As we near the halfway point of the year, one of the great performances of 2023 thus far comes courtesy Charlotte Gainsbourg in Mikhaël Hers’ new drama The Passengers of the Night. Following a woman adrift in 1980s Paris, the drama is carefully attuned to the emotions of everyone that graces the screen. Reeling from a divorce while balancing job prospects and a relationship with her two teenage children as well as a new teenager that enters her life, Passengers exudes a mature poeticism in every scene. Ahead of a release at the end of the month starting at IFC Center, the new U.S. trailer has now arrived.
Here’s the official synopsis for the Berlinale and TIFF selection: “On election night in 1981, celebrations spill out onto the street and there is an air of hope and change throughout Paris. But for Elisabeth, her marriage is coming to an end,...
Here’s the official synopsis for the Berlinale and TIFF selection: “On election night in 1981, celebrations spill out onto the street and there is an air of hope and change throughout Paris. But for Elisabeth, her marriage is coming to an end,...
- 6/6/2023
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
The dramatic wattage of Mikhaël Hers’s film about a family upended by divorce might be low, but its positive attitude and teen antics have unshowy charm
Mikhaël Hers has made a likably unassuming and easygoing movie set in 1980s Paris; a world of LPs and stonewashed denim, with TV news archive footage interspersed in the drama. We start with the celebrations that marked Mitterrand’s presidential victory in 1981 and end towards the end of the decade with the younger characters preparing to cast their first vote.
This is a film that doesn’t set out to push your emotional buttons all that hard, or even at all. But it covers a surprising amount of narrative ground and there is always something engaging and tender to it. The director appears to be aiming at the unshowy drama of Éric Rohmer. Three of his teen characters are shown sneaking into a...
Mikhaël Hers has made a likably unassuming and easygoing movie set in 1980s Paris; a world of LPs and stonewashed denim, with TV news archive footage interspersed in the drama. We start with the celebrations that marked Mitterrand’s presidential victory in 1981 and end towards the end of the decade with the younger characters preparing to cast their first vote.
This is a film that doesn’t set out to push your emotional buttons all that hard, or even at all. But it covers a surprising amount of narrative ground and there is always something engaging and tender to it. The director appears to be aiming at the unshowy drama of Éric Rohmer. Three of his teen characters are shown sneaking into a...
- 2/13/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
One of the most intriguing careers to track this past decade has been that of Kōji Fukada. Gaining international acclaim with his Cannes prize-winning family drama Harmonium, the Japanese director followed it up with A Girl Missing, a slow-burn mystery thriller that premiered at Locarno Film Festival last year and went on to play at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. Now set for a release in Virtual Cinemas nationwide beginning this Friday, we’re pleased to debut the exclusive trailer courtesy of Film Movement.
The film follows two timelines, both featuring Mariko Tsutsui’s character. In one, she works as a home nurse for a family, but one of their granddaughters goes missing and someone in the family may be involved. In another timeline, she forms a relationship with a younger hairdresser. One of the film’s many pleasures lies in Fukada’s specific...
The film follows two timelines, both featuring Mariko Tsutsui’s character. In one, she works as a home nurse for a family, but one of their granddaughters goes missing and someone in the family may be involved. In another timeline, she forms a relationship with a younger hairdresser. One of the film’s many pleasures lies in Fukada’s specific...
- 7/28/2020
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Netflix may get most of the attention, but it’s hardly a one-stop shop for cinephiles who are looking to stream essential classic and contemporary films. Each of the prominent streaming platforms — and there are more of them all the time — caters to its own niche of film obsessives.
From chilling horror fare on Shudder, to the boundless wonders of the Criterion Channel, and esoteric (but unmissable) festival hits on the newly launched Ovid.tv, IndieWire’s monthly guide will highlight the best of what’s coming to every major streaming site, with an eye towards exclusive titles that may help readers decide which of these services is right for them.
Here’s the best of the best for July 2019.
Amazon Prime
Once again dumping the brunt of its film offering at the tail end of the month, Amazon Prime isn’t doing much to distinguish itself with its July...
From chilling horror fare on Shudder, to the boundless wonders of the Criterion Channel, and esoteric (but unmissable) festival hits on the newly launched Ovid.tv, IndieWire’s monthly guide will highlight the best of what’s coming to every major streaming site, with an eye towards exclusive titles that may help readers decide which of these services is right for them.
Here’s the best of the best for July 2019.
Amazon Prime
Once again dumping the brunt of its film offering at the tail end of the month, Amazon Prime isn’t doing much to distinguish itself with its July...
- 7/8/2019
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
If you read the newspaper articles that appeared following the death of Eric Rohmer early this year, you will have come across the cliché that his work is ‘talky’: the implicit criticism is that Rohmer’s films feature too much dialogue and not enough action. Personally, I see nothing wrong with characters engaging in thought-provoking debate. Dialogue can do a lot to advance the film’s narrative, so a film with a lot of talking is not necessarily a film in which nothing happens. It seems to me that those who criticize a film for being ‘talky’ believe that cinema’s natural vocation is to convey movement per se, and this seems an awfully restrictive vision of the medium.
I recently watched one of Rohmer’s earliest films, Le Signe du lion (The Sign of Leo, 1959). This film is certainly not considered one of his best, but it’s...
I recently watched one of Rohmer’s earliest films, Le Signe du lion (The Sign of Leo, 1959). This film is certainly not considered one of his best, but it’s...
- 3/20/2010
- by Alison Frank
- The Moving Arts Journal
Rimbaud's mantra, 'one must be absolutely modern', guided the father of the New Wave, a director fascinated by France's bourgeoisie
The New Wave has just lost its father, and France a rigorous observer of his time whose films represented better than most what it may mean to be French. Ten to 15 years older than the Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and François Truffaut, whom he would hire to write alongside him in the soon mythical Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday in his 90th year in Paris, had invented a completely distinct art form.
A graduate in classics and German and until the mid-1950s a professor of literature in provincial France, he always followed Rimbaud's mantra: "One must be absolutely modern."
In cinema, as a critic turned director (whose first film was made at the age of 39 in 1959), to him the poet's motto...
The New Wave has just lost its father, and France a rigorous observer of his time whose films represented better than most what it may mean to be French. Ten to 15 years older than the Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and François Truffaut, whom he would hire to write alongside him in the soon mythical Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday in his 90th year in Paris, had invented a completely distinct art form.
A graduate in classics and German and until the mid-1950s a professor of literature in provincial France, he always followed Rimbaud's mantra: "One must be absolutely modern."
In cinema, as a critic turned director (whose first film was made at the age of 39 in 1959), to him the poet's motto...
- 1/13/2010
- by Agnès Poirier
- The Guardian - Film News
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,...
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,...
- 1/13/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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