I'll start this one off with a couple of BAFTA winning French films. First one is a film I've wanted to see for years and I HATE that I had to download it but there was no other way of seeing it in this country. I am by no means a fan of the French New Wave (I only really care for Le Mépris) but that doesn't stop me rooting out Truffaut films (I consider The Last Metro his bona fide masterpiece) and I've wanted to see his movie about movies, La nuit américaine (Day for Night), for a very long time. This is in no small part due to it being a BAFTA Best Picture winner and also that it garnered many awards and nominations for Valentina Cortese, who Ingrid Bergman so famously "apologised" to when she won her 3rd oscar over Cortese.
The set up is that there is a film in production, the director (François Truffaut) has insisted on the casting of a foreign star (Jacqueline Bisset) despite her recent mental problems and as such she will not be insured for the film. It's littered with familiar faces such as a very young Nathalie Baye but the show is absolutely stolen by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who is a complete riot as the infantile, sex obsessed star of the film. Cortese was memorable in her one scene where she can't remember her lines but I prefer the contributions of the bigger roles in what is an excellent ensemble. It's a very good film and a very earnest love letter to cinema from one of the most passionate directors on that subject.
Also last night after the Masters the BBC played Viva Maria! which I was very pleased about because it was the only awards attention Brigitte Bardot ever received (in the form of a BAFTA nom for best foreign actress, which she lost to Jeanne Moreau for the same film) and that alone has made me look out for it for years. She's very funny and the film requires her to be that and sexy and tough, she can do sexy just by breathing and there's always stunt-women for the more demanding stuff. It's a silly romp, but enjoyable fun, very surprising but refreshingly so from Louis Malle. The girls are fun and seem to be enjoying themselves and the only real downer in the cast is the inclusion of George Hamilton, who is one of the worst actors I've ever laid eyes on. Annoyingly in general the film was dubbed (and dubbed badly too) but adding a south american accent to Hamilton made his atrocious contribution very amusing and it fit in with the feel of the film nicely. Nothing amazing but entertaining enough.
I caught Robert Duvall's film (in every sense, he wrote, directed, produced and starred in it) The Apostle on Sky the other day about a preacher who gets kicked out of his church, gets cuckolded and attacks the guy with a baseball bat then flees to Louisiana (baptising himself as an "apostle" en route). There he gets on the radio and goes about starting up a new church. The most engaging part of the film is the divine Miranda RIchardson but she's sorely underused. Duvall's preaching starts off almost unbearably but come the climax there is undoubtedly something compelling and magnetic about both his performance and the character he has created for himself. By no means a great film, but a good performance piece.
Finally I watched a lovefilm rental Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress not just for the title but almost 
. It's a story about 2 young men who are sent to a very rural part of China to be "re-educated" in the early 1970s. There they meet the eponymous "Little Seamstress" (Zhou Xun, so memorable in Suzhou RIver which is basically if Wong Kar-Wai made Vertigo...) and use their acquisition of banned foreign books to make her less ignorant. It's a well made film, the guys aren't the best but Zhou is undoubtedly talented. It's more style and feel than performance though and the end is quite reminiscent of Underground and was therefore fairly moving. Nice enough little film.