Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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The Night of the Twelfth (2022)

It isn't very remarkable at the outset and could be an episode of any grey and dour television police procedural - a young woman dies horribly, and police look for the killer amongst her male friends - but The Night of the Twelfth starts with a placecard that connects the story to true crimes in France and has said something loudly by the end, rather than settling for the usual murder mystery denouement.

★★★★☆

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Only the Animals (Seules les bêtes) (2019)

The way this sober, bleak Colin Niels book adaptation unfolds across chapters titled "Alice", "Joseph" and "Marion", etc - individual stories that intersect and overlap in surprising ways - and the way the movie's initial mystery of a missing woman ends up being the repercussion of events surprisingly global, means Only The Animals recalls those sombre movies of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams, etc..), but when Only the Animals ends, you feel like you have been bogged down in the sordid criminality of several individuals, not swept across the world as in Iñárritu's movies where individual lives are mere threads of a global human experience.

★★★☆☆

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Switch (2011)

A fashion designer in Montreal is encouraged to do a homeswap with someone in Paris, and for the first day this seems like it was a really good idea - she flirts with a man in a park, enjoys the city, sees the Eiffel Tower - but then on day two the fashion designer wakes up to the Parisian police knocking down her door accusing her of grisly murder and suddenly she's alone in a foreign country, accused of murder and even worse, on the case are only the most bungling of detectives believing her to be a Parisian psycho while unwilling or unable to make a simple phone call to Canada to verify the facts of her life - it is an intriguing set-up that has nowhere to go but stupid.

★★☆☆☆

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Coup de Chance (2023)

Woody Allen's so prolific, all his new movies just seem like his old movies again, or blends of them, or gender-reversed versions, or simply retold (wasn't Blue Jasmine just Allen trying again, more successfully as it turns out, to tell again the underwhelming Melinda and Melinda) - he's done this one before, too, you find yourself thinking, and so it is with his fiftieth movie, a charming comedy suspense and kind of Irrational Man repeat or Scoop revisitation that plays with the themes of chaos and chance again, but the one big difference here is this is a good one, because that's something Allen doesn't always do - this is sharp, extremely (but subtly) funny, and beautiful to look at in terms of the costume, scenery, and actors.

★★★★☆

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Un Flic (Eng: 'A Cop') (aka Dirty Money) (1972)

All those Mission Impossible movies owe a lot to Jean-Pierre Melville's last French crime "flic" that features a centrepiece stunt distinctly Ethan Hunt in style involving a train and a helicopter...oh, and a cigar robe, a white pencil, and a horseshoe magnet (far too much detail: couldn't he have just gone into the bathroom and reappeared changed?) but unlike the Mission: Impossible movies, which plotwise are pretty straightforward, you'll need to watch Un Flic ("A cop") twice to confirm what might not be clear the first time through: that Alan Delon is a police commissioner, that apart from being committed by the same criminal gang, a drug robbery is a second crime unrelated to the first, and a second watch will help you to distinguish between far too many grey-faced trenchcoats and blonde bombshells, all of them (the bombshells AND the trenchcoats) mesmerized, transfixed by Delon.

★★★☆☆

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Masquerade (Fr: 'Mascarade') (2022)

W Somerset Maughan described the French Riviera as a sunny place for shady individuals; in this movie, the shady individuals - grifters of the Parasite kind who inveigle their way into the lives of the French Riviera's rich and glamorous - are themselves gorgeous, and so it isn't hard at all to watch these beautiful creatures, like Pierre Nimey's listless toyboy Adrien or Marine Vacth's desperate single mum Margot (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels operating their grifts off yachts and from opulent mansions), even if their loooong game becomes tired and increasingly hard to believe over the movie's two and a bit long hours. 

★★★★☆

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Tom At The Farm (Tom à la ferme)

The tyranny Tom finds himself subject to at the farmhouse of Guilliame, the friend whose funeral he is attending, is the sort of tyranny of classic romantic literature - I thought of the terror Joss held over the 'Jamaica Inn' - and the Quebecois farm is wintery and isolated like the Jamaica Inn or like Manderley, and like 'Rebecca', Tom represents the new, a liberal young alternative urbanite who doesn't belong, and he little realises how completely his world will have to change - and how quickly - to maintain Guilliame's family's rigid, secretive, retentive rural conservatism.

★★★★☆

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Appearances (Les Apparences) (2020)

I've never heard of the Swedish crime author Karin Alvtegena but here one of her books, Betrayal, is adapted for the screen and it is a mostly compelling psychological drama (although one messily over-plotted with a crime hurried in at the end) with a terrific lead performance by Karin Viard as the wife of an orchestra conductor, who 'keeps up appearances' after she discovers her husband has betrayed her. 

★★★☆☆

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The Big Picture (L'Homme qui voulait vivre sa vie) (2010)

This talented Mr Ripley played by an always rivetting Romain Duris isn't a sociopath - he's quite sympathetic - but there are signs, like his getting into a bath in a business suit, that suggest there is something wacky about him and that might help explain his ability to upheave his life and leave his kids behind after he kills his wife's lover, disposes of the body in distinctly The Talented Mr Ripley style, adopts his victim's identity and moves to Kotor to live and work as a photographer - all enthralling stuff but after this great start, nothing much else happens before an abrupt, meaningless ending that abandons matters, including a plot thread involving poor wasted Catherine Deneuve that a better film would have tied up.

★★★☆☆

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Maigret's Night At The Crossroads (2017)

Perhaps Rowan Atkinson was trying here to present an especially sad Maigret given the story opens upon the funeral of a police colleague, but he is so flat, so deadpan, so morose - even more so than usual - that this episode of the usually thrilling 2016 and 2017 Maigret series is the rather flat and ponderous one of the four - at some points you wonder if the actors are speaking as slowly as they are just to try to stretch the story to movie-length and this lethargic pacing is at odds with the outlandish characters, one of them scarred and hissing like a Bond villain and another a stammering cartoon who do not fit well against the backdrop of gritty Paris and its mid-50s period detail.

★★☆☆☆

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The Mystery of Henri Pick (Le Mystère Henri Pick) (2019)

In this jaunty comedy-mystery, like an Agatha Christie but without the murder, a book critic, smarting after losing his job and marriage, sets out like a detective to prove that a deceased pizza maker in Brittany was not the author of a bestselling novel.

★★★☆☆

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The 100 Year-Old Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared (2013)

Forrest Gump spouted his mother's life lessons and walked innocently, gormlessly through some of the 20th Century's most momentous historical occasions and so does Allan Karlsson, the 100 year-old birthday boy and 'Swedish Forrest Gump' of Jonas Jonasson's 2009 book adapted here into this movie which starts with good humour as Allan wanders out of his retirement home and embarks on an adventure involving a suitcase full of cash, a growing body count, and explosions, but quickly runs out of energy as the reenacted moments in history and the encounters with thugs become repetitive and the investigation into Allan's disappearance stalls and the absurd developments become more and more predictable.

★★☆☆☆

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The String (Le Fil) (2009)

Won't it be nice one day to not have to watch and rewatch this story over and over again about homosexual lovers keeping their love a secret, sometimes in the Pyrenees, sometimes in Wyoming, but here, in Tunisia, where class — not just homosexuality — plays a role in rich and privileged architect Malik wanting to keep his love of poor shoeless home-help Bilal a secret from mommy — a minor, well-meaning story set in an interesting cultural context but an oh-so-familiar one with lurching tonal shifts, sometimes opting for screwball sex comedy, sometimes becoming an absurdist farce with its peculiar "string" analogy thrown in only occasionally, and in its worst moments, it is a condescending social commentary. 

★★☆☆☆

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Look At Me (Regarde-moi) (2018)

If you find it hard to watch the yelling and screaming, you have to spare a thought for actual parents of profoundly autistic children who live a life like that of Tunisian immigrant Lotfi and live it truly, without Lotfi's unlikely nightclub nights-out and long phone calls and shopping trips that so often in this drama leave you wondering where Lotfi's severly autistic son Youssef ends up, but get past the unlikelihood of such scenes and this is a beautifully acted, touching drama, showing a guilt-ridden absent father finally stepping up and taking responsibility and starting to make (the right? the wrong?) parenting decisions.

★★★★☆

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Far From Men (Loin des Hommes) (2014)

So that he can be tried in a French court, Daru, a schoolteacher, reluctantly transports Mohamed, a confessed murderer, across Algeria's Atlas mountains and along the way the two men become embroiled in the beginnings of Algeria's War of Independence, in this visually arresting, philosophically interesting, and broadly politically relevant neo-Western drama based on a 1957 Albert Camus short story, The Guest.

★★★★☆

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The Translators (La Traducteurs) (2019)

More Oceans Eleven than Agatha Christie, this mystery thriller is about a team of translators who are called to a high-security bunker to translate a long-awaited third book in a bestselling series - think Dragon Tattoo, I think - and even though there are megabucks at stake - at least a billion apparently - the guns and knives that end up being waved about in the underground facility, and the physical violence metered out by Russian thug security staff and by a bonkers publisher-entrepreneur never feels warranted, in part because the all-important emotional lynchpin of the story is withheld, kept from viewers until the final scene by which time it is too late: by then, most will be fed up with the Now You See Me nonsense.

★★☆☆☆

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The Gang (Le Gang) (1977)

Based on a book by Parisian Inspector of Police-turned-author Roger Borniche, this wafer-thin crime caper follows a criminal gang in Paris in 1945, the real, historical Gang des Tractions Avant, who, with the suited swagger of Reservoir Dogs and the nonchalance of Ocean's Eleven, take advantage of the city's post-war disorganisation to commit a series of brazen robberies.

★★★★☆

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(The) Man On The Train (L'homme du train) (2002)

In this terrific, slow-burn French crime thriller, cool but full of heart, two men, one a slippered, pipe-smoking retired literature teacher and the other a leather-jacketed former stunt double, meet by chance in the week both men face a potentially life-changing Saturday - the teacher is scheduled to have triple bypass surgery, the Fonzi is robbing a bank - and both men are of an age that they are starting to contemplate the life paths they didn't follow, that the other did.

★★★★☆

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Harry, He's Here To Help (aka With A Friend Like Harry) (Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien) (2000)

Thrillers are described as Hitchcockian with wild abandon but the term is applied to this 2000 French thriller with only slight abandon: there's something wrong (some trouble) with the main character, Harry, a variety of Psycho whose waddle and gaze, at once twinkly and steely, recalls Robert Walker's deranged Bruno Antony and like Antony, this Harry has an off-kilter plan — but the real trouble with Harry, who turns up and wreaks havoc in his old school chum Michel's life, is there is no clear motivation for his actions - Hitchcock wouldn't have simply called him a psycho without also injecting the character with a mother or psychoanalysis or an inflated sense of superiority — and even Patricia Highsmith, whose works this thriller with its two males in stand-off very closely resembles, kept things cracking, not dour like this, and imbued her wafer-thin characters with clear motivations, ensuring her psychopath-driven plots were more than just shell...

★★☆☆☆

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