Brendan Bernhard

Wearing lightly tinted sunglasses and smoking a profusion of slim cigarettes, Catherine Deneuve, aging goddess of French cinema, neither quite meets expectations nor disappoints them. Perhaps it would be fair to say that she rearranges them. If you feel let down in one way, you’re more impressed than you expected......

Beau Travail, the new film by the French director Claire Denis (Chocolat, I Can’t Sleep), is a hypnotic meditation on military men in isolation. Only a director with a poet’s feel for imagery could have pulled it off; fortunately, Claire Denis, ably abetted by her cinematographer, Agnès Godard, is that......

“It’s often been said of my work that the search for style has resulted in a want of feeling,” says the dying novelist played by John Gielgud in Alain Resnais‘ film Providence. “However, I’d put it another way. I‘d say that style is feeling, in its most elegant and economic......

Bertrand Tavernier, the distinguished French film director, was lying flat on his back in his Paris apartment, blind in one eye and temporarily unable to see out of the other -- a fitting symbol, some might say, for the state of contemporary French cinema. That week, the last of October......