French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, who made waves with stylish works of 1980s cinema including “Diva” and “Betty Blue,” died Thursday at 75.
He died at home in Paris after a long illness, his brother told Le Monde.
Beineix started out as an assistant director to filmmakers including Claude Berri, Rene Clement and Jerry Lewis. After making a short film, he made his feature debut in 1981 with “Diva,” which won the Cesar for best first feature and three more Cesar awards. The story revolves around a young postman infatuated with an American opera singer who gets caught up in an international intrigue when he tries to make a bootleg recording of her performance.
The thriller was one of the most successful French films to play internationally in the 1980s. It ushered in a new style of filmmaking that melded auteur and genre elements, and Luc Besson and Leos Carax also made films...
He died at home in Paris after a long illness, his brother told Le Monde.
Beineix started out as an assistant director to filmmakers including Claude Berri, Rene Clement and Jerry Lewis. After making a short film, he made his feature debut in 1981 with “Diva,” which won the Cesar for best first feature and three more Cesar awards. The story revolves around a young postman infatuated with an American opera singer who gets caught up in an international intrigue when he tries to make a bootleg recording of her performance.
The thriller was one of the most successful French films to play internationally in the 1980s. It ushered in a new style of filmmaking that melded auteur and genre elements, and Luc Besson and Leos Carax also made films...
- 1/14/2022
- by Pat Saperstein
- Variety Film + TV
Hello, everyone! As we get ready to head into December, we have one last round of home media releases for this month on tap first. If you haven’t had a chance to check out James Wan’s Malignant yet, Warner Bros. is releasing it on both Blu-ray and DVD, and A24 is finally bringing Saint Maud home this Tuesday, too. Both Summer of 84 and Ticks are getting the 4K treatment, and Severin Films is showing some love to Ruggero Deodato’s Raiders of Atlantis as well.
Other titles being released on November 30th include Wild Indian and The Last Matinee.
Malignant
“Malignant” marks director James Wan’s return to his roots with this new original horror thriller. In the film, a woman is paralyzed by shocking visions of grisly murders, and her torment worsens as she discovers that these waking dreams are in fact terrifying realities.
Raiders of Atlantis...
Other titles being released on November 30th include Wild Indian and The Last Matinee.
Malignant
“Malignant” marks director James Wan’s return to his roots with this new original horror thriller. In the film, a woman is paralyzed by shocking visions of grisly murders, and her torment worsens as she discovers that these waking dreams are in fact terrifying realities.
Raiders of Atlantis...
- 11/30/2021
- by Heather Wixson
- DailyDead
The Moon in the Gutter: Chen Turns Tables in Taut Character Study
Argentina’s Veronica Chen adds to the annals of violent amour fou with her seventh feature, High Tide, a juicy character study cum thriller which navigates the amorphous tensions of gender and class. Boundaries seem made only to be crossed in such tenuous intersections, where victim becomes victimizer in a world where moral compasses have sloughed away. Chen gifts actress Gloria Carras a stellar platform to navigate a slippery struggle for power and control amidst the frivolous parameters of the privileged. As concessions are made, tensions rise considerably in what seems a superficial exchange of slights until Chen’s narrative reaches a point of no return.…...
Argentina’s Veronica Chen adds to the annals of violent amour fou with her seventh feature, High Tide, a juicy character study cum thriller which navigates the amorphous tensions of gender and class. Boundaries seem made only to be crossed in such tenuous intersections, where victim becomes victimizer in a world where moral compasses have sloughed away. Chen gifts actress Gloria Carras a stellar platform to navigate a slippery struggle for power and control amidst the frivolous parameters of the privileged. As concessions are made, tensions rise considerably in what seems a superficial exchange of slights until Chen’s narrative reaches a point of no return.…...
- 1/28/2020
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
TV stalwart Paul Wendkos' biggest success in movies was as the director of the Gidget series. I'm Scottish so I don't know what that was. But it turns out he had a real gift for expressionistic noir, as demonstrated in his debut film The Burglar, which was scripted by pulp noir icon David Goodis, whose novels provided source material for Delmer Daves' Dark Passage, Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, René Clément's And Hope to Die, Beineix's Moon in the Gutter (the author was big in France) and Sam Fuller's Street of No Return.The movie, a low-budget affair, substitutes flair and vigor for production values, and stars lifelong noir patsy/creep Dan Duryea and up-and-coming sex bomb Jayne Mansfield, with the result that it always seems to be in the wrong aspect ratio. Duryea's cranium seems to have an extra story built...
- 11/8/2016
- MUBI
Catherine Deneuve: César Award Besst Actress Record-Tier (photo: Catherine Deneuve in 'In the Courtyard / Dans la cour') (See previous post: "Kristen Stewart and Catherine Deneuve Make César Award History.") Catherine Deneuve has received 12 Best Actress César nominations to date. Deneuve's nods were for the following movies (year of film's release): Pierre Salvadori's In the Courtyard / Dans la Cour (2014). Emmanuelle Bercot's On My Way / Elle s'en va (2013). François Ozon's Potiche (2010). Nicole Garcia's Place Vendôme (1998). André Téchiné's Thieves / Les voleurs (1996). André Téchiné's My Favorite Season / Ma saison préférée (1993). Régis Wargnier's Indochine (1992). François Dupeyron's Strange Place for an Encounter / Drôle d'endroit pour une rencontre (1988). Jean-Pierre Mocky's Agent trouble (1987). André Téchiné's Hotel America / Hôtel des Amériques (1981). François Truffaut's The Last Metro / Le dernier métro (1980). Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Le sauvage (1975). Additionally, Catherine Deneuve was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category...
- 1/30/2015
- by Steve Montgomery
- Alt Film Guide
La course du lièvre à travers les champs (The Race of the Hare Across the Fields a.k.a. ...and Hope to Die, 1972) is an interesting late entry in the career of French crime specialist René Clément, a kind of smorgasbord of his favorite stuff: hardboiled crime, knotty sexual triangles, a hero on the run, convoluted crime schemes, with a harkening back to childhood sins that suggests his classic Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952). This might suggest desperation to recapture past glories, but the film is also stuffed with experimentation and up-to-the-minute influences (a train station confrontation early on suggests Leone) which confirm the filmmaker as alert to new possibilities.
But the film could just as easily be approached through the sensibility of its writer, Sébastien Japrisot, a key figure in French cinema and crime cinema, or even through that of the author of the source novel, David Goodis.
But the film could just as easily be approached through the sensibility of its writer, Sébastien Japrisot, a key figure in French cinema and crime cinema, or even through that of the author of the source novel, David Goodis.
- 2/21/2013
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
DVD Playhouse—February 2012
By Allen Gardner
To Kill A Mockingbird 50th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s landmark novel pits a liberal-minded lawyer (Gregory Peck) against a small Southern town’s racism when defending a black man (Brock Peters) on trumped-up rape charges. One of the 1960s’ first landmark films, a truly stirring human drama that hits all the right notes and isn’t dated a bit. Robert Duvall makes his screen debut (sans dialogue) as the enigmatic Boo Radley. DVD and Blu-ray double edition. Bonuses: Two feature-length documentaries: Fearful Symmetry and A Conversation with Gregory Peck; Featurettes; Excerpts and film clips from Gregory Peck’s Oscar acceptance speech and AFI Lifetime Achievement Award; Commentary by Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 2.0 mono.
Outrage: Way Of The Yakuza (Magnolia) After a brief hiatus from his signature oeuvre of Japanese gangster flicks,...
By Allen Gardner
To Kill A Mockingbird 50th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s landmark novel pits a liberal-minded lawyer (Gregory Peck) against a small Southern town’s racism when defending a black man (Brock Peters) on trumped-up rape charges. One of the 1960s’ first landmark films, a truly stirring human drama that hits all the right notes and isn’t dated a bit. Robert Duvall makes his screen debut (sans dialogue) as the enigmatic Boo Radley. DVD and Blu-ray double edition. Bonuses: Two feature-length documentaries: Fearful Symmetry and A Conversation with Gregory Peck; Featurettes; Excerpts and film clips from Gregory Peck’s Oscar acceptance speech and AFI Lifetime Achievement Award; Commentary by Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 2.0 mono.
Outrage: Way Of The Yakuza (Magnolia) After a brief hiatus from his signature oeuvre of Japanese gangster flicks,...
- 2/26/2012
- by The Hollywood Interview.com
- The Hollywood Interview
When I lived in Paris in the mid 80s this poster, in full French grande format, dwarfed my tiny chambre de bonne. Betty Blue (playing on Mubi for free in the Us this week) or, rather, 37.2 Le Matin, as it was originally called, was the first film I saw when I arrived in France in the summer of 86. Not yet a proper cinephile (a year in Paris did that to me) I was nonetheless a huge fan of Jean-Jacques Beineix. In my first year at college I was convinced that Diva was the best film ever made, and a couple of years later my university flatmates briefly tolerated the bloody poster of Beineix’s follow-up film maudit The Moon in the Gutter in our living room. So I was barely off the bus from London when I went to see 37.2 Le Matin (in a theater later firebombed for showing The Last Temptation of Christ...
- 7/23/2010
- MUBI
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