Barbet Schroeder Movies

La Boulangere De Monceau (The Girl at the Monceau Bakery is the first of six short films that make up the Six Moral Tales series by French New Wave director Eric Rohmer. This 25-minute segment was shot in Paris with 16 mm black-and-white film. Barbet Schroeder (who also produced) plays a young university student who is initially attracted to a girl he sees on the street. While searching for her over several days, he makes frequent stops to a bakery. When he finally finds the girl and arranges a date, it conflicts with the date he has made with the bakery salesgirl. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide

Jean-Luc Godard directed this brutal and purposefully harsh satire (adapted from a play by Benjamino Joppolo) which explores the grim folly of war. Ulysses (Marino Masé) and Michel Ange (Albert Juross) are a pair of thickheaded peasants living in a nameless country who receive a visit from a pair of military recruiters informing them the king wants a favor of them. Impressed that the king regards them as friends, Ulysses and Michel Ange join the army and set out to see the world's battlefields, having been told they can claim any spoils as their own and live a lawless life on the nation's behalf. Ulysses and Michel Ange often write their equally dim girlfriends, Venus (Geneviève Galéa) and Cleopatre (Catherine Riberio), with tales of the places they've seen and the people they've killed, but when the soldiers return home, their women discover the riches they were promised are not quite what they imagined. Filmed and recorded in a deliberately harsh and murky style, Les Carabiniers (aka The Riflemen and The Soldiers) features a brief appearance from Barbet Schroeder, years before he would become an acclaimed director, as a car salesman. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

La Collectionneuse is the third of director Eric Rohmer's "Six contes moraux" (six moral tales), and also the first of the series to attain full feature-length status (each of the first two entries, La Boulangere de Monceau and La Carriere de la Suzanne, ran less than one hour). Patrick Bauchau plays a self-centered young man on summer holiday in the Mediterranean. He finds himself irresistibly attracted to Haydee (Haydee Politoff,) the aloof young woman who shares his St. Tropez villa. Haydee is a sexual libertine, a "collector of men" (hence the film's title), but she appears disinterested in Patrick. For his part, the hero assumes that the girl's promiscuity is deliberately calculated to prompt him to seduce her. Filmed in 1967, La Collectioneuse was released in the US in 1971, by which time the fourth of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, My Night at Maud's (69), had already debuted in America. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A young man from Germany (Klaus Grunberg) leaves home and travels to Paris. Hooking up with a group of hippies, he is enamored by an American girl (Mimsy Farmer) he meets at a party. The two leave for an island off the coast of Spain and become lovers. He becomes aware she is a heroin user and warns her about the drawbacks of narcotics. The American girl allows him to sleep with her girlfriend and try heroin. After an LSD trip, the girl leaves him and he takes too much of the hallucinogenic drug. Pink Floyd provides the music for this film that decries the excesses of the counterculture. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada was but a distant irritation to everyone but his own countrymen and the British Empire until his perfidy became headline material in the early '70s. The first director to provide an in-depth study of this gregarious madman was director Barbet Schroeder, with his General Idi Amin Dada. In this documentary, Schroeder and his crew travel to Uganda to spend several days with the despot, one-on-one. The uncomfortable truths revealed in the film are all the most amazing when one realizes that Schroeder could not release his documentary without Amin's approval. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada was but a distant irritation to everyone but his own countrymen and the British Empire until his perfidy became headline material in the early '70s. The first director to provide an in-depth study of this gregarious madman was director Barbet Schroeder, with his General Idi Amin Dada. In this documentary, Schroeder and his crew travel to Uganda to spend several days with the despot, one-on-one. The uncomfortable truths revealed in the film are all the most amazing when one realizes that Schroeder could not release his documentary without Amin's approval. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Penny Patterson, an American psychology student, began an experiment in primate communication in the early 1970s using a young zoo gorilla named Koko, who was loaned to Penny for the experiment. Due to a philosophical predisposition to consider that "humanizing" animals is wrong, and alarmed at the increasing publicity over the experiments, the zoo took back the gorilla, which by then had learned over three hundred signs and showed, to many observers, an almost human comprehension of her condition. This French documentary explores the experiments, the circumstances of Koko's being withdrawn from them, and the question of the gorilla's "civil rights," if any. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Like a glossy wrapping around an empty box, this film about sophisticated gamblers with nothing deeper than their gambling addiction involves a story no deeper than the tracks along its plot line: win at the casinos alone, win with a woman companion, and then cheat to win some more. Elric (Jacques Dutronc) is a professional gambler successfully working the roulette wheel at the casino in Portuguese Madeira when he meets Suzie (Bulle Ogier) at 7:07 p.m. wearing a T-shirt with the number "7" on it. Convinced she will bring him luck if she stays with him at the games for 7 days, Elric talks Suzie into keeping him company -- he is also hoping her disinterest in gambling will cure him of his habit. The reverse happens; he infects Suzie with the gambling bug. At that juncture, Jorg (Kurt Raab), a skillful cheat at many games, cons Elric into taking off with him to scam their way through one casino after another. The men leave and when they return, the temporary rift between Suzie and Elric is healed -- she objected to Jorg's methods -- but Elric is now infected with Jorg's methods himself and uses a remote-control electronic device to cheat at roulette, winning a fortune. With these proceeds, he and Suzie can start building that chateau in the French Alps they have always dreamed of owning -- though it remains to be seen if the gambling bug has been exterminated or is just lying dormant for awhile. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Improper Conduct was written and directed by famed Spanish cinematographer Nestor Alemandros. With uncompromising clarity, Alemandros lays bare the cruelties and despotism of Cuba's Castro regime. The director interviews several Cuban expatriates, including writers, filmmakers and political prisoners who once supported Castro in his struggle to oust the corrupt dictator Batista and then turned against him as he fully revealed his communist beliefs who relate in disturbing detail their treatment for alleged "crimes against the state"--such as homosexuality. Even long-time Castro apologists will be hard put to deny the truths set forth in this harrowing 112-minute documentary. Nestor Alemandros later compiled the interviews heard in Improper Conduct into an illustrated book. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The five-star European director Barbet Schroeder - the creative force behind such efforts as Reversal of Fortune, Maitresse and La Vallée - in 1986 created one of the most surprising, shocking and delightful features of our time with the seriocomedy Barfly (1987). Schroeder, of course, directed the film from the semi-autobiographical script by "gutterbucket skid row poet" Charles Bukowski (who in turn based the central character on himself); the finished film received a Golden Palm nod at Cannes and much concomitant acclaim, largely thanks to the shattering central performance by a nearly unrecognizable Mickey Rourke. Lesser known about the motion picture is the fact that Schroeder and Bukowski (who died in 1994) spent a massive amount of time together during seven years of pre-production - with the poet boozing, pontificating and rhapsodizing on various aspects of life. Inveterate filmmaker Schroeder couldn't resist filming these sessions, and they form the basis of his documentary The Charles Bukowski Tapes. For the final product (which totals four hours), Schroeder opted to cut the material up into fragments of a few minutes per take, to best capture Bukowski's wit. What emerges is a multifaceted biographical portrait of a complex, somewhat tortured, yet emotionally ebullient and transcendent individual who reshaped American literature in a defiantly original way. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

The Golden Boat, the first American production from internationally acclaimed director Raul Ruiz, is a dry-humored, surreal tale set in downtown Manhattan. Young writer Israel Williams (Federico Muchnik) encounters a wounded man on the street. Though he has been stabbed several times over, the man seems unaffected by his wounds and refuses to go to a doctor. Instead, he asks Israel to help find his estranged son. Israel reluctantly agrees but is met with disbelief and suspicion from the supposed son, a South American television star. Things become dangerously complicated when the old man proves to be a murderer with shady criminal and political connections. Israel soon becomes lost in a strange world of international celebrities, Marxist operatives, and postmodern literary critics. The film deconstructs traditional techniques, relying instead on unconventional cinematography, jarring sound design, and eccentric patterns of recurring imagery, including several pairs of boots that reappear in odd places throughout the film. Ruiz made The Golden Boat on a shoestring budget, working in collaboration with The Kitchen, an avant-garde theatre group. Several notable members of the New York art scene make cameos, including director Jim Jarmusch and writer Kathy Acker. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

Based on the novel by John Fante, this film follows the trials of the Bandini family as they try to struggle through hard times in 1920s Colorado. Out of work and in need of money, Svevo Bandini (Joe Mantegna) tries to scrounge up the money his family needs to make it through the winter, while putting up with his nasty mother-in-law (Renata Vanni), his anxious wife (Ornella Muti), and his two young boys. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

The third entry in the popular Beverly Hills Cop series finds Detroit cop Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) returning yet again to Southern California, this time on the trail of two car thieves turned murderers. As he teams up again with L.A. cop Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), Foley's investigation leads him to Wonder World, a theme park that is also the front for a major counterfeiting ring. More action and less wit are the trademarks of this film, which features Murphy dishing out his usual wisecracks, but with less flair and freshness than in the original film. Alan Young plays the old man who runs the amusement park, an interesting setting that still adds little to the tired premise. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide