Anatole Dauman Movies

Wim Wenders' sprawling cyberpunk noir epic -- shot in no less than nine different countries -- is set in 1999 and stars Solveig Dommartin as Claire, a young Frenchwoman who comes into contact with a large sum of money stolen during a bank heist; in her travels she picks up a mysterious American hitchhiker (William Hurt), who himself steals some of the money before parting from her company. Upon discovering the theft, Claire sets out on his trail, with both a Hammett-styled German private eye (Rudiger Vogler) as well as her former lover, a novelist portrayed by Sam Neill, in tow. The hitchhiker is really Sam Farber, the son of an underground scientist (Max Von Sydow), and his mission is to travel the globe in order to acquire the funding necessary to develop the technology which will allow his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau) to "see" visual recordings of her family members; the second half of the film takes place largely in the Farbers' compound in the Australian Outback, where Sam, Claire and the others take refuge while attempting to bring the sight project to its fruition, in the meantime pondering earth's future in the wake of a nuclear disaster in outer space. Wenders' most ambitious film to date, budgeted at $23 million, Until the End Of the World is also among his most seriously flawed efforts -- despite a keen sense of cultural perception, a fascinating sci-fi take on life in the near-future and stunning Robby Muller cinematography, the picture never quite gels. Much of the blame seems to fall upon its distributors -- upon its wide release in 1991, the movie was drastically cut to a running time of 2 1/2 hours, resulting in a disjointed narrative that doesn't shift gears so much as grind them as the action moves from country to country. Still, while a three-hour version, issued on laserdisc in Japan, comes closer to realizing the full scope of Wenders' epic vision, rumors of a five-hour director's cut -- said to have been screened to thunderous applause at a handful of film festivals -- continue to persist, suggesting that a masterpiece may well exist here after all. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) is wandering through the Texas desert, a bit shaky and in desperate need of water, when he stumbles into a bar and collapses. A German doctor of dubious credentials finds a phone number in Travis' wallet, which belongs to his brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell). Walt is shocked to hear about his brother's condition, since no one in the family has seen or heard from Travis in four years; Walt flies to Texas to bring him home, only to find Travis wandering by the side of the road, and they begin the long drive back to Los Angeles, where Walt lives with his wife, Anne (Aurore Clement), and Hunter (Hunter Carson), Travis' seven-year-old son. At first, Travis refuses to speak and is oddly distant, but in time he begins to talk again, and when he arrives in California, he begins the painful process of reacquainting himself with his son and trying to reconcile with his wife, Jane (Nastassia Kinski). ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In Volker Schlöndorff's award-winning adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass' allegorical novel, David Bennent plays Oskar, the young son of a German rural family, circa 1925. On his third birthday, Oskar receives a shiny new tin drum. At this point, rather than mature into one of the miserable specimens of grown-up humanity that he sees around him, he vows never to get any older or any bigger. Whenever the world around him becomes too much to bear, the boy begins to hammer on his drum; should anyone try to take the toy away from him, he emits an ear-piercing scream that literally shatters glass. As Germany goes to hell during the 1930s and '40s, the never-aging Oskar continues savagely beating his drum, serving as the angry conscience of a world gone mad. The intense and visceral Tin Drum was one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s and won the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the 1979 Golden Palm (which it shared with Apocalypse Now). In the late '90s, the film became the center of a censorship controversy when some U.S. videotapes were confiscated because of the film's supposed violation of a child pornography statute. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this story, a young nobleman with an unusually strong interest in horse-breeding is being prepared to marry the wealthy niece of an American Cardinal. (Noble families which are growing impoverished try to marry off their younger generations to the heirs of wealthy commoners.) When the girl arrives at the nobleman's family mansion the day before the wedding, she is shown around the house and its treasures and is told the story of an ancestor's legendary battle against a beast. That night, she dreams of an erotic encounter with a man/beast which culminates in the death of the beast. On awakening, she finds that she has been in bed with her fiancé, who is now dead. When mysterious bandages on his person are removed, he is seen to have a tail and one hand which has turned animal-like. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Robert Bresson directed this grim but moving story of a girl forced to grow up quickly due to the unfortunate circumstances which surround her. Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is a fourteen year old girl living in a rural village in France; while it's the mid-1960's, in many respects her community looks as if it could still be World War II, or even the turn of the century, and a number of the men earn their living though poaching game. Mouchette's mother (Marie Cardinal) is slowly dying of an incurable illness, while her father (Paul Hebert) is a heavy drinker who shows little concern for his daughter, often using a hard shove as a parenting technique. Mouchette is an outcast at school, works odd jobs to help her family's meager circumstances, and has developed a thinly veiled contempt for most of those around her. One of the few places Mouchette feels at home is in the woods, and when a heavy storm breaks out while she's making her way home from school, she happens upon Arsene (Jean-Claude Guilbert), a poacher who allows her to stay in his cabin for the night; he forces himself upon her sexually, but after her initial resistance Mouchette seems to almost welcome his attention. When Mouchette is made party to an act of violence between Arsene and a rival gamekeeper, she's forced into a complicated lie, and after the death of her mother, her shabby existence becomes almost too much to bear. Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, Mouchette was (like many of Robert Bresson's films) largely cast with non-professional actors, and shot using a deliberately simple, ascetic style; the result was honored with major awards at the Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival, and was named Best Film of 1967 (along with Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour) by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Masculine Feminine was Jean-Luc Godard's first (but not his last) foray into the burgeoning "Children of the Sixties" generation -- or, as Godard described it, "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola." Impressionable teenager Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) tries to make sense of the world by working as an interviewer for a research firm. Meanwhile, Paul cohabits with aspiring singer Madeleine (Chantal Goya), with two additional young ladies joining the nocturnal festivities. Paul jumps or is pushed from a window, leaving a pregnant Madeleine to move on to the next aimless youth she meets. While the nominal hero has failed to find fulfillment in personal relations, another male protagonist (Michel Debord), a political activist, is luckier -- an indication that the director favored revolutionary politics over simple emotionalism at this point in his career. Though Godard's free-form style is usually opposed to linear storytelling, Masculine Feminine has solid literary roots, having been inspired by two Guy de Maupassant stories. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The movie that inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, Chris Marker's La jetée is a landmark of science-fiction filmmaking, a 28-minute masterpiece told almost entirely in still frames. Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, it tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. After a lengthy and nightmarish period of conditioning, he is sent into the past, where he falls in love with a woman whom he once saw on a pier. At the experiment's conclusion, he is visited by an advanced race, who offer him the opportunity to journey into their future world, but he instead requests that they send him permanently into the past, where he can remain with the woman of his dreams. A singular experience. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Lettre de Siberie is the fourth of French filmmaker Chris Marker's cinematic "personal essays". Using a letter from Siberia as its launching pad, the film goes off quixotically in several different directions. Thus, it's hard to categorize the film: a first documentary, it becomes a travelogue, then an animated cartoon, then a philosophical tract, and then?..Marker's self-styled Intellectual Leftism is very much in the forefront through the film's 60 minutes. Ironically, Lettre de Siberie was pulled from Czechoslovakia's Karlovy Vary Film Festival, on the grounds that the Soviet Union hadn't authorized a documentary on Siberia! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide