France

Bonnaire shines as a lowly maid who becomes an underdog chess contender in this assured first feature that smoothly blends romantic comedy, empowerment story, and (with a light touch) obsession drama. While making beds in a Corsican hotel, Hélène (Bonnaire) becomes fascinated by a glamorous couple playing chess. She buys a set and, unable to interest her baffled husband, barters housework-for-chess-lessons with a reclusive American expatriate (Kline, performing ably in a French-speaking role). Their increasingly intense matches crackle with undercurrents of sublimated desire.

Announced by Resnais as his last film, this sprightly swansong brings together the great director’s central themes of memory, self-reflexivity, and theatricality for a final bow. Honoring the last wish of a recently deceased playwright, a group of his actor friends gather at his mansion to view a crude video of drama students performing his play “Eurydice” (actually a 1941 drama by Jean Anouilh). Soon the aging actors are performing their own versions of it, the sets conjured up by memory and imagination.

The year is 1915, the setting the Côte d’Azur. Painter Auguste Renoir (veteran Bouquet of LA FEMME INFIDÈLE) is arthritic and recently widowed; his son Jean (Vincent Rottiers) returns badly wounded from the war. Both men are restored by the coarse but stunning redhead Andrée Heuschling, who becomes the muse of the father’s last paintings and (as Catherine Hessling) the son’s first films. Luminous cinematography by Mark Lee Ping-Bing (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE) and a lovely musical score by Alexandre Desplat (THE TREE OF LIFE) enhance this atmospheric three-sided biopic.

Following Woody Allen’s valentine to Paris in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, this breezy romantic comedy returns the favor, including a substantial guest appearance by the Woodman himself. Overshadowed by her older sister, Alice is a nice Jewish girl with a lackluster love life and a fixation on the Manhattan auteur. Much as Allen communed with Bogey in PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM, Alice communes with a poster of Woody, whose responses are cleverly culled from sound-bites of the maestro’s movie dialogue.

In this often uproarious culture-clash comedy, an upscale, uptight Parisian family gets a badly needed dose of defrosting when their lives are invaded by a rude-and-crude plumber/construction-worker. The plot is not the most original, but the superb cast and Fontaine’s smooth direction make it hum. Huppert has a ball as a mercilessly chic art critic; as her publisher husband, André Dussolier provides effective counterpoint with his easygoing warmth; and Poelvoorde (MAN BITES DOG) is a hoot as the horizons-broadening handyman. In French with English subtitles.

This touching and funny film centers on father-daughter conflicts in a Parisian Jewish family. An X-ray technician who yearns to be an artist (and ingeniously combines her two vocations), Justine (Laurent) is unable to sustain a romantic relationship. She attributes her problems to her mercurial, infuriating father (veteran Blanc in a juicy role), who manages to be both meddling and neglectful. When he announces that his much younger second wife is pregnant, it sets off a series of crises in a family already teetering on the edge of dysfunction.

BECOMING TRAVIATA is an exhilarating account of the creative process and a rousing, uniquely accessible rendition of Verdi’s glorious opera. Director Béziat, known for his innovative documentaries on classical music, trains his cameras on a 2011 production of La Traviata helmed by celebrated stage director Jean-François Sivadier. We get a behind-the-scenes look at such areas as set design and musical direction, but the heart of the film is the intense collaboration between Sivadier and charismatic soprano Natalie Dessay.

Alex Raphaelson (rising star Marmaï) is a low-level Parisian drug-dealer with a busted marriage and a burdensome brother (noted filmmaker Kahn in an excellent performance). He is also Jewish, and, when a cousin mentions a plan to open a restaurant in Israel, he jumps at the chance for “aliyah” (immigration to Israel), less as a return to his religious roots than as an escape from his present life. But, in order to do that, he needs to raise cash fast, which means dealing more drugs, which exposes him to greater risks.

Based on real characters and events, this stirring, culturally rich Resistance drama is set in the early 1940s, when large numbers of North Africans emigrated to Occupied France. After Younes (Rahim), a cynical black marketeer, is caught by the Nazis, he agrees to spy on the Paris Mosque, suspected of harboring Jewish refugees--an assignment that sparks his political awakening.