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Melvil Poupaud began his 40-year career, at the age of 10 Photo: Thomas Brunot/UniFrance Following in the illustrious wake of talents including Juliette Binoche, Virginie Efira, Olivier Assayas and Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, it is the turn of actor Melvil Poupaud to be honoured during the UniFrance Rendezvous with French Cinema in Paris later this month.

He will be given the French Cinema Award during a glittering ceremony at the French Ministry of Culture at a ceremony on 18 January.

Poupaud’s career has stretched across almost four decades, having begun his acting debut at the age of ten in City Of Pirates, directed by Raoul Ruiz, with whom he went on to make a further five critically acclaimed films.

Melvil Poupaud and Amanda Langlet in Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale Photo: Les Films du Losange During his career Poupaud has worked with many of France's most respected directors,...

Melvil Poupaud: "They are doing a little retrospective of my work at the Fi:af, French Institute, and I have a masterclass at NYU." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Nicolas Pariser’s The Great Game (Le Grand Jeu); Éric Rohmer’s A Tale Of Summer (Conte d'été); François Ozon’s By The Grace Of God (Grâce à Dieu); Charles de Meaux’s The Lady In The Portrait (Le Portrait Interdit); two from Raúl Ruiz, Genealogies Of A Crime (Généalogies d'Un Crime) and Treasure Island (L'Île Au Trésor); Zoe R Cassavetes’ Broken English, and Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways will all be screened in Magnetic Melvil Poupaud.

François Ozon's By the Grace of God in Magnetic Melvil Poupaud Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The CinéSalon series opens on Tuesday, March 7 with Carine Tardieu’s The Young Lovers (Les Jeunes Amants) at 7:30pm followed by a Q&a with Melvil Poupaud inside Florence Gould Hall...

Melvil Poupaud and Marion Cotillard in Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother And Sister (Frère Et Sœur) screening in Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Photo: Shanna Besson/Why Not Productions

In the first instalment with Melvil Poupaud (who is being honoured at the French Institute in New York next month) we discuss the dark side of Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother And Sister (Frère Et Sœur), Mathieu Amalric in A Christmas Tale and Kings And Queens, Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, a touch of François Ozon’s By The Grace Of God, James Joyce’s The Dead, Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale, and Woody Allen’s Coup De Chance with Lou de Laâge, Niels Schneider and Valérie Lemercier.

Melvil Poupaud with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I always understood that the most gratifying thing when you’re an actor is when a great director such as Eric Rohmer...

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.

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. A Summer's Tale is playing on Mubi in the Us through July 20.Gaspard, the protagonist of Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale, is in Dinard, waiting for the arrival of his girlfriend Lena, who, as it turns out, may not actually be his girlfriend and may not actually be coming. He wants to devote his life to making music, but doesn’t want to become a part of the industry he despises, so is considering becoming taking on a job as a maths teacher to make a steady income, despite having little interest in the profession itself. He feels that he’s making little progress in his personal and professional lives, but doesn’t let this bother him too much, as a graphologist has told him that he won’t reach his peak until he turns 30. In other words,...

Above: the great Italian filmmaker, Francesco Rosi, has passed away at the age of 92. Takao Saito, the Japanese cinematographer and frequent collaborator with Akira Kurosawa, has passed away at the age of 85. Best known for his turn in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, actor Rod Taylor has passed away at the age of 84. It started out as a very casual conversation on Twitter (and eventually Facebook), but Kevin B. Lee has put together an impressive poll of the best films of the decade at its halfway mark, with nearly 300 people factoring in to the results. Here's a peep at the top 10, and you can click here to see all the details:

1. The Tree of Life (103 votes)

2. Certified Copy (91 votes)

3. The Master (76 votes)

4. Margaret (68 votes)

5. Holy Motors (66 votes)

6. A Separation (64 votes)

7. Under the Skin (61 votes)

8. Inside Llewyn Davis (59 votes)

9. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (45 votes)

10. Boyhood (44 votes)

For The A.

Are film directors like cupids? Are they armed with a bow and arrow, shooting their particular and peculiar vision of life at the audience so some spell can begin? If so, Eric Rohmer's arrows are philosophically tinged, though aimed more at the heart and the many-tiered prejudices surrounding it than the head. Sometimes mistakenly branded intellectual, his cinema is the personification of the Shakespearian invocation at the beginning of Twelfth Night, “If music be the food of love, play on...” His music is talk and the talk is of love, and though it can stray into discussions of Plato, Pascal, and Kant, its end is the heart because the fleshy fist ultimately decides who we stay with and who we leave, who's in and who's out—the fist answers Rohmer's main question, Who, out of all the people I attract or I'm attracted to, is my type?

Rohmer's least seen,...

The 2014 best-of-the-year lists have begun rolling in. I've seen Ann Hornaday at The Washington Post speak up (props for the "Edge of Tomorrow" inclusion) and Sight & Sound's annual poll has just landed as well. The critics phase of awards season has commenced. Let's start with Sight & Sound's list, keeping in mind that international release dates apply: 1. "Boyhood" (Richard Linklater) 2. "Goodbye to Language 3D" (Jean-Luc Godard) = 3. "Leviathan" (Andrey Zvyagintsev) = 3. "Horse Money" (Pedro Costa) 5. "Under the Skin" (Jonathan Glazer) 6. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (Wes Anderson) 7. "Winter Sleep" (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) 8. "The Tribe" (Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy) = 9. "Ida" (Pawel Pawlikowski) = 9. "Jauja" (Lisandro Alonso) = 11. "Mr. Turner" (Mike Leigh) = 11. "National Gallery" (Frederick Wiseman) = 11. "The Wolf of Wall Street" (Martin Scorsese) = 11. "Whiplash" (Damien Chazelle) 15. "The Duke of Burgundy" (Peter Strickland) = 16. "Birdman" (Alejandro G. Iñárritu) = 16. "Two Days, One Night" (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) = 18. "Citizenfour" (Laura Poitros) = 18. "The Look of Silence" (Joshua Oppenheimer) = 18. "The Wind Rises" (Hayao Miyazaki) Singular as always.

The late New Wave auteur Eric Rohmer equated his films to novels — that's what auteur means, after all — and A Summer's Tale feels like a great beach read of a movie, that deceptively slender paperback you tuck into your luggage because it's substantial without weighing much.

The plot of this 1996 film, newly restored and in its first American theatrical release, seems quaintly simple: On a Brittany beach-town holiday, a moody math student (Melvil Poupaud) waits to meet his girlfriend (Aurélia Nolin), meanwhile making a friend (Amanda Langlet) who wants to set him up with her friend (Gwenaëlle Simon).

The ensuing complications play out as a perfectly minimal farce, with edges planed so smooth as to be almost invisible. Days and moods pass...

Fans of Eric Rohmer, start getting excited now. The French auteur's light-as-air classic "A Summer's Tale," the third film in his Four Seasons film cycle and the only one to never before receive Us distribution, is arriving this summer on the big screen. It hits theaters June 20 at New York's Lincoln Center, and July 18 at various Laemmle theater locations in La. A national release is set to follow. Originally premiering in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, "A Summer's Tale" follows a young college graduate (Melvil Poupaud) as he touches down in a breezy seaside town in Bretagne for a three-week vacation. All of the films in Rohmer's Four Seasons cycle -- and, indeed, in his career -- look at the tangled complications of love, much of which is discussed at length by his introspective if fallible characters, and this film is no different. The young...

Subtle irony, minimal plot – and plenty of couples debating the meaning of love. This summer's cinema has all gone a bit Eric Rohmer. So why do today's directors love the French auteur?

After a handful of writers happened to publish novels that depicted Henry James as a character, or paid homage to his work, David Lodge – who was one of them – christened 2004 "the year of James". In the same spirit, it could be said that this is the summer of Eric Rohmer. Some of the season's most prominent films, including Frances Ha, Before Midnight, and Exhibition (which recently opened the Locarno film festival), show the influence of the French director, who died in 2010, and whose lithe and playful work extended the possibilities of a certain kind of small-scale, psychologically curious, dialogue-led drama.

Though Rohmer's name has been invoked whenever films include anything other than exploding fireballs and blood-drenched zombies, it's...

"Though Éric Rohmer's breakthrough film stateside was the lustrous black-and-white, winter-set My Night at Maud's (1969), the New Wave architect may be cinema's greatest chronicler of the summer vacation," suggests Melissa Anderson in the Voice. "Among the director's many holiday-set movies, Pauline at the Beach (1983) and A Summer's Tale (1996) explore both the languid pleasures and the romantic anguish of time off during the hottest season. Rohmer's 1986 masterpiece (being re-released with its original French title, which translates as 'The Green Ray'), Le Rayon Vert centers on those themes, too, but delivers something much richer: an absorbing, empathic portrait of a complex woman caught between her own obstinacy and melancholy."

"As Delphine, the lonely but defiant Paris secretary at the center of Le Rayon Vert, Marie Rivière creates an emotionally rich portrait of a young woman disappointed in love who transfers her energies into an anxious quest for the ideal summer vacation.

The wonderful late summer Lincoln Center retrospective "The Sign of Rohmer" would require a book-length study to give a reasonable account of the many layers of Rohmer's filmmaking, and of the surprising variety of emotions and behavior that one finds beneath the surface consistency of his material. Instead of that book, I offer a memory of the final impressions that the series made on me: of two intense scenes from two dissimilar films shown in the last days of the Walter Reade program. In one film, Rohmer uses bleak, snowy landscapes and unaesthetic working-class interiors as the backdrop for the single strongest affirmation of a character in his work. In the other, a light-comic tone and an idyllic vacation ambience culminate in emptiness and desolation.

About two-thirds of the way into Conte d'hiver (A Tale of Winter) (1992), Rohmer tips off the origin of his story idea by sending his working-class...