Centenary Film Society

Cédric Klapish, the beloved director of L'Auberge Espanole, gathers together some of the biggest actors in French cinema for a valentine to the city of lights. While waiting for a heart transplant that could save his life, Pierre (Duris) grows close again with his sister (Binoche) and her lively children. This rediscovery of his family and observation of the teeming streets outside his window give Pierre a new, hopeful sense of how he might spend the time still left to him. A cinematic love letter to the city that seems to hide a story behind every shop window, small alley, street market or grand apartment building, the film explores the life and love possible only in PARIS.

Paris pulses with a contemporary version of the energy that animated Balzac's novels, or Colette's accounts of the life she observed from the window of her apartment in the Palais Royal. Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

Based on true events and developed from eyewitness accounts during World War II, Ole Christian Madsen's political thriller Flame & Citron is an ultra-stylized and remarkable spy noir about the murky moral complexities of wartime. Copenhagen, 1944. World War II is entering its final stretch in Europe. Denmark is occupied by Nazi Germany. Two resistance fighters nicknamed Flame (Thure Lindhart) and Citron (Mads Mikkelsen - Casino Royale) become heroes of the underground dealing violently with traitors to their cause. When the pair is sent to execute Flame's lover Ketty, the line between ally and enemy is blurred forcing them to determine their own orders which starts with killing the much hated and feared chief of the Gestapo - Karl Heinz Hoffman.

A deeply involving look at people living permanently on the knife-edge of danger, Flame & Citron does more than radically rethink the World War II resistance drama. Its biggest accomplishment may be to make these historical conflicts and dilemmas seem surprisingly contemporary. Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

New York Times journalist Andrew Jacobs directs this documentary about a summer colony in upstate New York of Holocaust survivors. Partially shot by legendary documentarian Albert Maysles, Four Seasons Lodge looks at the last time these people gather together to discuss their past and present, revealing moments of both sadness and humor. The decision to close the community evokes a variety of emotions from its longtime seasonal residents, but their shared history unites them even as they disagree about the lodge’s future.

Some of the observations are priceless! Celebrating the fact that they’re still alive is their ultimate revenge on Hitler. Aaron Hillis, Time Out New York

Celebrated filmmaker Agnes Varda (CLEO FROM 5 TO 7) turns the camera on herself for this autobiographical documentary. While roaming the beach, the beatific 80-year-old revisits her past—including...One of France's most respected filmmakers, Agnes Varda (Cleo from 5 to 7; Vagabond; The Gleaners and I) turns the camera on herself for this autobiographical documentary. While roaming the beach, the beatific 80-year-old revisits her past—including memories of fellow Left Bank directors Jacques Demy (later her husband), Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker. Incorporating clips from Varda's work, animation, and photographs, the film plays like a fond scrapbook of a life well lived.

A wonderful, warm, witty and insightful cinematic memoir from the godmother of the French new wave. Alistair Harkness, Scotsman

Written and directed by Academy Award winner Jane Campion, Bright Star is a riveting drama based on the three-year romance between 19th century poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which was cut short by Keats untimely death at age 25. Ben Whishaw (The International, I'm Not There) and Abbie Cornish (Stop-Loss, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) star as Keats and Brawne, respectively.

Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word. A. O. Scott, New York Times

Director Paolo Sorrentino's audacious and inventive biopic of Italian parliamentarian (and "Senator for Life") Giulio Andreotti illuminates, in great emotional detail, important events surrounding an early-1990s investigation in which the perpetual statesman was accused of having Mafia ties. The case was appealed and overturned several times, and Andreotti never served prison time, but it effectively marked the end of his centrist Christian Democratic party. Sorrentino's fanciful use of titles, quick edits, multiple-perspective flashbacks, slow motion, extreme close-ups, and sublime musical accents—as well as star Toni Servillo's brilliantly stylized acting—convert this airless and sinister piece of world history into a dynamic tale of moral ambiguity and seemingly invulnerable political power. Sorrentino's controlled and masterly storytelling won the 2008 Prix du Jury at Cannes.

The frequently outrageous Il Divo follows the career of one of the best-known and most tenacious figures in Italian political history in a lively, sensory-overload, cartoonlike fashion reminiscent of Amelie and Moulin Rouge. The fact that it's often over-the-top goes without saying, and is part of the fun. Peter Brunette, Hollywood Reporter

Based on a play by Jean-Marie Besset, The Girl on the Train is inspired by one of the most media-blitzed and polarizing events in recent French history: a young woman’s lie about being the victim of an anti-semitic attack on a Paris suburban train. Jobless, soul-searching and rollerblading Jeanne (Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Winner Emilie Dequenne) lives in a Paris suburb with her widowed mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve), who makes a living as a baby-sitter. Louise helps her daughter get a job with her old flame Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc, Monsieur Hire, Grosse Fatigue), now a famous lawyer and Jewish activist. When Jeanne’s budding relationship with aspiring wrestler Franck (Nicolas Devauchelle) is shattered by a violent turn of events, Jeanne and Bleistein’s opposite worlds get set on a collision course, as the film becomes a complex psychological drama raising issues of race, religion and identity.

Téchiné's unsettling The Girl on the Train is his best film in years and already one of 2009's highlights, freely inspired by a sensational real-life media furor. Kent Turner, Film-Forward.com

Raquel (Saavedra) has a bad attitude. A woman in her early forties, she’s been the live-in housekeeper for a kind, moderately wealthy Chilean family for half her life, and the joyless repetition of the job has begun to take its toll. Increasingly dependent on painkillers, Raquel resorts to household pranks and childish avoidance to antagonize the family’s college-age daughter and a procession of new servants, all in the hopes of protecting her precarious power within the home. Her antics successfully push everyone away, until new maid Lucy (Loyola) actually pushes back. This Chilean drama won prizes for Best Foreign Feature and Best Actress at Sundance 2009.

Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes unsettling, and always engrossing, The Maid is a domestic drama about the gulf that exists at impossibly close quarters between the worlds of upstairs and downstairs, the worlds of employer and household servant. Jonathan F. Richards, Film.com

Fifteen years ago, Junpei, the youngest son of the Yokoyama family died while rescuing a boy from drowning. On the anniversary of his death, the remaining siblings visit the quaint home of their parents with their families in tow. Over the course of a beautiful day, new relatives become acquainted, telling stories and squabbling over sizzling tempura and an elegant graveside ritual is performed for Junpei. Winner of nine international film awards.

The tone is perfect; this is one of those rare films that, despite being rooted firmly in the world around us, is utterly absorbing and capable of reducing the immediacies of life into abstract thoughts in the back of one's mind. James Berardinelli, ReelViews.com

Pipe-smoking Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. Tati’s wildly funny satire of vacationers determined to enjoy themselves includes a series of precisely choreographed sight gags involving dogs, boats, and firecrackers. The first entry in the Hulot series is a masterpiece of gentle slapstick.

A great introduction to the work of Tati, who made only a few movies but is rightly recognized as one of the great visionary directors. Stan Hall, Oregonian

Audience Award Winner at Fantastic Fest 2009 and the first stop-motion animated feature selected to Cannes, A Town Called Panic follows the wacky, hilarious and often surreal adventures of three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse who share a rambling house in a rural town which never fails to attract the weirdest events. Each speedy character is voiced—and animated—as if they are filled with laughing gas. With hysteria a permanent feature of life in this papier-mâché burg, will Horse and his equine paramour—flame-tressed music teacher Madame Longray (Jeanne Balibar)—ever find a quiet moment alone? A sort of Gallic Monty Python crossed with the Marx Brothers, A Town Called Panic is zany, brainy and altogether insane-y!

There's really very little to say about this film beyond that it's absolutely brilliant. Peter Brunette, Hollywood Reporter

Jacques Tati's gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology reached their creative apex with Playtime. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust the endearingly clumsy, resolutely old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a baffingly modernist Paris. With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, Playtime is a lasting testament to a modern age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.

A film comedy directed with the grace of a ballet, the painstaking detail of an action painting and the affection of a love song. Sean Axmaker, Turner Classic Movies Online

Moliere has been released from prison by wealthy bourgeois, Monsieur Jourdain, who settled the young actor's debts on the understanding that he will teach him the craft of the stage. Hungry for recognition, Jourdain is infatuated with the lovely but poisonous Climene, whose salon gathers together suitors and great wits. Trapped in this untenable situation, Moliere will experience all manner of events that will open his eyes and his mind, both to life itself and to his work as an artist.

An extravagant and thoroughly irrestible story of intrigue, romance, comedy and artistic inspiration. Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Author Colin Beavan, in research for his next book, began the No Impact Project in November 2006. A newly self-proclaimed environmentalist who could no longer avoid pointing the finger at himself, Colin leaves behind his liberal complacency for a vow to make as little environmental impact as possible for one year. No more automated transportation, no more electricity, no more non-local food, no more material consumption...no problem. That is, until his espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping wife Michelle and their two year-old daughter are dragged into the fray. Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein's film provides a front row seat into the experiment that became a national fascination and media sensation as well as an intriguing inside look at the familial strains and strengthened bonds that result from Colin's and Michelle's struggle with their radical lifestyle change.

The movie is a hilarious, riveting must-see about a family as it breaks down almost all the way and then reinvents itself. Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com