Jean Renoir

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-...

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...

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...

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...

Running Oct. 4-17, the 43rd Chicago International Film Festival will bring to town a string of visiting actors and directors, among them Anthony Hopkins, Ben and Casey Affleck, Jeffrey Wright and Laura Linney. But the opening-night gala will honor one...

4 stars (out of four) There are about a dozen genuine miracles in the history of cinema, and one of them is Jean Renoir's supreme 1939 tragi-comedy "The Rules of the Game, " opening Friday in a new, digitally restored 35 mm print at the Music Box...

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...

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...

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...

4 stars (out of 4) Spectacle movies are often mindless and showy, geared for adolescent brains and often, it seems, made by them as well. But Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "A Very Long Engagement" proves different. "Engagement," which reunites Jeunet and...