‎Francesca de Rochefort’s profile • Letterboxd

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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…

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Empire of Passion 1978

★★★ Watched by Francesca de Rochefort 28 May 2022

Empire of Passion was Oshima's next film after his still controversial and transgressive masterpiece In The Realm of the Senses and it continues some of the central threads of that work, especially with regards to sexual repression and forbidden love vs a societal framework that cannot tolerate untrammeled sexuality. In particular the latter takes centre stage where Realm was just as if not more focused on a more abstract idea of amour fou and all consuming passion as a disguised…
The Red Queen Kills Seven Times 1972

★★ Watched by Francesca de Rochefort 21 May 2022

Silly but entertaining giallo with some Gothic aspects. Barbara Bouchet shines as ever and I'm weak for fashion house gialli in general even if this is no Blood & Black Lace and even if I feel like more could have been done with the villain characterization (and the twist stretches credulity even by the standards of the genre). Looks pretty fantastic as you'd expect and I was very happy to see it's part of the bottle of J&B cinematic universe

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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
Duelle 1976

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

Kinda knew I was going to love this as soon as I realized how many Fran-core attributes it checks off - noir-esque lighting and shadow, glamorous femme fatales, plentiful sapphic and vampiric subtext/text-text, seedy and stylish nightclubs, fatal desires, intricate conspiracies. Really it just came down to how well Rivette would be able to pull off this particular concoction, and the answer is spectacularly as ever; Duelle is a pulp art masterpiece that feels impossibly convoluted and steeped in mythology…