With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s BILLY BUDD, SAILOR, Claire Denis (STARS AT NOON, WHITE MATERIAL) firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit (Grégoire Colin) plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains of Benjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.

A young American journalist (Margaret Qualley) stranded in present-day Nicaragua seduces an enigmatic Englishman (Joe Alwyn) who seems like her best chance of escape. She soon realizes, though, that their torrid affair has only put her in more danger. A stunning erotic thriller from acclaimed filmmaker Claire Denis.

Juliette Binoche is Sara, a woman whose life spirals out of control when she becomes involved in a passionate love triangle. From acclaimed writer-director Claire Denis.

Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his baby daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to the outer reaches of the solar system. The crew—death-row inmates led by a doctor (Juliette Binoche) with sinister motives—has vanished. As the mystery of what happened onboard the ship is unraveled, father and daughter must rely on each other to survive as they hurtle toward the oblivion of a black hole. A staggering and primal film about love and intimacy, suffused with anguished memories of a lost Earth, High Life is a haunting, thrilling achievement from visionary director Claire Denis.

Juliette Binoche delivers a luminous performance in the deliciously witty, sensuously romantic new film from acclaimed director Claire Denis (White Material). Isabelle (Binoche) is a divorced Parisian painter searching for another shot at love, but refusing to settle for the parade of all-too-flawed men who drift in and out of her life. There's a caddish banker (Xavier Beauvois) who, like many of her lovers, happens to be married; a handsome actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who's working through his own hang-ups; and a sensitive fellow artist (Alex Descas) who's skittish about commitment. What reads like a standard romantic comedy premise is transformed, in the hands of master filmmaker Denis, into something altogether deeper, more poignant, and perceptive about the profound mysteries of love.

In this gripping thriller about money, sex and power by acclaimed director Claire Denis (35 Shots of Rum, Beau Travail), a ship captain returns to Paris to seek vengeance on the man suspected of causing his brother-in-law's suicide. Stars Chiara Mastroianni, Vincent Lindon and Michel Subor.

Chapters 13-15: New Boundaries: World Cinema in Africa, Asia, Latin America, New American Independents & The Digital Revolution, and Cinema Today and the Future. World cinema in the 90s enters a golden age. The story starts in Iran, where we meet Abbas Kiarostami, who rethought movie making. Then the English-speaking world introduces us to new kinds of brilliant, playful movies, epitomized by Tarantino’s dialogue and the edge of the Coen brothers. Finally, we plunge into the digital world to see how it changed the movies forever and go beyond the present, to look at film in the future.

Chapters 10-12: Movies To Change The World, The Arrival of Multiplexes and the Asian Mainstream, and Protest in Film. This is the story of the movies that tried to change the world in the 70s. We start in Germany, head to Britain, travel to Italy, see the birth of new Australian cinema, and then arrive in Japan. We see how Star Wars, Jaws and The Exorcist created the multiplexes and then travel to India to show how Bollywood was doing new things. Then American director John Sayles talks about how filmmakers spoke truth to power in the 1980s.

Chapters 7-9: European New Wave, New Directors, New Forms, and American Cinema of the '70s. We discover how French filmmakers planted a bomb under the movies and see how this "new wave" swept across Europe and all around the world. We discover the films of Roman Polanski, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Nagisa Oshima. Paul Schrader reveals his thoughts on his existential screenplay for Taxi Driver, Robert Towne explores the dark ideas in Chinatown, and Charles Burnett talks about the birth of Black American cinema.

Chapters 4-6: The Arrival Of Sound, Post-War Cinema, and Sex & Melodrama. With the advent of sound in the 1930s we witness the birth of new types of film: screwball comedies, gangster pictures, horror films, westerns and musicals. The onset of WWII makes cinema more daring and the story shifts from Italy back to Hollywood, to chart the darkening of American film and the drama of the McCarthy era. Sex and melodrama infuses the American movies of the 50s, and we travel to Egypt, India, China, Mexico, Britain and Japan to find that movies there were also full of rage and passion.

Chapters 1-3: Birth Of The Cinema, The Hollywood Dream, and The Golden Age of World Cinema.



The opening of THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY shows the birth of a great new art form: the movies. We see how Hollywood became a glittering entertainment industry and how star directors like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton emerged in the roaring twenties. Then we visit Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai and Tokyo to discover the places where movie makers were pushing the boundaries of the medium.

From Claire Denis, the incomparable director of BEAU TRAVAIL, L'INTRUS and 35 SHOTS OF RHUM, comes WHITE MATERIAL: a rich and thrilling account of a woman driven to the edge. An official selection of the Venice, Toronto and New York Film Festivals, the film is a riveting exploration of the complexities of racial conflict and the limits of human will. The legendary Isabelle Huppert (LA CEREMONIE, THE PIANO TEACHER, 8 WOMEN), is Maria Vial, a fearless French woman attempting to run her family's coffee plantation in an unnamed African country. Torn violently apart by hate-fueled civil conflict, this unforgiving setting soon turns against the foreign family, declaring them outlaws in their new home. In a brash effort to save her family and livelihood, Maria risks everything, fighting with every shred of her will to buck the rebel forces wrestling for control of local power.