French Cinema - There Were No Gods Left

There Were No Gods Left

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French Cinema

A collection of 14 posts

Toronto International Film Festival 2025

Dog 51

Every day our dystopian future gets closer.

Dandelion’s Odyssey

Dandelion’s Odyssey

Yes, you read that right: this is an animated film without words about dandelion seeds traversing the cosmos in search of a new home.

Maldoror — Fabrice Du Welz

Maldoror — Fabrice Du Welz

this anti-creative decision turns out to be an predictive of the woefully misguided and frankly arrogant film that it precedes.

Review: Pandemonium (2023) dir. Quarxx

Review: Pandemonium (2023) dir. Quarxx

The first 20 minutes are excellent. And the final ten minutes work well enough. It’s the middle hour or so that just squashes all of the other good ideas.

The Musicality of The Beast

The Musicality of The Beast

Jeanne du Barry — Maïwenn

Jeanne du Barry — Maïwenn

After acknowledging all of these insurmountable asterisks ... one can admit that Jeanne du Barry still succeeds in many respects.

The Three Musketeers: Part II – Milady — Martin Bourboulon

The Three Musketeers: Part II – Milady — Martin Bourboulon

A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity.

Buff Review: Infested (2023) dir. Sébastien Vaniček

Buff Review: Infested (2023) dir. Sébastien Vaniček

We don’t have enough spider movies. For how widespread arachnophobia is, there is a relative dearth of actually watchable spider horror. Beginning as early as 1955’s Tarantula, the few spider films we get center jumbo-sized arachnids — the sort you’re very unlikely to ever encounter in your bathroom.

The Animal Kingdom — Thomas Cailley

The Animal Kingdom — Thomas Cailley

Both the film’s premise and actress Adèle Exarchopoulos are underutilized.

Year Ender: Top Ten Films of 2023

Year Ender: Top Ten Films of 2023

The best films of the year creatively resist the studio destruction of art and suppression of vision with bold statements of visual-sonic distinction

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Amal & Cat Call

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Amal & Cat Call

Amal is the kind of film I expect to see a lot more of from French-speaking Europe over the next decade: well-intended, competently-made, and incredibly simplistic films that divide the rising Islamic community in Europe into either the good European progressives that hide all religiosity from the p

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Consent

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Consent

Until 2021, France did not have a set legal age of consent. Then Vanessa Springora wrote Le Consentement in 2020, an autobiographical memoir about her experience being groomed and abused by the famed author Gabriel Matzneff for two long years. She was just 14 when the abuse began; he was

Les Indésirables and Covid-19

Les Indésirables and Covid-19

“The real problem [or] the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the king, but ministry; it is not the law, but the police — that is to say, the governmental machine that they form and support.” Those are

The Trajectory of Emmanuel Carrère and Between Two Worlds

The Trajectory of Emmanuel Carrère and Between Two Worlds

I first became interested in the artistry of Emmanuel Carrère through his 2018 genre-disintegrating novel The Kingdom. The book offered something completely original: an astute history of the earliest Christians filtered through the memoir of one of the French language’s great contemporary prose masters as he, now agnostic, reflects