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When people recognize Bruno Gouery on the street he usually gets one of two reactions. Some fans are delighted to see the eccentric Frenchman Luc from Emily in Paris. Others are moved to (genially) scold him as one of those gay men who murdered Jennifer Coolidge on The White Lotus.

“When they know me as Luc, people come up to me with a lot of joy and with a smile,” Gouery says, speaking over Zoom from Paris. “But when it’s from White Lotus they say, ‘You killed Jennifer!’ But either way,...

An Odd Turn (Un movimiento extraño) thrums with a sense of classicism and mystery, yet feels plugged into the uncertainties of Argentina’s current reality: haunted by a failure to confront the violent past, high inflation rates and a devaluation of the peso. Concerning the travails of a security guard with a sixth sense whose romantic encounters are linked to her gamble on the currency market, Francisco Lezama’s film eschews conventional narrative plotting in favour of creating a peculiar yet beguiling vibe; born out of his unorthodox way of writing narratives through collecting contrasting ideas on cards, all the while working as a film history professor at Universidad del Cine and at the Museum of Moving Image Film Archive in Buenos Aires. After his Golden Bear win at this year’s Berlinale, we talked to Lezama about the twin inspirations of Balzac and Rohmer, creating a humanist working method...

French actor and Russian citizen Gerard Depardieu will star in a Russian TV series based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic 1879 novel, The Brothers Karamazov. The series, produced by Mars Media, will consist of eight episodes, with shooting planned for 2017. Mars Media head Ruben Dishdishyan told Russian news agency Rambler News Service, "Depardieu was the initiator of the project. He will play the father of the Karamazovs." According to Dishdishyan, French producer Jean-Pierre Guerin — who produced the French TV series Le comte de Monte Cristo, Balzac and Les miserables, starring Depardieu — will also come on board. Funding for the series

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François Truffaut believed that artworks resemble their makers. As the BFI presents a retrospective of his films, it is clear that the man who made them was the most humane of directors

It seems a cliché that a film might change your life. Yet a film by the French director François Truffaut changed mine. Having just heard of how, in the 1950s in Northern Ireland, a child was brought up in a hen house, I watched L'Enfant sauvage (Wild Child) (1969) late one night on BBC2. It presented the story of Victor, a young boy discovered, in the years following the French revolution, living wild and alone in the woods of France. The film so mesmerised and moved me that I began researching a book on Victor and children like him.

In L'Enfant sauvage, Truffaut himself played Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, the young man who educated the wild boy, teaching him language,...

When I was young, European serials offered a view into other worlds. Why do we now limit ourselves to Us imports?

For those of us of a certain age, the death of Cécile Aubry at the end of July caused a nostalgic pang: memories of black-and-white television, mountains, and a dog that seemed to be made out of the fluffy snow over which she bounded. Belle et Sébastien, which she originally wrote, was a much-loved part of my childhood. I had not realised until I read her obituary that Sébastien was played by her son, Mehdi El Glaoui.

What struck me most, though, was remembering that British television for the young was far more international in those days. Dubbed or narrated imported serials, mostly made in the 1960s, were repeated well into the 70s, offering a window on to excitingly different worlds. My earliest TV memories include L'Âge Heureux, a...

Scholars clash over Auguste Maquet's role in creating masterpieces such as The Three Musketeers

He spent his life in the shadow of one of France's most celebrated authors and in death has become a mere footnote in literary history. Despite having co-written some of the most popular tales in the French language, Auguste Maquet has been forgotten by all but the most erudite of scholars.

Now, however, the quietly creative ghostwriter whose crucial role in the production of some of Alexandre Dumas's most famous novels has gone unacknowledged for more than 150 years is finally having his moment in the limelight. A film released in French cinemas tomorrow seeks to shed new light on the man who fans say was the true genius behind The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Starring Gérard Depardieu as the colourful Dumas and Belgian actor Benoît Poelvoorde as his downtrodden employee,...