Férid Boughedir is a filmmaker on a mission to make [...]

PARIS - French New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette died Friday at the age of 87. He was, like many of his New Wave collaborators, a film critic first and foremost, working at the eminent Cahiers du Cinéma. He A.D.’d with the likes of Jean Renoir and landed in the director’s seat in the sixties, an obviously tumultuous time in France that inspired many a filmmaker and a writer. Notable films by Rivette include

People walk all over Jesus, partially because he can’t fight back, partially because he lets them. His best friend is a prostitute who shakes him down for money and hogs his measly apartment to service clients. People have an uncanny ability to not notice him when he walks in a room—unless they need him for something, of course. The gay, femmy son of a famous ex-boxer, Jesus makes ends meet turning the occasional trick and fixing the wigs of Havana transvestites

In his last film HOW STRANGE TO BE NAMED FEDERICO the great Italian director Ettore Scola recounts his decades-long friendship with Fellini, the undisputed master of cinema. But following the arc of that friendship, he also talks about himself and how at age fifteen, following in the footsteps of his elder (born in 1931, he was eleven years younger than Fellini) the future he saw for himself was as a caricaturist at the time with

His last film, CHE STRANO CHIAMARSI FEDERICO (2013), was a love letter to Fellini, another great director and a good friend of his. Ettore Scola, the last royal heir to the vibrant and rich Italian cinema that has shaped so many of our most important filmmakers today, has passed on at the age of 84 in a Rome clinic. "His heart got tired of beating," his wife and daughters told Italian daily Corriere della Sera. Sofia Loren

The praise critics have showered on Todd Haynes’s CAROL gives me pause. Have I seen an entirely different film or is there something in this one that escapes me? A. O. Scott of the N.Y. Times sees CAROL as “fetishistically precise in its recreation of the look and sound of the past.” Sorry, but the fingernails with their bright red polish, the lips with their bright red lipstick, the precisely-coiffed heads, women wearing high heels

Bill Cosby, Mel Gibson and Roman Polansky were among the few (corrected: the many) Hollywood bold-faced names that got trashed by British comedian and Golden Globe host Ricky Gervais ("The Office"). There was a whiff of shenanigannery to the affair, with Gervais promising that he would hold his tongue only to start lashing out at everyone before him and creating, I assume, some major discomfort