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Alain Delon, the striking French leading man known for his uncommonly beautiful, coldly calculating villains in Le Samouraï and Purple Noon, has died. As confirmed by his family to France’s Afp news agency, Delon died Sunday after years of health complications stemming from a 2019 stroke. He was 88.An icon of French cinema,...

Margaret Menegoz, the head of French production company Les Films du Losange, who produced the movies of Michael Hanke, Wim Wenders and Éric Rohmer, among others, has died. She was 83.

The company issued a statement confirming that Menegoz died in Montpellier on August 7. They cited her “love of films and work, and her loyalty to her filmmakers that have become the hallmarks of Les Films du Losange,” describing Menegoz as “open-minded towards Europe and the international scene, which she particularly cherished.”

Menegoz led Les Films du Losange for close to 50 years, taking over at the company in 1973. She produced more than 60 films, including Haneke’s Amour, The White Ribbon and Cache, Wenders’ 1977 feature The American Friend, Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love (1984), Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa (1990), Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime (1990) and A Tale of Winter (1992), among many others.

Amour received 5 Oscar nominations in 2013, including a nomination for Menegoz for best feature.

Margaret Menegoz, the pioneering producer who was a central figure in France’s film industry during a career spanning decades, has died. She was 83.

The Hungarian-born German-French producer served as president of Les Films du Losange from 1975 until 2021, and was president of Unifrance from 2003 to 2008.

During a career that included a key role at the Cesar Academy, Menegoz produced films for directors such as Eric Rohmer, Barbet Schroeder, Wim Wenders, Andrzej Wajda, Agnieszka Holland and Michael Haneke, including the latter’s Palme d’Or-and Oscar-winning Amour in 2012.

After her tenure at Les Films du Losange ended, Menegoz handed over the...

Margaret Menegoz, the pioneering producer who was a central figure in France’s film industry during a career spanning decades, has died. She was 83.

The Hungarian-born German-French producer served as president of Les Films du Losange from 1975 until 2021, and was president of Unifrance from 2003 to 2008.

During a career that included a key role at the Cesar Academy, Menegoz produced films for directors such as Eric Rohmer, Barbet Schroeder, Wim Wenders, Andrzej Wajda, Agnieszka Holland, and Michael Haneke, including the latter’s Palme d’or-and Oscar-winning Amour in 2012.

After her tenure at Les Films du Losange ended, Menegoz handed over the...

Legendary screenwriter collaborated with scores of filmmakers including Jacques Tati, Luis Buñuel, Milos Foreman and Louis Malle.

French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, whose 60-year career spanned more than 150 writer credits and collaborations with Jacques Tati, Luis Buñuel, Milos Foreman and Louis Malle, has died in Paris aged 89.

Born into a family of winegrowers in south-western France, Carrière moved to the outskirts of Paris at the age of 14 when his parents took over the running of a bar.

After obtaining a degree in history and literature, he embarked on a writing career, publishing debut novel Lezard in 1957. Set against the backdrop of a restaurant in the suburbs,...

Return To Montauk set at Lincoln Center Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

While filming Return To Montauk (Rückkehr Nach Montauk) in New York last spring, Volker Schlöndorff spoke to me on the set. His film will have its world premiere at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival in a couple of weeks. We discussed shooting in Berlin with Niels Arestrup and Stellan Skarsgård, connecting Sam Shepard to Max Frisch, Brooklyn author Colm Tóibín's Henry James in his novel The Master, Proust beyond Jeremy Irons in Swann In Love, shopping for clothes, Nina Hoss and Bronagh Gallagher at Lincoln Center, and what's in an affair.

Stellan Skarsgård, Mathias Sanders, Isioma Laborde-Edozien and Colm Tóibín - New York Public Library Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Return To Montauk, co-written by Tóibín, is the story of a writer, called Max Zorn (Skarsgård), who is married to Clara (Susanne Wolff). He comes to New York to promote his book and meets again,...

Jeremy Irons is in many respects the quintessential English film actor. That’s not simply because of the honeyed diction and innate elegance, but the versatility that has enabled him to travel with ease between romantic leading man, edgy character actor and sinister villain, towards an Indian summer of ever-dependable supporting player.

Read More: Jeremy Irons Knocks ‘Batman v Superman’: It’s ‘Overstuffed’ & ‘Very Muddled’

Think James Mason. In fact, Irons and Mason even have a role in common – the riskiest of roles, Nabokov’s infamous pedophile Humbert Humbert, Mason most famously in Kubrick’s “Lolita” of 1962, Irons for Adrian Lyne in 1997. It’s difficult to imagine many Americans jumping at a character who came second in Time’s “Top 10 Worst Fictional Fathers,” or possessing the nuance necessary to make us almost like the man.

Again like many Brits, Irons is classically trained (at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School,...

Volker Schlöndorff directs cast and crew on Return to Montauk set Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

When Volker Schlöndorff sent me the call sheet for his Return To Montauk shoot in New York City, we arranged a schedule for me to be on set to document the goings-on as he was filming at the New York Public Library and up at Lincoln Center. The film, co-written with Colm Tóibín, stars Stellan Skarsgård and Nina Hoss with Niels Arestrup, Susanne Wolff (Dominik Graf's Dreileben 2: Don't Follow Me Around), Isioma Laborde-Edozien, Mathias Sanders and Bronagh Gallagher (Alan Parker's The Commitments).

Stellan Skarsgård as Max Zorn Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Volker and I met at his hotel the day after he was shooting in the Financial District, for a conversation that led us to a quote from Thoreau, connecting Sam Shepard to Max Frisch, Colm Tóibín's Henry James in his novel The Master,...

The Legacy of Octopussy: Mendes Returns to 007 on Autopilot

A good act is hard to follow, and Spectre, the latest installment in the enduring legacy of British MI5 super spy James Bond, is evidence of the adage. Agent 007 returns for his twenty-fourth feature, the fourth reincarnation of Daniel Craig, and this follows the success of 2012’s Skyfall, considered a game changer in the franchise with box office profits luring not only its star back for another chapter but returning director Sam Mendes and screenwriters John Logan, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade (with Black Mass and Edge of Tomorrow scribe Jez Butterworth along for the ride, too). Aiming to present us with more of Bond’s murky origin story, touched upon with foreboding flourishes in the last installment, this end result is an overly-complicated and increasingly silly follow-up attempting nearly the same narrative tricks but without the same dramatic success. A...

Above: Polish poster for Young Törless (Volker Schlöndorff, West Germany, 1966). Design by Kazimierz Krolikowski (1921-1994).

Since Volker Schlöndorff’s newest film, Diplomacy, is opening in New York next week (full disclosure, I work for the distributor) I thought I’d take a look back at the posters for the 25 or more films he has made over he past half a century. Though I quickly discovered that from the late 80s onwards there is little of note (Palmetto, anyone?), I have found some gorgeous posters from the first twenty years of his career, when Schlöndorff was one of the most important directors of the New German Cinema. What is striking is the wide variety of looks given to some of his films, most particularly the international posters for his breakout success The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum which he co-directed with his then-wife Margarethe von Trotta (though shame on the French...

It's 100 years since the first volume of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu was published, but a definitive cinematisation of Proust's epic novel has so far proved elusive

This year has been punctuated by a rash of anniversary-themed books and articles anticipating the first world war centenary, and indeed attempting snapshots of how Europe looked and felt in 1913, eerily poised on the precipice. The other centenary is similar in many ways: on 8 November 1913, Marcel Proust published the first volume of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, his monumental novel about memory, mortality and art, the belle époque, and the leisured and aristocratic classes of Paris, a city crammed in Proust's pages with the most vivid and extraordinary personalities, destined to be swept away by the Great War.

Fourteen years ago, at Cannes, I saw Raúl Ruiz's superlative screen adaptation of the final volume: Time Regained, in which the narrator,...

Legendary French writer Jean-Claude Carrière has crafted strange, wonderful films with directors from Buñuel to Godard. He talks here about the art of creating cinematic enigmas

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Jean-Claude Carrière welcomes me into the former gaming house and den of iniquity that he has called home for nearly half his 80 years; the 19th-century building stands in a sun-dappled Parisian courtyard. It's a glorious afternoon, and I apologise for being so demonstrably English in remarking on that fact, but the legendary screenwriter – tall, with salt-and-pepper stubble and warm, alert eyes – waves away my words. "Why shouldn't we discuss it?" he chuckles. "At least everyone can agree on the weather." Imagine the sense of social rupture if they didn't. "I have a little of that," he confesses, settling into an armchair in a high-ceilinged living room where wooden sculptures stand guard over Persian rugs. "Coming from...