From hardboiled crime sagas to breezy portraits of postwar Parisian life, the films of this classic French director are ripe for rediscovery.
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A great director takes viewers on an idiosyncratic tour of French film in this delightful documentary, which offers an entire lifetime of cinema knowledge and passion within its running time. “Exhilarating and inspiring” (New York Times).
Imported 35mm Print
A city slicker departs Paris for the provinces in Becker’s droll satire on city and country folk, family and outsiders, men and women. “Becker gave French cinema its greatest film about rural France” (Bernard Eisenschitz).
Becker’s “official” directorial debut offers a suitably fast-moving tribute to Hollywood pre-Code programmers, as two rookie sleuths deal with a murderer, a beautiful femme fatale, and even a visiting Chicago gangster.
A talented, vain couturier runs roughshod over workers, friends, and lovers in Becker’s vividly realist drama of Parisian haute couture, a fascinating companion piece to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Jean-Paul Gaultier is a fan.
Becker’s “snappy, sentimental comic melodrama” (New Yorker) follows a young working-class couple and the husband’s desperate search for a missing lottery ticket in this portrait of changing proletarian life in postwar Paris.
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
A dazzling Simone Signoret is caught between a gangster tough and an honest carpenter in Becker’s “elegant masterwork” (Time Out) set in turn-of-the century Paris. Signoret’s performance is “a triumph of sensuality” (Pauline Kael).
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
A dazzling Simone Signoret is caught between a gangster tough and an honest carpenter in Becker’s “elegant masterwork” (Time Out) set in turn-of-the century Paris. Signoret’s performance is “a triumph of sensuality” (Pauline Kael).
A pianist and his wife quarrel as they prepare for an upcoming recital in Becker’s airy, Lubitsch-like portrait of love and life in a slowly modernizing urban France, which was praised by—and inspired—Godard and Truffaut.
The famed (and infamously wild) Italian artist Modigliani’s last days in Paris are reconstructed in Becker’s untamed biopic, a loving tribute to the city’s bohemian life.
A group of students, hepcats, and others spill through the streets of the Left Bank in search of love, life, and jazz in Becker’s spirited portrait of France’s emerging postwar generation, poised between existential despair and liberating action.
French legend Jean Gabin is a Montmartre gangster looking to hide—and later find—his loot, with Jeanne Moreau as his tough-as-nails lover. A masterpiece of hard-boiled film noir, French style.
A group of convicts attempts an escape in Becker’s last film, one of the great prison-break movies and, for Jean-Pierre Melville, “the greatest French film of all time.”
East Bay Premiere
A great director takes viewers on an idiosyncratic tour of French film in this delightful documentary, which offers an entire lifetime of cinema knowledge and passion within its running time. “Exhilarating and inspiring” (New York Times).
French legend Jean Gabin is a Montmartre gangster looking to hide—and later find—his loot, with Jeanne Moreau as his tough-as-nails lover. A masterpiece of hard-boiled film noir, French style.
A group of convicts attempts an escape in Becker’s last film, one of the great prison-break movies and, for Jean-Pierre Melville, “the greatest French film of all time.”
The first militant left-wing film made in France, this lyrical cine-essay is a collective effort by some of the finest writers, directors, and cinematographers working in France in the thirties.