Leos Carax

In "A Christmas Tale," French director Arnaud Desplechin's bittersweet deconstruction of the home-for-the-holidays drama, Catherine Deneuve plays the hands-off matriarch Junon, who may not live to say "Joyeux Noël" again. She and her husband (Jean-Paul...

The late Stu Troup, Newsday's former jazz writer, once said of Wynton Marsalis that he'd never be great until someone broke his heart. With this in mind, you have to wonder about the emotional breadth and crazy beauty of "Mister Lonely" and how it now...

Some years ago, a commercial hustling some slop of a beer or another disposable part of our world lodged deep in my memory banks. The ad featured a couple of ordinary Joes who, while cruising a video store, had been stopped dead in their tracks by a...

Veit Helmer's "Tuvalu" is a jaunty, captivating fairy tale told essentially in mime and shot through with the sooty humor of its Eastern European locale. This one-of-a kind charmer casts an immediate and delightful spell, and could never have happened...

"Tuvalu," the first feature from German filmmaker Veit Helmer, is a richly imagined, feverishly detailed experimental work that turns out to be both thrilling and exhausting. It is filled with imposing and beautiful imagery, though it becomes increasingly...

Without much apparent fuss, one of the last great movie taboos is being tossed to the winds. Recently, in film after film from France and Scandinavia, the boundaries between hard-core pornography and regular art-house movie fare have been all but erased....

Friday July 2, 1999      Leos Carax's "The Lovers on the Bridge" has the raw, gritty look of a documentary on the homeless, but it is in the grand tradition of heady screen romances. It's a throwback to the golden era of both Hollywood and of the...

Friday October 13, 2000      The Europeans, especially the French, can still carry off the big, serious romantic movie, and no one is doing it better, or with such bravura, as Leos Carax.      The cost of replicating Paris' Pont Neuf for his "Lovers...

- denotes a movie to watch. "Lost Souls" (director: Janusz Kaminski). More devilish doings, with Winona Ryder trying to save the world from the Satanic invasion of Ben Chaplin'sbody. The director is Spielberg's cinematographer and a local Columbia...

The period from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day is the busiest moviegoing time of the year. To take advantage of this annual rush to the theaters -- as well as to draw maximum attention to Oscar-aspiring films -- the studios cram many of their high-...

The end of a year is time for stock-taking. A decade calls for even more. And a century or a millennium? The sheer potential for memory or fact overload can be mind-boggling. So, what can we say about movies at the end of 1999? In the last century,...

French film has long been the special gourmet treat of the well-seasoned film buff -- which is why Facets Multimedia's fourth Annual Festival of New French Cinema, which runs through Thursday, Dec. 7, is an event to make your cinema tastebuds tingle....