come upon Tom Hiddleston and Kathryn Worth's capes in Unrelated, the many roles Viv Albertine and Liam Gillick have in Exhibition, A Nos Amours starting with Chantal Akerman, Catherine Deneuve in Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin, and games people play.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Unrelated, Archipelago, Exhibition, each have totally distinct concepts about costumes.

Joanna Hogg: It's so much about the different stories. With Unrelated, there is a dress that Anna wears that looks like a maternity dress. It belonged to Kathryn Worth's mother. Stéphane [Collonge] and myself were looking at what Kathryn has of her own clothes that might fit into the story.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Written and directed by Jacques Demy

France, 1964

Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Busby Berkeley, Vincente Minnelli, Arthur Freed: names synonymous with the movie musical. Missing from this standard list is a key contributor to the form, the French director Jacques Demy. Perhaps part of the reason for his widespread unfamiliarity, even to those who adore the genre, is that Demy only directed a handful of musicals in his entire career. It’s also likely that the musical is simply thought of as an American type of movie, and therefore, “foreign” practitioners don’t quite warrant similar attention. In either case, Demy did amplify the genre with at least two major works, one of them the recipient of the Palme d’Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which also received four Academy Award nominations (at least some American love there), is not just an exceptional musical,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: July 22, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $124.95

Studio: Criterion

French director Jacques Demy launched his glorious feature filmmaking career in the Sixties, a decade of astonishing invention in his national cinema. He stood out from the crowd of his fellow New Wavers, however, by filtering his self-conscious formalism through deeply emotional storytelling. Fate and coincidence, doomed love, and storybook romance surface throughout his films, many of which are further united by the intersecting lives of characters who either appear or are referenced across titles.

Six of Demy’s films are collected in The Essential Jacques Demy. Ranging from musical to melodrama to fantasia, all are triumphs of visual and sound design, camera work, and music, and they are galvanized by the great stars of French cinema at their centers, including Anouk Aimée (8 1/2), Catherine Deneuve (Belle de Jour), and Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim).

The six works here, made...

Criterion has announced their July 2014 titles and among them is one fans have been waiting a long time to see introduced, David Cronenberg's head-exploding sci-fi Scanners, set for a July 15 release. The set will include a newly restored 2K digital film transfer, supervised by Cronenberg, "The Scanners Way" visual effects documentary, a new interview with Michael Ironside, a 2012 interview with actor and artist Stephen Lack, an excerpt from a 1981 interview with Cronenberg on the CBC's "The Bob McLean Show" and Cronenberg's first feature film, Stereo (1969). Also on July 15 comes Robert Bresson's 1959 classic Pickpocket, telling the story of Michel (Martin Lasalle), a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. Features include: New, 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray Audio commentary by film scholar James Quandt Introduction by writer-director Paul Schrader The Models of "Pickpocket," a...

The Criterion Collection has announced two new titles, two Blu-ray upgrades and a seven-film box set for release this July. Check out the new cover art along with a full list of extra features for each in the gallery viewer below! Debuting in the collection are David Cronenberg's Scanners and Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill as well as a set of Jacques Demy films that includes Lola , Bay of Angels , The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , The Young Girls of Rochefort , Un Chambre en Ville and Donkey Skin . Erik Skjoldbjærg's Insomnia and Robert Bresson's Pickpocket , meanwhile, are receiving HD upgrades. Special features for the new releases are listed as follows: Scanners - New, restored 2K digital film transfer, supervised by director David Cronenberg, with...

I came across this superb Polish poster for The Great Escape recently. Though it is by one of my favorite poster artists, the great Wiktor Górka (1922-2004), I had not crossed paths with it before. An eccentric, stylized and yet perfectly apposite distillation of John Sturges’ 1963 WWII prison-camp adventure, this 1967 poster is a stunning piece of graphic design which renders the film, in just two colors, to its essentials: a plane, fleeing figures, stripes to denote the military, and two black circles for Steve McQueen’s motorbike, all surrounding the multi-font, playbill-styled panel for the film’s all-star cast. Górka’s best work is often in this vein: simple, witty and indelible: an ass’s head on a human body for Donkey Skin, a swastika made out of stockinged legs for Cabaret (perhaps his most famous design), and one rather adorable white whale for Moby Dick.

Growing up in Britain,...

Above: Us poster for Le Sauvage (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, France/Italy, 1975).

Since my column last week on the lesser-known posters of Jean-Luc Godard got so much attention, and since this week the great Catherine Deneuve turned 70 years old, I thought I’d do the same for the grand diva of French cinema. Deneuve—“the most beautiful woman in the world”—has graced well-known posters for numerous masterpieces, whether for Bunuel’s Tristana or Belle de Jour, Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Donkey Skin, Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid or Polanski’s Repulsion, and when I was searching for a poster to mark her birthday last Tuesday, these were the films that kept popping up. But Deneuve has been making films for over 50 years and has appeared in over 110 of them so there should be a lot more to choose from. So that is what I want to focus on here to celebrate Ms.

The following "Auditions at a Glance" calendar conveniently organizes projects by the date and day-of-the-week that the projects' auditions are taking place, to help you schedule your plans. Click on any of the following links to see the casting and job notices related to the dates and project titles highlighted below. Fri. Oct. 18 'Christmas Wedding Baby' 'Finding Neverland''Grown Up' 'If On A Winter's Night...' 'It Hardly Rains' 'The Hammerstein Beauties' 'The Pirates of Penzance' Youth Production 'Under Her Hat!' Untitled Will Eno Play Sat. Oct. 19 'Donkey Skin' 'Les Miserables' 'Paiton's Place' 'Remnants of Men' 'The Forever Game' 'The Parables' Sun. Oct. 20 Cherub Improv 'Grown Up' 'If On A Winter's Night...' 'Matilda', Girl Dancers 'The Miss Longview Texas Drag Pageant' 'The Pirates of Penzance' Youth Production Untitled Starz Ballet Drama, Open Call Mon. Oct. 21 '4000 Miles' 'A Christmas Carol' 'Buddy's Tavern' 'Copacabana' & 'Singin' In The Rain...

Catherine Deneuve: 2013 European Film Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Catherine Deneuve has been named the recipient of the the European Film Academy’s 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award for her "outstanding body of work." And outstanding it is. Yesterday, I posted an article about Dirk Bogarde (Victim, Death in Venice, Despair), one of the rare performers anywhere on the planet to have consistently worked with world-class international filmmakers. The Paris-born Catherine Deneuve, who turns 70 next October 22, is another one of those lucky actors. (Photo: Catherine Deneuve at the Potiche premiere at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.) Deneuve’s directors have included an eclectic and prestigious list of filmmakers from various countries. Those include Belle de Jour and Tristana‘s Luis Buñuel; Le Sauvage and La Vie de Château‘s Jean-Paul Rappenau; The Hunger‘s Tony Scott; Un Flic‘s Jean-Pierre Melville; The Mississippi Mermaid and The Last Metro‘s François Truffaut...

In theaters September 6th, here’s the new trailer for Populaire.

Spring, 1958. 21-year-old Rose Pamphyle lives with her grouchy widower father who runs the village store. Engaged to the son of the local mechanic, she seems destined for the quiet, drudgery-filled life of a housewife. But that’s not the life Rose longs for. When she travels to Lisieux in Normandy, where charismatic insurance agency boss Louis Echard is advertising for a secretary, the ensuing interview is a disaster. But Rose reveals a special gift – she can type at extraordinary speed. Unwittingly, the young woman awakens the dormant sports fan in Louis. If she wants the job she’ll have to compete in a speed typing competition. Whatever sacrifices Rose must make to reach the top, Louis declares himself her trainer. He’ll turn her into the fastest girl not only in the country, but in the world! But a...

The Cinémathèque Française is currently running a major exhibition titled Le monde enchanté de Jacques Demy (through August 4) devoted to the great romantic fantasist who brought us such candy-colored musical reveries as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort and Donkey Skin. What caught my eye was a video on their website (unsubtitled, unfortunately) in which the head of the poster department, Jacques Ayroles, takes us into the Cinémathèque’s vaults (which contain some 25,000 posters) and talks about the various posters for Demy’s films.

The exhibition seems to place particular emphasis on Peau d’Âne or Donkey Skin, Demy’s beloved Cocteau-esque fantasy which, in 1970, was his greatest success (with over 2 million admissions in France) and which came hot on the heels of one of his most disappointing flops, the L.A.-set Model Shop. Based on the 17th-century fairytale by Charles Perrault (famously illustrated by Gustave Doré...

Catherine Deneuve Catherine Deneuve, 68, will be the recipient of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 39th Chaplin Award. The annual fundraising gala benefiting Lincoln Center programs will be held on Monday, April 2, at the Alice Tully Hall in New York. The evening will include films clips and a party. [Full list of Film Society of Lincoln Center (Fslc) Chaplin Award Honorees.] Catherine Deneuve's career spans more than five decades, from André Hunebelle's Les collégiennes / The Schoolgirls (1957), Jacques-Gérard Cornu's L'homme à femmes / Ladies Man (1960), and Michel Fermaud and Jacques Poitrenaud's Les Portes claquent / The Door Slams 1960) to her latest efforts: Christophe Honoré's Les Biens-aimés / The Beloved, shown at last year's Cannes Film Festival; Thierry Klifa's Les Yeux de sa mère / His Mother's Eyes; and Laurent Tirard's upcoming Astérix et Obélix: Au Service de Sa Majesté / Astérix et Obélix: On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as Cordelia, the Queen of England, opposite frequent co-star Gérard Depardieu and Edouard Baer.

In Potiche, Catherine Deneuve plays Suzanne Pujol, the titular ‘trophy wife’ who thinks that jogging, housekeeping and writing light verse are enough to keep her happy. But deep down, she feels useless: her children have grown up, her husband Robert scoffs at her ideas and opinions, and the maid does all the real work in the house. When Robert becomes ill, Suzanne is forced to take responsibility for the family umbrella factory, which her husband had been running with an iron fist and quick temper. Suzanne’s softer management style is an immediate success—in fact, director François Ozon places almost too few obstacles in his protagonist’s path.

What the film lacks in conflict it makes up for with play. Set in the late 70s, Potiche is very much of its time. It champions the career woman, though more as a matter of pleasure than principle: Suzanne’s transformation...

Batter, eggs and flour aren't usually cinematic flavour of the month, but here's a stack of good scenes

Don't show. Tell. That's the general rule for pancakes in films (unless they're the punchline). For what's generally acknowledged as being a visual medium there is scant interest in focusing on these thin slices of batter-based deliciousness. Perhaps it's because they lack punch as a symbol of culinary excess.

Maybe it's because they change dialect on the journey from Europe to America, becoming as heavy and sweet as the Texan drawl on one of Tommy Lee Jones's sheriffs. But then they don't lack cross-cultural appeal. They appear in some form in the cooking of nations from Eritrea to India. Whatever the reason for their elusive nature onscreen, the scenes they generate illustrate how inspiring a disc of fried egg, flour and milk really can be.

1) Not a pancake in sight. But...