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Streaming now in various virtual cinemas in new restorations, Éric Rohmer’s “Tales of the Four Seasons,” the last of his three major film cycles, offers a fresh chance to consider the methods of one of cinema’s most quietly perceptive artists. Compared to his “Six Moral Tales” and “Comedies and Proverbs,” films that probed the strident yet misplaced confidence of young people as they attempt to find their place in the world, the “Tales of the Four Seasons” found Rohmer—70 years old the year that the first film in the series, 1990’s A Tale of Springtime, premiered—turning his attentions to middle-aged characters.

Perhaps for that reason, this is the most narratively driven cycle in Rohmer’s oeuvre, focusing on characters who may still show flashes of impertinence but generally have a far more solid grasp of self than the pseudo-intellectuals and flighty dreamers of his earlier work. This...

Swimming Home is an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2011 novel, written and directed by debut UK flmmaker Justin Anderson.

The UK-Dutch co-production premiered in the Tiger competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film centres around a war reporter played by Mackenzie Davis, on a family holiday with her husband (Christopher Abbott), a poet, and their teenage daughter. Returning home to their villa with a friend (Nadine Labaki) they find a naked stranger, Kitti (Ariane Labed) floating in the pool. Invited to stay, Kitti’s presence comes to emphasise the tensions within the family.

Anderson studied...

Swimming Home is an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2011 novel, written and directed by debut UK flmmaker Justin Anderson.

The UK-Dutch co-production premiered in the Tiger competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film centres around a war reporter played by Mackenzie Davis, on a family holiday with her husband (Christopher Abbott), a poet, and their teenage daughter. Returning home to their villa with a friend (Nadine Labaki) they find a naked stranger, Kitti (Ariane Labed) floating in the pool. Invited to stay, Kitti’s presence comes to emphasise the tensions within the family.

Anderson studied...

Award-winning artist Justin Anderson’s debut feature “Swimming Home” has its world premiere in competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam. Variety has secured access to the first clip from the film.

The film, an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, centers on poet Joe (Christopher Abbott) and war photographer Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), whose marriage is dying when Kitti (Ariane Labed), a naked stranger found floating in the pool at their sunny holiday villa in Greece, is invited to stay. Oscar nominated Lebanese actor-director Nadine Labaki plays a significant role in the film as does emerging actor Freya Hannan-Mills.

In 2014, Anderson directed “Jumper,” a short inspired by Pasolini’s “Teorema,” about a man emerging from a pool and standing naked in the window during a family dinner. A friend saw the film and suggested that he read Levy’s novel. The book resonated with Anderson and he contacted Levy.

Du côté d’Orouët (1971).The water is too cold for swimming and there’s the subtle threat of a gale in Jacques Rozier’s 1971 film Du côté d’Orouët. Ostensibly a summer movie, this lackadaisical, two-and-a-half hour dispatch from three girls’ eponymous beachfront holiday nevertheless has trouble fulfilling the hallmarks of a successful vacation. In addition to the especially crummy weather, the beachhouse grows messier and the local patisserie, one of the only eateries, shutters for the impending fall and winter seasons. Such is the liminality of September, where the worst elements of August and October mingle without ever fully committing to one or the other, and these three weeks are the chosen off-time chosen by Caroline (Caroline Cartier), Kareen (Francoise Guégan) and Joëlle (Danièle Croisy). These 21 days equally swirl with torpor and fleetingness, Rozier evincing an impossible relationship between the two to convey both the longueurs and excitability of vacation.

The films of French director Quentin Dupieux spin self-contained worlds that revolve around absurd obsessions: an automobile tire with an urge to kill (“Rubber”), a man consumed with desire for a fringed leather jacket (“Deerskin”), and now, in the low-key, blank-stare silliness of “Mandibles,” two dimwitted dirtbags determined to train a shockingly large pet housefly to steal.

Tall, oafish, jorts-wearing Manu (Grégoire Ludig) and smaller, squirrely Jean-Gab (David Marsais) are affable idiots. Jean-Gab is happy to walk away, at a moment’s notice, from the small gas station he manages without locking up, while Manu is first seen sleeping on a beach, unaware he’s being soaked by the encroaching tide. They’re thirtysomething fools, a live-action Beavis and Butthead whose only constant is their lifelong friendship, one punctuated by inside jokes, private handshakes, and a recurring habit of getting stuck in the middle of a thought with a very French “duh” on their lips.

Emmanuelle Bouilhaguet, a TV industry veteran who ran Lagardere Studios Distribution for a decade, has joined The Oligarchs Group (Tog), the banner behind Eric Rochant’s hit spy series “The Bureau,” as managing director.

The Paris-based company was founded in 2008 by French-American producer Alex Berger and Rochant, the French show runner and director. The outfit’s best-known credits is “The Bureau,” the Canal Plus original series which has been a commercial and critical hit at home and abroad, traveling to more than 110 territories around the world. A U.S. remake is currently being developed at Paramount.

In a newly-created role at Tog, Bouilhaguet will be in charge of driving and expanding the strategy and business opportunities of the company and its subsidiaries.

The seasoned executive will also oversee production, licensing, marketing and distribution of all contents and brands.

“For our next chapter of growth, the team and I couldn’t...

As a filmmaker, Ira Sachs, the director of “Love Is Strange,” “Little Men,” and (his masterpiece) “Keep the Lights On,” is like a flower that keeps sprouting new tendrils, growing ever more beautiful and complicated and delicate. His new movie, “Frankie,” may the closest that anyone has come to making an American version of an Eric Rohmer film. I say that having long compared Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” and its sequels to Rohmer (and make no mistake: all three of the “Before” films are marvelous). But “Frankie,” even more exactingly, re-creates the deceptively casual and meandering but pinpoint Rohmeresque sensation of a small handful of characters wandering around, not doing much of anything but revealing, through conversation and (occasionally) through action, who they are and how, almost imperceptibly, over the course of one movie, they might change.

“Frankie” is a film made with immaculate craftsmanship (and one non-Rohmer element:...

The upcoming Beijing International Film Festival will give space to high-profile Hollywood franchise movies with screenings of all films in both the “Mad Max” and “Bourne Identity” series. Classic Hollywood fare will also feature prominently in a lineup that, as usual, features an eclectic grab-bag of titles.

The local government-backed festival opens April 13 and runs through April 20.

The list of films nominated in the festival’s competition section, and jury members has not yet been released. Winners of the Tiantan (Temple of Heaven) Award will be announced at the closing ceremony.

Since this year is the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, the theme of both the opening and closing ceremonies will be “home and country,” the festival said on its website, so as to make the event “a birthday blessing for the motherland.”

This benediction is so far scheduled to include “Mad Max” (1979), “Mad Max 2” (1981), “Mad Max:...

Idiosyncratic French film-maker who was a leading figure in the cinema of the postwar new wave

In Arthur Penn's intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman's hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. "I don't think so," he says. "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."

Behind that exchange lies a jab at ­Hollywood's mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is ­literature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.

Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts,...

As a repeatedly self-confessed french cinema enthusiast it embarrasses me to admit this but I'm relatively unfamiliar with Eric Rohmer's filmography. I wanted to note his passing here anyway because he's such an icon of the French New Wave. Rohmer was just a few months shy of his 90th birthday when he died earlier today in Paris.

Though I couldn't quite get in synch with Rohmer's recent work (The Lady and the Duke and his last feature Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon were the most recent I had seen and both escaped me ...though I adored the finale of the latter), I was quite fond of Pauline à la Plage (Pauline at the Beach) back in the day. It was one of the first handful of French films I sought on on VHS in the late 80s when I decided that French cinema was for me. Merci.

Rohmer's...