Andrew Sarris

Stark, stylistically directed, fact-based story of a dreamy, intense 15-year-old girl (Mouchet) and her desire to become a Carmelite nun, to be wedded to Christ. Winner of six Cesar Awards, including Best Picture. Remake of the 1938 film THERESE MARTIN.

In the 1750s, young orphan John Mohune (Jon Whiteley) arrives at the seaside Dorset village of Moonfleet seeking Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger), a one-time "friend" of his late mother, to whom she has turned over care of the boy. Fox exudes an aura of class and bravado, along with an obvious love of life and the finer things it can offer, all of which combine to make him a beguiling presence to one and all, including the larcenous, decadent local nobility (George Sanders) and a band of cut-throats led by Elzevir Block (Sean McClory), to whom he has more than a passing acquaintance……

In the French Riviera, the spoiled and futile seventeen years old girl Cecile is spending the summer vacation with her father, the widow playboy and bon-vivant Raymond, and his girlfriend Elsa. Cecile has a serious Complex of Oedipus with her father, and they have a quite incestuous relationship. The successful designer and former friend of her mother Anne Larson arrives in their seaside house invited by Raymond to spend a couple of days with them, and the life of Cecile changes when Raymond proposes Anne to marry him. Full of jealousy, Cecile plots with Elsa to separate Anne from Raymond.

“Defiantly and majestically cinema a la Rossellini” (Andrew Sarris), Socrates was a film Rossellini had wanted to make since the early Fifties. The film brilliantly recreates ancient Athens and the last days of the orator and philosopher with whom the director clearly identified. (Massimo Olmi’s touching account of the shooting of the film ends with this telling observation: “Patriarch Rossellini, patriarch Socrates, both absorbed in the difficult delivery of Truth,” which is echoed in Michael McKegney’s review of the film in The Village Voice: “Two great men separated by so many centuries seem to speak with one voice to a race which controls the atom and the atmosphere but seems to have forgotten why: ‘Know thyself.’”) Rossellini’s serene, sometimes shocking account of Socrates’ life and philosophy characteristically fastens on fact rather than myth, placing the prodigious figure in a detailed setting of the city with its workers and merchants, and a mundane domestic world of meals, servants, and an impulsive wife. Its irony also restrains any reverence for the great philosopher, emphasizing his foibles as well as his grandeur: when we first meet him, he has spent two days wandering about the city after forgetting that he left home to buy bread. The trial of Socrates for impiety and “corrupting the young” is high drama, and the final sequences, in which his family and followers gather in a cave as he is about to die, have a simple, resounding eloquence. “There is in this fidelity a kind of beauty and poetry that are all but unknown in the work of other contemporary filmmakers”

An old roue arrives in Hades to review his life with Satan, who will rule on his eligibility to enter the Underworld.

The obsessive and jealous shipowner Bruce Vail does not accept the divorce his wife Irene Vail achieved in London, and he hires his driver Michael Browsky to forge adultery with Irene in Paris to make the decree null. However, she is rescued by the headwaiter Paul Dumond, who punches Michael and locks Bruce and his private eyes in a locker, and they spend a wonderful night together in the restaurant Chateau Bleu, where Paul and his best friend Chef Cesare work, and they fall in love for each other. Meanwhile, Bruce kills Michael and blackmails Irene, blaming Paul and forcing her to return with him to New York. But Paul does not give up on Irene, and moves to New York with Cesare trying to find her love.