The third of Eric Rohmer's Four Seasons romances follows the indecision of a young man who juggles three women during his final summer between school and work. Drifting along the beaches of Brittany while waiting for his commitment-shy girlfriend, Lena, to meet him, Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud of Diary of a Seducer) becomes fast friends with pretty waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet, the grown-up Pauline of Pauline at the Beach a decade earlier) and has a fling with Margot's aggressive and sexy friend Solene before Lena finally shows. By then, Gaspard has inadvertently committed himself to all three women. It's a lovely portrait of awkwardness and ambivalence set against the gorgeous land and seascape of Brittany, and populated by pretty young performers. This, the most understated of Rohmer's sex farces, carries a bittersweet sting, but little of the emotional effervescence of his best films. While these characters are no less pretentious or vulnerable than his other lovers (who all seem to be emotionally at sea), Rohmer just skims the surface of their emotional revelation. His greatest achievement is the evocation of young adults caught between their teens and 20s, with little real experience but full of easily sidelined ideals. In the best Rohmer tradition, the circular conversations and solipsistic monologues are neither glib nor pretentious, merely the immature but sincere ramblings of vulnerable youth playing adult games. -Sean Axmaker.

Legend has it that Henri-Georges Clouzot beat out Alfred Hitchcock to secure the rights to this novel, which proved to be a veritable blueprint for an icy masterpiece of murder, mystery, and suspense. Véra Clouzot plays the sickly wife of a callous headmaster of a provincial boarding school going to seed, and the commanding Simone Signoret is the headmaster's mistreated mistress. Together they plot and carry out his murder, a brutal drowning that director Clouzot documents in chilly detail, but the corpse disappears, and a nosy detective starts sniffing around the grounds as threatening notes taunt the women. Clouzot's thriller is as precise and accomplished a work as anything in Hitchcock's canon, a film of grueling suspense and startling shocks in an overcast, gray world of decay, but his icy manipulations lack the human dimension and emotional resonance of the master of suspense. The film has been accused of being misanthropic by many critics, and Clouzot's attitude toward his characters is bitter at best, contemptuous at worst. The viewer is left on the outside looking in, but the razor precision and terrifying twists deliver a sleek, bleak spectacle worthy of attention. -Sean Axmaker.

Paul (François Cluzet) and Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) have what seems to be a storybook marriage. They love each other madly and have worked together to turn their little lakeside inn into a gorgeous resort getaway while raising an adorable son. But there's a problem: Paul is convinced Nelly is having an affair and his jealousy spins to insane proportions. Hallucinations and nightmares twist his dementia until he imagines her sleeping with every man in sight, and his obsessive spying turns Nelly's life into a living hell. Claude Chabrol (director of La Cérémonie, known as the Gallic Hitchcock for his cool thrillers of obsessive love and homicidal passion, created his film from an original unfilmed screenplay by Henri-George Clouzot (Les Diaboliques). He injects Clouzot's dark, misanthropic tale with a soupçon of Hitchcock's voyeuristic obsession, but ultimately makes the film his own with unexpected sympathy for Paul, whose pathological jealousy spins out of control in a chilling conclusion that leaves the viewers uncomfortably nestled in his madness. The film faced charges of misogyny upon release largely because Chabrol remained steadfast in his portrayal of Paul not as a monster but a victim of madness (somewhat at the expense of Nelly, an angelic sexpot whose loyalty and love is almost sacrificial), but ultimately that's what gives L'Enfer its unsettling power. -Sean Axmaker.

Like everything else, the secret of a good wine is in the timing: the timing of the grape-picking, the fermentation, the breathing. And the timing is just right in Autumn Tale, a luminous story set in the winemaking country of France; director Eric Rohmer, in his late 70s when the film was made, clearly waited until this particular bottle had reached the proper maturity. At the center of the film is the friendship between two gracefully middle-aged women: Vineyard owner Magali (Beatrice Romand, star of the previous Rohmer gems Claire's Knee and Le Beau Mariage), blunt and compact, is currently unattached. Isabelle (Marie Rivière, from Summer), willowy and slightly ditzy, is married-and would like to see Magali happily wed. A matchmaking scheme via the personal ads leads to a gentle, amusing, yet increasingly profound romantic confusion. At first glance, the film may seem like sun-dappled simplicity itself, but stick around for the final moments at the very tail of the end credits, and you'll appreciate the wise mingling of longing, satisfaction, and regret that have been percolating through the movie all along. Rohmer likes to make films in groups (the "Six Moral Tales" launched him onto the international film stage in the 1960s), and Autumn Tale rounds off a set devoted to the four seasons. The other films in the quartet are worthy enough, and Rohmer has the kind of adornment-free clarity that many great artists develop after a lifetime's worth of craft, but Autumn Tale is the best of the bunch: a warm, quiet masterpiece. -Robert Horton.

This beloved 1962 film from the golden age of international cinema can't help but look terribly self-conscious now, full of ambivalent nods to the contemporaneous vitality of the French New Wave (an obligatory iris shot of star Hardy Kruger, for instance, as seen through something like a tiny knothole). There is also a fair amount of dragging and wasted motion in the overlong story, but even that is forgivable given this film's extraordinary, soulful portrait of a beautiful if impossible relationship. Kruger plays Pierre, a former military pilot whose plane crashed after a bombing raid in Indochina. Killing a little girl in the process, Pierre suffers a psychological trauma that is lessened by the company of a 12-year-old orphan named Cybele (Patricia Gozzi), herself an abandoned, luckless child in need of companionship. Meeting every Sunday, the two become immersed in a deeply affectionate world of their own, where nothing unsavory actually occurs yet a full range of emotional colors seems possible-much like two innocents reborn in each other's eyes. Cowriter and director Serge Bourguignon adopts a fairy-tale tone for both the central bond between Pierre and Cybele as well as the oddly harsh, uncaring social environment that inevitably condemns their union. Bourguignon is lucky to have a couple of important allies: Maurice Jarre for the musical score and legendary cinematographer Henri Decae behind the lens. While these artists can't save Bourguignon from his own trite excesses as a visualist, they enhance his considerable feeling for the redemptive poetry of an unlikely love. -Tom Keogh.

In the 1960s and early '70s, Claude Chabrol was celebrated as the Gallic Hitchcock for his crisp, character-rich thrillers. La Cérémonie, his 1997 hit adapted from Ruth Rendell's novel A Judgement in Stone, is a return to form, an assured domestic drama set in the upper-class household of the kind but condescending Lelievres family. Sandrine Bonnaire, excellent in an enigmatic, uncommunicative role, stars as their new, neurotically silent maid Sophie. She performs her duties efficiently and emotionlessly, staring out from behind an implacable, mask-like face born of loneliness and defensiveness. Isabelle Huppert is the town's gleefully misanthropic postmistress Jeanne, a gossipy, energetically insolent misfit who hates the Lelievres. When she becomes Sophie's best friend, her pathological game of taunts and gossip goes into overdrive with her sudden access to their house, and an already simmering class conflict boils over in unleashed anger. Chabrol charts the cascade of mischief and misunderstandings to its shattering conclusion, with a sensitivity to character and an eagle-eyed remove that makes the explosive climax all the more chilling. It's a devastating thriller, one of Chabrol's best, and a powerful portrait in hate and psychosis pushed over the edge in misunderstanding, manipulation, and mistrust. Jacqueline Bisset is the fumbling but sincere Mme. Lelievres, Jean-Pierre Cassel her complacent husband, and Virginie Ledoyen (A Single Girl) their sensitive young daughter. [+]