‎Francesca de Rochefort’s profile • Letterboxd

Favorite films

All

More

The Iron Rose 1973

★★★★ Watched by Francesca de Rochefort 04 Jul 2021

After so many films I think I can finally summarize just what it is that Rollin is doing in these movies that I find so enthralling - and it's that he's creating a cinema that's one of the purest distillations of a classical aesthetic of death and decay I know of. So many of the images he composes are drawn from a deep tradition, a kind of collective unconscious that he feeds on to inspire feelings of the sublime, to…
La Cérémonie 1995

★★★★★ Rewatched by Francesca de Rochefort 25 Jul 2021 6

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

One of the big problems with the way I review movies is that I usually do so not long after seeing them, almost always on the same night, so my reviews aren't so much my congealed thoughts about a film as much as they are my first, unformed impressions, the stuff that I was immediately thinking about after I finished the film and while experiencing it for the first time. Oftentimes that's fine, and nothing much changes or occurs to…

More

Hiroshima Mon Amour 1959

★★★★ Watched by Francesca de Rochefort 29 Jun 2022

For some reason I'd not seen this up until now (nor any Resnais other than a watch of Marienbad over a decade ago by now probably) and I think I harbored some secret fear this might be one of the nouvelle vague classics I wouldn't be able to warm to. That was dumb because this is precisely the kind of cinema I can easily lose myself in and it was no exception here - Resnais, with the writing aid of…
PlayTime 1967

★★★★ Watched by Francesca de Rochefort 28 Jun 2022

I remember a conversation with my mother when I was quite young in which I asked her if all the housing and identikit office buildings of the city I grew up in were really all the world comprised; she responded something along the lines of "well, yeah, what else would there be?" and I still recall the intense disappointment I felt back then I think for the first challenge to the idealistic spirit of my childhood and my idea that…

More

The Children's Hour 1961

★★★★ Watched by Francesca de Rochefort 09 Oct 2018

Mary Tilford vs Veda Pierce deathmatch for the title of most loathable child in cinema
The Piano Teacher 2001

★★★★★ Watched by Francesca de Rochefort 10 Jul 2021 7

Back in the days of the Old Hollywood there was a whole subgenre of the woman's picture that revolved around women essentially coded as spinsters/sexually repressed discovering themselves and their potential for romance, in Hays Code friendly ways of course - think Now, Voyager especially as the ur-example of this. At first this film hints that it might be a kind of modern take on the same material, and it is certainly a film about deepset sexual neurosis, but it…