Dr Tony Shaw

Marius et Jeannette is by far the most popular and well known of Robert Guédiguian's (at present) twenty-one films, obviously in part b...

À la vie, à la mort ! isn't a conte de l'Estaque , although seven years later it was to be the title of an album by Johnny Halliday...

At the beginning of Joseph Mai's short analysis of L'Argent fait le bonheur in Robert Guédiguian , he says that his old friend, now...

Under different names to the previous Ki lo sa ? , which ended in all four spiritually lost characters being poisoned, Dieu vomit les tiédes...

(In September of this year, 2021, the Cinémathèque française showed a number of films by the almost forgotten Luc Moullet, who at the age o...

(In September of this year, 2021, the  Cinémathèque française  showed a number of films by the almost forgotten Luc Moullet, who at the age ...

Les Indes galantes (sub-titled ' Ballet héroïque ') is the most noted opera-ballets of Jean-Philippe Rameau, dated 1735. On Bouleva...

Steak , as might be expected of a film by Quentin Dupieux, is an insane film, and stars comedians Éric Judor et Ramzy Bedia. But this is not...

(In September of this year, 2021, the Cinémathèque française showed a number of films by the almost forgotten Luc Moullet, who at the age o...

Robert Guédiguian returns to the present, and here we have four childhood friends who, among a number of others who don't turn up, have ...

Guédiguian wished he'd made this film first rather than Dernier Été for its more autobiographical element, although I can't see tha...

This is Robert Guédiguian's first film, co-directed with Frank Le Wita, is as so often set in the working-class area L'Estaque and R...

(In September of this year, 2021, the Cinémathèque française showed a number of films by the almost forgotten Luc Moullet, who at the age o...

(In September of this year, 2021, the  Cinémathèque française  showed a number of films by the almost forgotten Luc Moullet, who at the age ...

(In September of this year, 2021, the Cinémathèque française showed a number of films by the almost forgotten Luc Moullet, who at the age o...

(In September of this year, 2021, the Cinémathèque française showed a number of films by the almost forgotten Luc Moullet, who at the age o...

Alexandre Arcady's Hold-up is a screwball comedy set almost entirely in Montréal with a script by Alexandre Arcady himself, Daniel Sain...

Now how do we talk about this in any sensible way? This is an adaptation of James Hadley Chase's crime novel No Orchids for Miss Blandis...

Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé is a celebration of a kind of non-intellectual anarchism: it (exaggeratedly) delights in the simple pleasu...

Jacques Baratier's La Ville bidon is a retake of the téléfilm La Décharge , made some years before but censored because of its left-wi...

Philippe Jaenada's La Serpe is a book of 635 tightly-filled pages, and although it would be impossible to read it seriously at one sitt...

Although no doubt inspired by Easy Rider , Mammuth is a road movie all on its own, a bizarre comedy with a surreal atmosphere and effects w...

Kylli Sparre's photo on the cover of Babouillec's Voyage au centre d'un cerveau d'autiste is so apt. Being severely autisti...

This film won the 1976 Cannes film festival best film award, plus best actor for Philippe Noiret and best score. It is set in late 1944 towa...

Les Yeux Cernés is a film set in Seefeld (Austria) in which the (almost ex-) husband of Florence (Michèle Morgan) has been shot dead and Co...

Jacques Baratier considered the cinema as an intellectual adventure as opposed to a profession and associated with such writers as Jacques A...

The date Gérard Pirès's first feature was released – 1969 – should perhaps give an indication of the content of this very French film: t...

This early, thirteen-minute short 'about' Charlotte and her ' jules ' (or boyfriend) Jean is in effect almost entirely a mon...

Gérard Blain is perhaps better known as a actor than a director, appearing in early films such as Truffaut's Les Mistons (1957) and Cha...

(At the time of writing I've seen five films directed by the Québéquois Denis Villeneuve, and although they are all different from each ...

(At the time of writing I've seen five films directed by the Québéquois Denis Villeneuve, and although they are all different from each ...

Polytechnique , Denis Villeneuve's third feature, is in black and white and is a recreation of the massacre in Montréal twenty years bef...

(At the time of writing I've seen five films directed by the Québéquois Denis Villeneuve, and although they are all different from each ...

(At the time of writing I've seen five films directed by the Québéquois Denis Villeneuve, and although they are all different from each ...

Rémy Belvaux's C'est arrivé près de chez vous (which is rather sensationally translated as Man Bites Dog ) is a brilliant but much ...

I include a shot here of Yvonne de Gaulle  as in the sculpture in Calais by Elizabeth Cibot but  without her husband as it's not my styl...

As I stated last year when I first saw Le Dragon de Calais , which wasn't at the time operational because this was just a day before loc...

Georges Lafaix (better known as Jean Raphael) (1916-2006) was born in Orléans and died in Dormans, where he is buried. He was brought up in ...

Jules Crochet (1902-72*) was born in Dormans, died in Tinqueux near Reims, and was a pioneer of medical aviation. In the 1930s he carried ou...