Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien evokes Albert Lamorisse’s fey little half-hour fantasy of 1956, not merely in the last three words of the title, but in very intermittent and unintegrated appearances of an actual red balloon, the size and strength of a beach ball, every bit as autonomous as Lamorisse’s, albeit …
Corny costume adventure involving Austrian spies in pursuit of Italian expatriates in post-Napoleonic France, presently in the grips of a cholera epidemic. (All you need to know of the history: the Italians are the good guys, the Austrians the bad.) The casting of a vain vapid male-model type, Olivier Martinez, …
Filmmaker John Boorman takes up the South African apartheid problem after its solution, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the mid-Nineties offered amnesty to political criminals, provided they could demonstrate a political motive for their crimes, in exchange for their public confession and confrontation of their victims. Juliette Binoche …
Gracefully paced romantic comedy about a couple of wayfaring strangers who meet-cute in a French airport shut down by an air-controllers' strike. It is good to see Juliette Binoche's relentless intensity turned against her for the purposes of comedy -- in the role of a high-strung beautician for whom her …
There’s a very good chance that the love of Isabelle’s (Juliette Binoche) life will always be someone else. The divorcee goes through men quicker than Billy Jack could kick apart a patient procession of would-be attackers, and that includes her ex-husband (Laurent Grévill). There’s the piggish banker (Xavier Beauvois), whose …
Grand passion in the Parisian gutter: the love of a broken-legged acrobat for a half-blind artist, sharing a stone bench on the Pont-Neuf during its closure for restoration. ("Love takes bedrooms," philosophizes a fellow bum, "not windy sidewalks.") The bicentennial fireworks and the frolicking beneath them are something to see, …
Multiple storylines encircle many facets of the French capital. The city looks splendid; the not very compelling characters (the brink-of-death Romain Duris excepted) keep getting in the way. Several liberating bits of dance, strictly gratuitous. With Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, Albert Dupontel, François Cluzet, and Mélanie Laurent; directed by Cédric …
André Téchiné manages to turn up plenty of intriguing things in Paris, a little drably photographed, however. And in the occupants thereof he turns up plenty of unintriguing things such as would never be found in any actual occupants of any city on earth. Recklessly, violently, insanely, Frenchly, fatiguingly romantic, …
Summer, 1910. An impoverished family of cannibals living near the titular beach resort begin to literally have tourists for dinner in a new slapstick romp from Bruno Dumont. When was the last time you saw a comedy of physical absurdism that drew many a laugh from nothing more than its …
Three French siblings scattered around the globe (Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, Jérémie Renier, in order of prominence on screen) must dispose of the valuable family estate, including a couple of Corots and Redons, after the sudden death of their seventy-five-year-old mother (Edith Scob, still elegant even if a long way …
Set in France in 1889, the film follows the life of Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) as a chef living with his personal cook and lover Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They share a long history of gastronomy and love but Eugénie refuses to marry Dodin, so the food lover decides to do …
A gender-flipped Hurt Locker? Erik Poppe directs Juliette Binoche (Clouds of Sils Maria) in the story of a war photographer who triumphs on the battlefield but faces reverses on the homefront.
To celebrate the publication of her memoir, Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), one of history’s most celebrated beauties (and Europe’s greatest actress), has invited her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) — a successful screenwriter in her own right — son-in-law/“internet actor” Hank (Ethan Hawke), and young granddaughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier) to her chateau …
Number two of Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy of films titled after the colors of the French flag. Each tale is independent of the others, notwithstanding minor points of intersection: the heroine of Blue, Juliette Binoche, pokes her head apologetically into a courtroom in White. This second one has to do with …
Fact-based historical nugget, set on a French-Canadian island off Newfoundland in the mid-19th Century, about the rehabilitation of a condemned murderer and the efforts of the islanders to save him from the guillotine. Solemn, sanctimonious, and simplistic: the almost universal change of heart toward the murderer is swift, undermotivated, and …