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Coming to Blu-ray for the first time from the Cohen Media Group, Claude Chabrol’s late career thriller, Nightcap (better known by its French title, Merci Pour Le Chocolat) is often lumped into conversation as merely one of the seven films the director made with actress Isabelle Huppert. While it is certainly outshined by some of their finer achievements together (particularly The Story of Women and La Ceremonie), it stands firmly on its own as an odd exercise that’s more character study than murder mystery. Chabrol seems amused at the convention and convenience of the narrative, supplied by Charlotte Armstrong’s nonsensically titled 1948 novel The Chocolate Cobweb. Armstrong was in high regard in the 1950’s (her novel Don’t Bother to Knock was turned into a very strange Marilyn Monroe vehicle in 1952), and Chabrol seems keen on retaining the rather deliberate ambience from a tradition of genre gone by.

Prolific French director of films with murder at their heart

The film director Claude Chabrol, who has died aged 80, created the first ripple of the French new wave with his first feature, Le Beau Serge (1958). Unlike some of his other critic colleagues on the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma, who also became film-makers, Chabrol was perfectly happy in the mainstream. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, he paid serious attention to Hollywood studio contract directors who retained their artistic personalities through good and bad films, thus formulating what came to be known as the "auteur theory".

In 1957, he and Rohmer wrote a short book on Alfred Hitchcock, whom they saw as a Catholic moralist. Hitchcock's black humour and fascination with guilt pervades the majority of Chabrol's films, most of which have murder at their heart. However, although Chabrol's thematic allegiance to Hitchcock remained intact, his...

PARIS -- The Printemps du Cinema, France's annual spring promotion which lures audiences to the movies with cut-price tickets, kicked off Sunday with 1.1 million admissions, a 30% increase over last year's first-day figure, organizers said Monday. The National Federation of French Cinemas (FNCF), which has organized the three-day promotion since 2000, attributed Sunday's turnout to the diversity of new Hollywood and French releases, including The Pink Panther, Underworld: Evolution, French comedies Du jour au lendemain (One Fine Day) and Essaye-moi (Try Me) and black-and-white animation film Renaissance. The holdover strength of earlier releases such as Prime, Fauteuils d'orchestre (Orchestra Seats) and L'Ivresse du pouvoir (Comedy of Power) also contributed to film admissions on the first day. The strong showing Sunday was also helped by French hit comedy Les Bronzes 3 - amis pour la vie (Friends Forever) which crossed 10.1 million admissions this weekend, and another French comedy, Je vous trouve tres beau (You Are So Beautiful), which crossed the 3 million mark, the FNCF added.

BERLIN -- The competition lineup for the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival features a mix of independents and blockbusters, with Marc Evans' drama Snow Cake set to open the festival Feb. 9 and V for Vendetta, the Wachowski brothers' comic book adaptation starring Natalie Portman, landing a world premiere in an out-of-competition slot. Also competing for this year's Golden Bear will be Robert Altman's ensemble comedy A Prairie Home Companion, Claude Chabrol's Comedy of Power and Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo, a politically charged drama about the U.S.' Cuban-based detainee camp. All three will have their world premieres in Berlin, festival organizers said Wednesday. The festival runs from Feb. 9-19.