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To mark the release of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange on 27th August, we’ve been given 1 copy to give away on Blu-ray.

Monsieur Lange (René Lefèvre) is a publishing house clerk who writes cheap Western novels in his spare time. When his untrustworthy, salacious boss, Batala avoids his debt collectors by pretending to be dead, Lange and his co-workers take over the business themselves and thrive on the popularity of Lange’s pulp stories. That is until Batala returns to demand his share of the profits. Meanwhile Lange falls deeply in love with his neighbour Valentine, portrayed gloriously by the mesmerising Florelle.

Directed and co-written by Renoir, Le Crime De Monsieur Lange’s story is adapted by another great of French cinema, Jacques Prévert (Quai des Brumes, Le Jour se Léve), and boasts a nuanced leading performance by Lefèvre.

Please note: This competition is open to UK residents only...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean Renoir's The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) is playing August 31 - September 30, 2017 in the United States as part of the series Jean Renoir.From the beginning, Jean Renoir embraced dualities. One wants to say he played with them, and that’s often true, but he also took them seriously. When these two things are happening at the same time, his work is imbued with a magic that still casts a spell, just as it did over French New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s who rightly took him as a father figure. A striking example of contrasting impulses, his first film on his own, La fille de l’eau (Whirlpool of Fate, 1925) is one of his open-air works—a heroine’s journey out in the world—but at its heart is a dream sequence and very theatrical. That set Renoir’s aesthetic course.

It’s a given that their Main Slate — the fresh, the recently buzzed-about, the mysterious, the anticipated — will be the New York Film Festival’s primary point of attraction for both media coverage and ticket sales. But while a rather fine lineup is, to these eyes, deserving of such treatment, the festival’s latest Revivals section — i.e. “important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners,” per their press release — is in a whole other class, one titanic name after another granted a representation that these particular works have so long lacked.

The list speaks for itself, even (or especially) if you’re more likely to recognize a director than title. Included therein are films by Andrei Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Daughter of the Nile, a personal favorite), Pedro Costa (Casa de Lava; trailer here), Jean-Luc Godard (the rarely seen,...