Jean Renoir

A new year signifies a fresh start, so it only seems appropriate to devote the first column of 2009 to a trio of debut crime novels. The Rules of the Game By Leonard Downie Jr. Knopf / 321 pages / $25.95 Just a few months before the publication of...

Though Hollywood suits have been trying to make it for decades, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is not a project that cries out to be filmed. Now that it's finally been turned into a major motion picture, complete with megawatt stars Brad Pitt and...

For a little background on the battles that took place near the Meuse-Argonne, Henri-Chapelle and Sicily-Rome American Military Cemeteries, take a look at these World War I and II books and movies: World War I "All Quiet on the Western Front," written...

Amin Matalqa's teary drama, "Captain Abu Raed," takes its obvious cues from the neorealism of Satyajit Ray and Jean Renoir, but Matalqa doesn't know how to balance melodrama with quiet moments the way the masters did. The movie's strongest point is...

By Richard Rayner "A good writer can make you believe time stands still. Yet the end of all stories, even if the writer forbears to mention it, is death," wrote the English writer Angela Carter, who died 16 years ago this month. At the time Carter was...

Plenty of movies have been made about Chicago. Plenty of movies have been shot on Chicago's streets. But the city itself has never been a center of international studio filmmaking, except for one brief golden age that lasted only a decade. That single 10-...

Jean-Luc Godard's films have always reflected the times in which they were made with their acute, even startling ability to evoke self-recognition, yet so rich and far-ranging are their concerns that it is hardly surprising they seem timeless. Such is the...

It's hard to approach a new film by Wes Anderson without feeling like you've walked into an argument. There's something about his dollhouse aesthetic, his storybook formality, his miniaturist's attention to detail and his dogged belief in the power of...

Hipsters have been traveling to India for decades to imbue their ironic, image-conscious lives with meaning. Blame the Beatles for making it the West's one-stop country for spirituality (an image from which India has undoubtedly benefited). So it was...

Fons Rademakers, the Dutch director behind the Academy Award-winning foreign language film "De Aanslag," has died at the age of 86. The filmmaker died of emphysema in a Geneva hospital, reports Dutch media. Alphonse Marie Rademakers was born in Noord-...

There's a beguiling resonance and effortlessness to films of master directors who have enjoyed long and venturesome careers. That is certainly the case with "Private Fears in Public Places," the latest film from Alain Resnais, the French New Wave...

One rainy afternoon a few weeks ago, I was having tea at the Auberge la Lucarne aux Chouettes in a riverside hamlet about 80 miles southeast of Paris when the innkeeper joined me. She was a petite woman with dark brown hair, over 60, I guessed, but how...