News for
Les quatre cents coups (1959) More at IMDbPro »

2009 | 2008

11 articles from 2009

---

Stella Artois and The Auteurs Present 7 French Classics

10 December 2009 3:27 AM, PST | The Auteurs | See recent The Auteurs news »

From December 15 through 22, The Auteurs and Stella Artois will be presenting to viewers over 18 in the UK a daily series of French films for free. Titles include Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin, Féminin and Vivre sa vie, François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Jules et Jim, Jacques Demy's Lola, Chris Marker's La Jetée and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour.

The occasion is France 7 Ways | 7 Days | 7 Films: French New Wave Film Festival, celebrating the closing week of Stella Artois' Recyclage de Luxe campaign. Enjoy! …

Permalink | Report a problem

---

The Best Films of the Decade (aka "The Naughties")

8 December 2009 10:25 PM, PST | The Hollywood Interview | See recent The Hollywood Interview news »

Best Films Of The Decade (aka The Naughties) From Alex & Terry

List # 1

By Alex Simon

When Terry and I initially discussed writing these lists, I had a tough time thinking back on 20 films over the past decade which I was really taken with, thinking that movies have sunk so low over the past ten years, that even choosing a dozen would be a short-order job. Thirty minutes into it, my list had nearly 60 titles! After much cutting, pasting, and re-cutting and pasting, here are my top 20 films (in no particular order) of the first decade of the 21st century, dubbed by many as “the naughties.” --A.S.

1.No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers, 2007) An elegiac blend of stark beauty and full-throttle despair from two of our finest filmmakers, set in the contemporary American West. Every frame is damn near flawless, and would have been an even more perfect vehicle for the late Sam Peckinpah. …

- The Hollywood Interview.com

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Movie Poster of the Week: "Small Change"

4 December 2009 7:08 AM, PST | The Auteurs | See recent The Auteurs news »

I like the new poster (see below) for the re-release of Francois Truffaut’s 1976 film L'argent de poche, but for me nothing can beat the kitsch charm of the original British poster which takes a number of memorable vignettes from the film and turns them into what looks like a teen romance paperback. In the UK the film was called Pocket Money (the literal translation) and legend has it that it was Steven Spielberg who suggested the American title Small Change.

L’argent de poche was Truffaut's biggest hit in France since The 400 Blows, and, after opening the 1976 New York Film Festival, went on to great success in the Us too. It's a strange film: mostly plotless, a combination of gentle humor, bitter social commentary and lovely magical realism ("Gregory went Boom!") populated by shaggy haired youngsters in bell bottoms. I've seen it twice before over the years and …

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Desperately seeking Sendak

23 November 2009 2:32 AM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers relive the cold winter's day when they went to visit famously prickly writer Maurice Sendak, to talk about filming Where the Wild Things Are

Dave Eggers: So here we are. It's always awkward doing this kind of thing together. If we wrote this the way we wrote the script, fighting over every word, it would probably take a year.

Spike Jonze: We should just have a conversation. Then we can fight over every word when we edit it.

De: But let's be really eloquent. We can talk, and then after we transcribe the talk, we can make ourselves seem articulate.

Sj: Yes, we shall do that. It brings to mind something the bard once said: "Tis excellent to be spontaneous, tho better to be brilliant."

De: He didn't say that.

Sj: He did. In one of his lesser-known plays, The Sisters of Hannah. …

- Dave Eggers

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Denver Film Festival announces full lineup

26 October 2009 11:34 AM, PDT | QuietEarth.us | See recent QuietEarth news »

The only big film festival in my own backyard is back and it runs from November 12th through the 22nd. While it caters more to heavy run fest material and arthouse film, they do have some of the more interesting films playing this year:

Ryan Ward's excellent Son of the Sunshine which is one of my favorite films of the year. (review)

The weird, lengthy comedy The Revenant (review)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

and much more. Program after the break!

In Competition

Children of Invention

Two first-generation Chinese kids in suburban Boston find themselves on their own after their desperate mother is unwittingly involved in a pyramid scheme and arrested. Older brother Raymond takes a page from her marketing seminars to start creating a life for himself and his sister - casting a strange, pint-sized reflection on the American Dream.

Footprints …

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Film: Review:Araya

8 October 2009 12:02 PM, PDT | avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news »

Fifty years after Margot Benacerraf’s documentary Araya played in competition at the Cannes film festival—in the year of The 400 Blows and Hiroshima Mon Amour, no less—it’s been beautifully restored for a belated U.S. release. But anyone coming to Araya expecting a great, lost classic of world cinema is likely to walk away disappointed. The movie is visually stunning, deploying fluid camerawork and stark black-and-white imagery to record the hardscrabble lives of Venezuelans living and working on a remote salt marsh. As a piece of documentary filmmaking though, Araya is more noteworthy for what it …

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Shane Meadows Takes to the Road

16 July 2009 2:40 PM, PDT | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »

Write what you know, the old chestnut echoes, and that's precisely what celebrated British filmmaker Shane Meadows has been doing since his 1997 feature debut "TwentyFourSeven." Meadows' naturalistic, working class dramas all seem to be at least partly based on real-life experiences, from the drug-addled friend who was bullied into suicide -- the inspiration behind his revenge thriller "Dead Man's Shoes" -- to the violence-prone skinhead pals from his youth that turn up in "This is England." One of the films is even entitled "Once Upon a Time in the Midlands," which is precisely where the BAFTA Award-winner was born, raised, and still lives today.

The rare exception to Meadows' typical small-town locales, then, is his latest, "Somers Town," which still features what film buffs might call kitchen-sink realism, but is transplanted to the titular neighborhood in central London. In a second collaboration with young Thomas Turgoose (who stole the show …

- Aaron Hillis

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Agnès Varda in person at American Cinematheque

17 June 2009 6:09 PM, PDT | Pretty/Scary | See recent pretty-scary news »

Start: 06/24/2009 End: 06/27/2009 Timezone: America/Los Angeles Start: 06/24/2009 End: 06/27/2009 Timezone: America/Los Angeles If you're in Los Angeles, catch a crapload of films by legendary Varda June 24-27th 2009! A gifted and outspoken feminist and one of the most acclaimed directors anywhere in the world, Agnès Varda could be considered the prototype of today's independent filmmaker. Varda is a survivor, a stubborn and patient observer of her time and her people, like the pop singer in Cleo from 5 to 7, the lovers in Le Bonheur or the drifter in Vagabond. "I have fought so much since I started ... for something that comes from emotion, from visual emotion, sound emotion, feeling, and finding a shape for that," Varda has said...

Varda directed her first feature, La Pointe Courte, in 1954, with no formal training in filmmaking. The movie has often been identified as the film that started the French New Wave ("and a famous flop, …

- Superheidi

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Blu-Ray Review: Criterion Continues Blu-Ray Expansion With Pair of Truffaut Classics

26 March 2009 1:20 PM, PDT | HollywoodChicago.com | See recent HollywoodChicago.com news »

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0 Chicago – The Criterion Collection continues its foray into the world of HD with one of the most beloved directors of all time, taking a film already in the collection and giving it the HD treatment while simultaneously releasing a new edition of one of his later films. The legend is Francois Truffaut and the films are “The 400 Blows” and “The Last Metro”.

The “continuing series of important classic and contemporary films” has long-included “The 400 Blows” but this marks the first time that the film has been available on Blu-Ray. Criterion just started doing Blu-Ray and they are wisely alternating bringing some of their most popular films to the format along with issuing new releases on it.

The 400 Blows was released on Blu-Ray on March 24th, 2009.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

“The 400 Blows” is actually Truffaut’s first film. Released in 1959, this classic …

- adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Blu-ray Review: Truffaut's '400 Blows' and 'Last Metro' on Criterion Blu-ray

24 March 2009 4:46 AM, PDT | Rope of Silicon | See recent Rope Of Silicon news »

Jean-Pierre Leaud in The 400 Blows

Photo: Criterion Collection Blu-ray via DVD Beaver I debated on writing individual reviews for Criterion's Blu-ray releases of The 400 Blows and The Last Metro, both hitting store shelves on March 24, but I couldn't help believe director Francois Truffaut is just as interesting as the films he made, if not more interesting. It was that angle I wanted to bring to my commentary and I didn't see how that would be possible or helpful to the reader if broken up into two parts. Before receiving my review copies of The 400 Blows and The Last Metro I already owned 400 Blows as well as Truffaut's Jules and#038; Jim on DVD as part of my Janus Collection, but I had not watched either. I was a Truffaut virgin and had actually held off watching 400 Blows since owning the collection because I knew the Blu-ray would be …

- Brad Brevet

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Criterion Announces March 2009 DVDs and a few Blu-rays -- The 400 Blows Blu-ray, The Last Metro, Dodes’ka-den, Danton, Il Generale Della Rovere, and films from Hiroshi Shimizu

11 January 2009 | Collider.com | See recent Collider.com news »

Criterion has announced their March 2009 DVDs and, as usual, there’s some great stuff coming. If you’re a fan of Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, Andrzej Wajda, and Roberto Rossellini…you’ll be happy. From Kurosawa, we’re getting his first color film, Dodes’ka-den. And from the other director’s, three richly detailed historical dramas (Truffaut and Rossellini tackle Nazi-occupied Europe in "The Last Metro" and "Il Generale della Rovere"; Wajda travels back to the French Revolution with Gérard Depardieu for "Danton". Finally, we’re getting a Blu-ray of Truffaut’s "The 400 Blows"! And from Criterion’s Eclipse line, we’re getting four films from Hiroshi Shimizu. He’s one of the most acclaimed Japanese directors that many people have never heard of. Hiroshi Shimizu worked alongside Ozu and Mizoguchi during the thirties and forties, and he …

Permalink | Report a problem

---

2009 | 2008

11 articles from 2009

---