NEW YORK: "The French Crime Wave: Film Noir Thrillers, 1937-2000" at Film Forum, runs August 8 through September 11. The programmers' definition of "thrillers" is pretty loose: it includes not just Henri-Georges Clouzot's great existential nailbiter The Wages of Fear but Robert Besson's existential and ascetic Pickpocket and A Man Escaped, as well as the pure horror poetry of Eyes without a Face. But then the French do take their crime literature seriously. One of the charms of the schedule is the chance to see what the work of a number of famous thriller writers--including Jim Thompson (whose Pop. 1280 and A Hell of a Woman provided the basis for, respectively. Bertrand Tavernier's Clean Slate and Alain Corenau's Serie Noire), Patricia Highsmith (whose The Talented Mr. Ripley was turned into Rene Clement's Purple Noon), and Cornell Woolrich (Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid) looked like after a pass through the French film hopper. The series is dedicated to honorary French director Jules Dassin (b. Middletown, Connecticut), who died last March at the age of 96, and who kicks things off with his influential 1955 caper film Rififi.
Over the course of the last dozen years, the Dardenne brothers have built up a remarkable body of films that address hard questions with intellectual and moral seriousness and with a rigorous filmmaking approach that is never condescending and usually aesthetically stimulating. Starting Thursday and running through the weekend, Anthology Film Archives is showing the films that put and kept them on the world film map: La Promesse, Rosetta, The Child, and perhaps their most extraordinary work, The Son.
