Author: Philippe Vigneres

She is in a phase, her mother claims. Clearly the teenager is sullen and cross, she does not feel well and the trouble is that she may have a hunch about the cause. She tentatively goes to a Planned Parenthood center and takes a test. The outcome is unequivocal: she is pregnant, what she obviously did not…

The first title card explains the title, right away putting on a high moral ground the lead character, defined as an embodiment of strong virtuous feelings and acute social problems, a mythic figure amid the harsh and hectic modernity, an ideal incarnate, and so much so that she is known as a concept…

She gingerly steps out of the jail, looks around eagerly, smiles, but then frowns, puts a daunting sulky face, and walks away briskly. In the next scene, she arrives with big, farcical strides in a flea market, throws unkind remarks at a man trying to fill an old tire with air, and starts yelling she is crazy…

“I don’t care what they talk about”. Harry Caul is a wiretapping, surveillance and espionage specialist living in San Francisco. He is highly respected by his peers and it seems that he turns a pretty penny from his secret activities. Delivering high-quality tapes to his clients is the only thing…

The film borrows from “Taxi Driver” (1976) a nocturnal, strange, tough atmosphere, and a peculiar sense of danger and tension but it inverts that movie’s dynamics. A New York on the edge and on the move is not just the perfect background, or the quirky reflection, of the leading character…

As it was the case of his 1967 gangster movie “Le samouraï” director Jean-Pierre Melville begins the titles with a quote reflecting Asian spirituality – an anecdote from the Buddha about men who stand within a red circle the Buddha has drawn on the ground and then move on with their lives, straying from each other…

The inaugural sequence is a long take lasting some four minutes. The camera, using an extreme long shot, captures a huge, sparsely decorated and furnished room in the dark. A barely visible man is lying on the bed, which stands against the right side of the frame; he is smoking a…

The film opens in a railway station where a boy, skinny and dirty, sits listless against a pillar among the moans and gripes of people walking around him; later a sweeper realizes he is dead. How this boy was led to meet such a tragic, early, end, which is a shocking, brutal way…

The title is a bit misleading: this is not a comprehensive adaptation of the book by Jonathan Swift, grappling on-screen with its key themes and events. It is in fact a loose, good-humored take on the adventures of stranded mariner Gulliver in the kingdom of Liliput…

A more literal translation of the original French title signals even more bluntly what is the situation of the lead character, a former butcher: Alone against All. The film tracks the mind of a loser as he vows to shake up and better his life but actually rages against the people around him…

A US oil company operating in an unspecified corner of South America urgently needs to move tons of nitroglycerin from one of its warehouses to a well burning after an accident, in the hope that a blast could put the fire off. Four men from a nearby town, all foreigners, are hired…

The Big Red One is the nickname of the First Infantry Division of the US Army, which played a key role in the American effort to win World War Two. Four great moments of this war divide the narrative: the Allied forces’ landing on the North Africa coast in November 1942…

A gang of street urchins loiter on the platforms of the Shimonoseki railways station, filching their ways to survive under the commandment of a one-legged lout as the Japanese struggle to get over their defeat at the hands of the Allied forces. They notice a repatriated soldier…

Japan comes across first as a wild, verdant, gorgeous landscape, waves pounding against rocky cliffs that are topped by lush grass and rice paddies. Men look tiny as they scramble over the paths leading to the sea or to caves or to villages. They rush…

The love story behind this stern title unfolds over fifteen years, from 1949 to 1964. It starts and ends in Communist-ruled Poland but there are stints in the former East Germany and Yugoslavia and, above all, in Paris. The lovers meet as the new Polish regime born after World War Two…