The Crime Is Mine draws on the same giddily rules-trampling pre-war mood as Chicago.
Even Blaise Pascal would wager you have everything to lose by not picking up Criterion’s upgrade of Eric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales.”
Bruno Dumont seems perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking.
Bruno Dumont’s formalism is charged with a spark of simultaneously controlled and spontaneous mystery.
Cruelty here can feel cheap, perhaps a result of Dumont not knowing how to effectively command comedy yet.
The film dabbles in the French romantic-comedy tradition and simultaneously spoofs it, committing to neither.
Even though the subtext about the past and modernity constantly being at odds is intriguing, the director presents this in a clunky, almost didactic fashion.
It’s buoyant and titillates, striking that distinctly Ozonian balance between the beautiful and the sinister, but it doesn’t resonate.
Some of the films in competition attempted to remind the cushioned critics of reality.
The Women on the 6th Floor is a Vicodin pill of a film about a rich stock broker who gets swept up by his Spanish maid’s youth and beauty.
Éric Rohmer uses a country-mouse-and-city-mouse template to explore morality, aesthetic sense, urban and rural savvy, and more.
So soon after Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu’s sublime work in Changing Times, François Ozon’s froth looks especially trivial.
Apparently, all that’s needed to quell class warfare in Service Entrance is a little home cooking, a peck on the cheek, and a cheesy line.
Potiche finds François Ozon reverting to his campy 8 Women ways.
François Ozon’s latest is more like Pastiche.
The film’s “It’s a small world” plotting is sunk by Cédric Klapisch’s bland artistry and dull insights into his milieu.
Despite its Hitchcockian title and corresponding everyman-embroiled-in-foreign-intrigue premise, the film is a frustratingly suspense-free affair.
An intriguing curio that would have played better as a condensed sketch in Luis Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty.
A wry mix of King Kong and My Man Godfrey, it’s a potent premise that somehow never catches fire.
Molière offers a harmless, fairly breezy fabulist romp about the life of the great French satirist.