Georges Franju

PARIS — Up four old, crooked flights of stairs in her apartment building with no elevator, Emmanuelle Riva sits wrapped in a thick, woven, poncho-like sweater. Warm light streams through colorful windowpanes into her narrow living room, where Riva...

From the blog Michael Sragow Gets Reel: It hasn't been a great era for haunted-house movies. The third version of "House of Wax," in 2005, was awful enough to kill off the form, at least as far as big American studios were concerned. The day my review...

To come across "Classe Tous Risques" is like discovering a bottle of marvelous French wine you didn't remember you had, opening it and finding it every bit as delicious as its reputation promised. That's how good this classic fatalistic French gangster...

With such films as "I Can't Sleep," "Nenette and Boni" and "Beau Travail," Claire Denis over the last decade has risen to the first rank of French directors with her incisive, sharply perceptive films. Her latest, "Trouble Every Day," however, is highly...

Friday June 27, 1997      John Woo is known for a cinema of violent delirium so breathtaking it plays like visual poetry, and "Face/Off," though his third film in Hollywood, is the first to expose mainstream audiences to the master at his most...

In "La Mentale" (The Code), an absorbing French gangster picture, the plot remains eternal but ethnic groups change. Set in Chicago or New York in the bad old days, the gangs likely would have been Italian or Irish. In this film's present-day Paris the...

Once seen, never forgotten, "Eyes Without a Face" is a film to haunt your dreams. Disturbing, disorienting, quietly terrifying, it's one of the least known of the world's great horror movies and, in its own dark way, a startlingly beautiful and artful...

Friday May 16, 1997      Olivier Assayas' amusing "Irma Vep" is an homage to radiant and versatile Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung--and a blast at contemporary French filmmaking. Assayas displays an intimate, informal style and a sharp sense of proportion...