News

French production and distribution firm Oble is to handle international licensing of Canadian hit drama series “Aller Simple” or “No Return.”

Produced by French-Canadian firm Sphere Media, the six-episode psychological thriller premiered on prime-time earlier this year in Canada and has been a hit with critics and audiences. It plays on Noovo, where it has been the most watched drama in the channel’s history, and is available before linear broadcast via subscription on Crave TV.

Written by Annie Pierard, Bernard Dansereau and Etienne Pierard-Dansereau, who all previously worked on Sphere’s “Epidemie” (aka “The Outbreak”), the show sees six complete strangers; a former policeman, an art-dealer, a retired teacher, a marketing director, a criminal lawyer and a businesswoman, en-route to a reclusive billionaire’s home when their helicopter makes an emergency landing deep in the forest. Having survived intact, they stumble across a fishing camp. But disturbing incidents suggest...

Mubi is kicking off the new year with a selection of our 2021 highlights, including some of which haven’t picked up proper distribution yet. Most notably, their own release, Alexandre Koberidze’s dazzling What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, will premiere along with a New Voices in Georgian Cinema series. Also arriving is Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden, Ana Katz’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, Alex Camilleri’s Luzzu, and Nino Martínez Sosa’s Liborio.

As part of a series of first films, they’ll also feature works from Janicza Bravo, Noah Baumbach, Garrett Bradley, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Terry Gilliam, and more. A double bill of Federico Fellini classics, Nights of Cabiria and The White Sheik, will also come to the platform.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

January 1 | Kicking & Screaming | Noah Baumbach | First Films First

January...

The Conversation is a new feature at Sound on Sight bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their second piece, they will discuss Stanley Kubrick’s film The Killing (1956).

Drew’s Take

Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) is not my favorite work by the visionary director. In fact, the film probably wouldn’t even make it onto a list of my top five Kubrick films. Yet, with a career that included such amazing films as Paths of Glory (1957),Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964),2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980), that’s not an indication that The Killing is a film of poor quality but an indication that Kubrick’s body of work comes the closest to cinematic perfection than any director I can think of. Thus, while The Killing...

Alain Corneau, the French director who died in 2010 at the age of 67, shortly after completing this glossy thriller, was little known in Britain. After working as an assistant to Costa-Gavras he made some notable crime movies, including Choice of Arms (starring Yves Montand) and Série noire, a transposition of Jim Thompson's pulp novel A Hell of a Woman from Chicago to suburban Paris starring Patrick Dewaere. But his masterpiece is the stately 1991 Tous les matins du monde, featuring Depardieu père et fils and set in the world of 17th-century baroque musicians.

Already remade by Brian De Palma as Passion, Love Crime starts well as a psychological drama in which two highfliers – bitchy, sadistic Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas) and seemingly submissive Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier) – come into conflict as their heads batter the glass ceiling of the American multinational they work for in Paris. It goes badly off course, however, when...

All amnesiac thrillers get off to an intriguing start then tend to fall away when their heroes and heroines start to recover their memories. The first half-hour of the Danish ID:a is consistently gripping, as its beautiful heroine awakes in a French river with a scar, a gun, a bag containing €2m and no identity. Her search to discover her past takes her to Denmark, Holland and back to France, and includes some agreeable suspense, a great deal of violence, some rather vague leftwing politics and some narrative holes.

ID:a is worth a visit, as is The Woman in the Fifth, Pawel Pawlikowski's first film since My Summer of Love seven years ago and his first thriller. Not exactly an amnesia film but pretty close, it's based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy, the American writer resident in London, whose novel The Big Picture was filmed in France two...

Award-wining French film director best known for Tous les Matins du Monde

It is fair to say that the majority of audiences who saw the film Tous les Matins du Monde (All the Mornings of the World, 1991) – directed by Alain Corneau, who has died of lung cancer aged 67 – had previously never heard of (or heard) the music of the baroque composer and viola da gamba virtuoso Marin Marais. However, the lacuna was soon filled after this sensitive, painterly and vivid recreation of 17th-century French musical life had won seven Césars (France's Oscars), become an international success and resulted in a bestselling CD of the soundtrack by Le Concert des Nations ensemble.

Starring Gérard Depardieu as the older Marais, looking back on his reckless younger self (played by Depardieu's son, Guillaume), it remains Corneau's biggest success outside France. In fact, Tous les Matins du Monde, one of the few films...

Le Monde and other French news outlets are reporting that Alain Corneau has succumbed to cancer at the age of 67. Just last week, Jordan Mintzer reviewed Corneau's latest, Crime d'amour (Love Crime), for Variety, calling it a "taut, sinister psycho-procedural." Starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier and having just opened in theaters in France, the film is set to screen in a couple of weeks at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In 1992, Corneau's Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings of the World) swept France's César Awards, winning best film, director, cinematography (Yves Angelo), supporting actress (Anne Brochet), music (Jordi Savall), costume design (Corinne Jorry) and sound. In 2004, Corneau was awarded the Prix René Clair.

Updates, 8/31: "Mr Corneau's movies included science fiction, police thrillers, a look at office politics in Japan and a mood piece about ancient India," writes Douglas Martin in the New York Times, "but...

French newspaper La Monde is reporting that director Alain Corneau has passed away of cancer at the age of 67. Corneau first began his work in the industry as an assistant director for Costas-Gavras on early 1970s films "The Confession" and "Atlantic Wall." His feature film debut was 1974's "France, Inc.," which kicked off over 35 years of filmmaking that included 1976's "Police Python 357," 1977's "La menace," 1979's "Série noire," ...