24/10/2012 - Michael Haneke’s masterpiece and Palme d’Or winner in out in cinemas, as is beautiful animation film Day of the Crows

Produced up to 70% by France, Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 2012 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Michael Haneke
film profile] is out today in French cinemas. Released by its producer Les Films du Losange on 240 copies, this feature starring Jean-Louis Trintignant (photo), Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert has been unanimously praised by the press, and it will be interesting to see whether the public also responds so positively to a subject (the end of life) that, despite being far from glamourous on paper, the director has however turned into a masterpiece.

Jean-Christophe Dessaint’s great animation film Day of the Crows [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (original title: Le Jour des Corneilles), a co-production between France (Finalement), Luxembourg, Canada, and Belgium, is also out on 186 copies distributed by Gebeka. This first feature, whose screenplay was adapted by Amandine Taffin from the novel of the same name by Jean-François Beauchemin, centres on a young boy brought up in the middle of the forest by his father, a tyrannical giant. Not knowing anything about human society, the boy grows up as a savage, until the day he has to go to the closest village and meets young Manon... A talented return to traditional animation thanks to remarkable work on lights and colours that evoke expressionism, the film skilfully plays on the boundaries between reality and fairy tale. As the screenwriter stresses, “the fantastic forest full of ghosts is not the worrying place where our hero gets lost, but where he leads his daily life, and civilisation is not the world that he must leave and return to victorious, but the world that he must explore. And the ogre that he will confront is none other than his own father.” Day of the Crows received very good reviews at the Annecy and San Sebastian film festivals, and is sold worldwide by Le Pacte.

Also worth noting among the new releases today, before the James Bond tidal wave expected this Friday (Sam Mendes’ Skyfall [+see also:
film review
trailer
making of
film profile]), are Frédéric Forestier and Thomas Langmann’s nostalgic musical comedy Stars 80 [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (distribution: Warner in 537 cinemas) and three documentaries: German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s Into The Abyss and French filmmakers Clara Bouffartigue’s Tempête sous un crâne and Philippe Béziat's Traviata et nous.

At the box office, Laurent Titard’s Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia [+see also:
trailer
film profile] has kicked off with 1 million admissions in five days, while François Ozon’s In The House [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] continues to do well with 637,000 admissions in 12 days. Taken 2 drew 2.3 millions cinema-goers in about three weeks, whereas football comedy Les Seigneurs [+see also:
trailer
film profile] has done just as well in about four weeks. Two other French films are also in the week’s top ten: Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou et les hommes et les femmes [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (481,000 admissions in 19 days) and Christian Vincent’s Haute Cuisine [+see also:
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film profile] (876,000 cinema-goers in about five weeks).

(Translated from French)