Le Forum

Described by the Village Voice as "a proto-slacker mood piece...more Renoir than Fuller-the least preoccupied with American culture of any of Godard's '60s films", Bande a Part (Band of Outsiders) is the great French director's classic tale of disaffected youth in suburban Paris.

Namesake for Quentin Tarantino's production company (Band a Part also inspired the famous dance sequence in Pulp Fiction), the film is lesser known than Godard's Breathless, yet was more groundbreaking, pioneering daring cinematic devices that have become commonplace today.

A simple story about two young delinquents (Franz and Arthur) who befriend a young girl, Odile (Anna Karina), and conpire to commit a robbery, Band a Part is best remembered for its quirky set pieces: the celebrated mad dash through the Louvre; Arthur and Franz reading aloud from a daily tabloid, one crime story after another, ending with an account of tribal slaughter in Rwanda. And of course, there's the sequence where Odile, Franz, and Arthur dance the Madison in a half-empty café.

With Masculin féminin , ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to "the children of Marx and Coa-Cola," through a gang of restless youths engaged in hopeless love affairs with music, revolution, and each other. French new wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud stars as Paul, an idealistic would-be intellectual struggling to forge a relationship with the adorable pop star Madeleine (real-life yé yé girl Chantal Goya). Through their tempestuous affair, Godard fashions a candid and wildy funny free-form examination of youth culture in throbbing 1960s Paris, mixing satire and tragedy as only Godard can.

Charles Duchemin, le directeur d'un guide gastronomique qui vient d'être élu à l'Académie Française, se trouve un adversaire de taille en la personne de Jean Tricatel, le PDG d'une chaîne de restaurants. Son fils Gérard anime en cachette une petite troupe de cirque.

Prenez la plus grande vedette comique française - de Funès - qui effectue son retour dans un rôle taillé sur mesure après trois ans d'absence. Adjoignez-lui un espoir venu du café-théâtre et du music-hall - Coluche - qui tient là son premier grand rôle au cinéma. Mitonnez-leur une histoire aux petits oignons où l'un serait le père de l'autre, où quiproquos et malentendus s'enchaînent sans discontinuer. Ajoutez-y un méchant d'anthologie - Tricatel, interprété par l'excellent Julien Guiomar. Placez enfin aux fourneaux un expert en artillerie comique, Claude Zidi (La moutarde me monte au nez, Les Ripoux). Résultat : vous obtenez l'une de ces comédies au fumet bien de chez nous dont on reprend volontiers une louche à chaque passage ! --Sylvain Lefort

Louis de Funès was the quintessential funnyman in France. Reminiscent of the characters created by Jacques Tati and Peter Sellars, de Funès' awkward filmic persona was beloved by French and international audiences throughout his prolific film career. Four of his side-splitting classics are collected here:

GRANDES VACANCES
MR LEGUIGNON LAMPISTE
PEEK-A-BOO
THE LITTLE BATHER

JACQUES TATI
Jacques Tati is one of the great comic icons of French cinema, a Gallic equivalent of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. This exclusive box set brings together his four masterpieces available for the first time - all beautifully restored, plus a collection of bonus rarely seen Tati film shorts.

4 Dvds : Jour de Fête - Mr Hulot's Holiday - Mon Oncle - Playtime

JOUR DE FETE
Jacques Tati plays the role of a mailman in a small French village in his first feature film. After viewing a film about efficiency in the American postal system, the mailman decides to upgrade his archaic means of delivering mail.

MR. HULOT'S HOLIDAY
Pipe-smoking Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati's endearing clown, takes a holiday at a seaside resort where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. The first entry in the Hulot series is a masterpiece of gentle slapstick.

MON ONCLE
Jacques Tati’s eccentric hero Monsieur Hulot is let loose in the ultramodern home of his sister and in an antiseptic factory that manufactures plastic hose. Slapstick prevails in the second entry of the Hulot series, a delightful satire of mechanized living.

PLAYTIME:
The endearingly clumsy Monsieur Hulot wanders through modernist Paris trying to reconcile the old-fashioned ways with the confusion of the encroaching age of technology.