Hallyday, in Hollywood not on holiday but at COL·COA

Film · Music
French rock star Johnny Hallyday, who resides in Los Angeles, manly, subtle and sensitive in director Claude LeLouch‘s latest, “Salaud, On t’Aime” (“We Love You, You Bastard” its less charming English title) seen last night, with Lelouch and Hallyday in the house, at opening night of the 18th annual COL*COA, French film festival. In the ...

Oh, COL•COA!

Film
The wonderful French film festival in Los Angeles turns 18 this year. A big draw amongst the 41 feature films on view in the festival: Roman Polanski‘s riveting direction of “Venus in Fur” with a killer courageous performance by Emmanuelle Seigner. A little disappointing that it’s not a truly auteur film; instead, it’s based on ...

Cherbourg umbrellas pop with panache, fifty years later

Film · Music
  The delicious, the divine, the delectable and digitally restored, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, opens Friday at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles for a one-week big-screen viewing engagement. If you’ve not yet seen Jacques Demy’s candy-colored all-song French classic — yes, it’s an operetta à la française —  on the big screen doing so  at ...

Respect for Godard’s “Contempt”

Film
Laemmle Theatres and Rialto Pictures have teamed to present Rialto Pictures’ new 50th anniversary restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s CONTEMPT (1963). The exclusive Los Angeles engagements begin Friday, January 17 at the Royal in West L.A. and Playhouse 7 in Pasadena. The director’s look at a crumbling marriage stars Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, and, ...

Happy 75th birthday, Laemmle Theatres!

Film
At arts·meme, we love movie theaters and none has sustained us better over the past two decades than the wonderful seven-location art-house chain Laemmle Theatres. Over the next week, the Laemmles are celebrating a significant birthday, with great screenings and charitable donations. Two of the screenings here, Monday, December 16, Noho Seven, North Hollywood: Wim ...

“La Passion Noureev” to premiere in Los Angeles for Dance Camera West

Dance · Film
The beautiful and moving documentary, La Passion Noureev, a labor of love by Fabrice Herrault, a filmmaker who is also a respected New York City dance instructor and himself the product of the French ballet academy, will have its American premiere in Los Angeles on Thursday December 5, 2013. The film was previously screened in ...

“An Evening with George Chakiris” passes beautifully @ UCLA Film & Television Archive

Dance · Film
Prior to a screening of French director Jacques Demy’s auteur-masterpiece, “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort,” in which the dancer-actor-singer appears prominently, UCLA Film & Television Archive honored George Chakiris with clips from his many appearances on television variety shows and an interview that touched on both his singing and his dancing career. The full-evening event took ...

Rokia Traoré brings Malian magic to the Luckman

Music
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Though Rokia Traoré began her genre-, culture- and gender-bending incursion into the international music scene in the late 1990s, I didn’t encounter her until Peter Sellars’ 2006 New Crowned Hope Vienna festival, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Reconceiving the composer as a griot traveller between Paris and Mali’s capital of Bamako, Traoré’s glorious ...

Claire Denis’ City of “Bastards”

Film
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Her first feature, “Chocolat”—autobiographical, set in Africa, brazen in the extreme—announced Claire Denis as Europe’s most daring writer-director. She still is, with only a few filmmakers from Iberia (Pedro Costa, Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Albert Serra, Miguel Gomes, all much younger than Denis) as serious competition. Her latest, “Bastards,” (at Laemmle’s Town Center 5 in Encino) ...

Koehler on Cinema: Clips

Film
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A new James Benning movie is enough news in itself and enough for a simple request: Just stop everything and see it. Now, Benning’s “Nightfall” (Los Angeles Filmforum, Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, Sun. 7:30 p.m.) isn’t exactly new. It was digitally shot in 2011 in the Sierras, near his property where he built exact ...