Cinemascope

 May 68 remains a defining political, social and cultural touchstone in France; many French films and books, consequently, have sprung from ...

 Richard Linklater composed Nouvelle Vague as a love letter to the eponymous French movement and Jean-Luc Godard’s trailblazing genius thro...

 In a hyperconnected digital world overstuffed with vacuous “influencers” spewing inane garbage in the name of content, and their rabid “fol...

 JFK’s assassination has formed a recurring thread within political conspiracy thrillers, while among French left-wing political cinema in p...

 Few films have so powerfully combatted collective historical amnesia like Marcel Ophüls’ monumental 4-½-hour-long documentary did by disman...

 Jacques Rivette, in a rare foray into genre cinema with Secret Défense , made the narrative both freer and more expansive while also retain...

 Orson Welles’ delightfully irreverent, discursive and playful film F for Fake – through its impish and exuberant celebration of fakery, ch...

 With Certified Copy , the great Abbas Kiarostami joined an exclusive group of non-francophone filmmakers like Buñuel, Kieślowski and Losey ...

  The War Is Over – the (translated) phrase with which Franco had declared the end of the Spanish Civil War – was as much its ‘Left Bank’ a...

 A sleepy, closely-knit provincial town in Brittany – a place that Chabrol has returned to multiple times across his career – is a bubbling ...

 Claude Chabrol’s stunning ‘ Hélène cycle ’ – La Femme Infidèle , Que la Bête Meure , Le Boucher , La Rupture and Juste Avant la Nuit – de...

 Claude Chabrol decided to take inspiration from Patricia Highsmith’s legendary and fabulous novel The Talented Mr. Ripley for Les Biches ....

 Claude Chabrol had impishly quipped that La Cérémonie – one of his greatest accomplishments, and which I’d been craving to revisit ever si...

  Nada , the ferocious, fatalist and brilliant political thriller by Jean-Patrick Manchette, was a book tailor-made for adaptation by Costa-...

 What happens when you mix a cocktail that’s equal parts grotesque body horror, caustic showbiz satire, deliriously lurid and grisly B-movie...

 Alain Guiraudie channelled Claude Chabrol – the latter’s recurring love for delivering cutting and subversive social critiques through tale...

 Joseph Losey’s penultimate film, The Trout , was a more ambiguous, formalist and “arthouse” – but no less amoral or outré – revisiting of h...

In Eva , Joseph Losey had one foot into the underpinnings of American genre movies from his past and the other in the vocabulary of European...

 The most fascinating thing about Z is how Costa-Gavras effortlessly counterpoised heft with panache. Being based on the 1963 assassination...

 Chabrol’s renowned ‘ Hélène Cycle ’ of films – murky, morally complex and spellbinding investigations into bourgeois social structures and ...