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Afternoon
Léon Morin, Priest (Léon Morin, prêtre)
Based on a novel by Béatrix Beck that Melville described as “the most accurate picture I have read of the life of French people under the occupation,” Léon Morin, Priest focuses on Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), a widowed mother living in provincial France who, with the arrival of German forces, is suddenly confronted by the twin rigors of […]
Find out moreEvening
Le doulos (The Informer)
No one can be trusted in the guarded, duplicitous milieu of Le doulos, Melville’s first decisive plunge into the policier genre. Most devious of all, at least from what we can tell, is Silien, Jean-Paul Belmondo’s sphinx-like gangster, who can swerve from businesslike practicality to homicidal detachment to suave seductiveness on a dime. In Melville’s ghostly, […]
Find out moreLe trou (The Hole)
Four years after Bresson’s A Man Escaped, Jacques Becker directed his own film about prison escape, this time asking not what one man can accomplish with his hands but rather what five men can accomplish with their hands. The answer? If Bresson highlights shrewd ingenuity, Becker foregrounds brute force. The escape plan hatched by Becker’s quintet […]
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