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By Tim McGlynn

Kino-Lorber has released a Blu-ray edition of 1971’s The Deadly Trap starring Faye Dunaway and Frank Langella. Helmed by famed French director Rene Clement, this film is a nifty thriller with more than a few surprising plot twists. The 1980s VHS release of this film carried the incredibly inappropriate title of Death Scream which may be the reason you never heard of this more reserved story.

Written by Sydney Buchman and Eleanor Perry with a little help from an uncredited Ring Lardner, Jr., this film requires some patience on the part of the viewer as the characters are introduced thoroughly before events are set into motion.

Faye Dunaway, looking gorgeous as a brunette, and Frank Langella play Jill and Philippe, American ex pats living in Paris where they raise their two children. Philippe is a successful book editor who has...

Downward Slopes: Morano’s Debut of Downtrodden Beats

Cinematographer Reed Morano (The Skeleton Twins; Kill Your Darlings) makes her directorial debut with Meadowland, an increasingly cheerless portrait of parents in the traumatic aftermath following the disappearance of their only child. Constructing a complex psychological portrait of lives thrust into ceaseless turmoil, Morano serves as her own DoP in this visually striking odyssey focusing on familiar subjects in unpredictable ways. Mercilessly contained within the limited perspectives of its main characters, it’s an uncomfortable examination that manages to be surprisingly repellant without sacrificing sympathy for its complicated lead character. Filled with notable actors in supporting roles, some of them arguably wasted here (though, conversely, no one manages to distract), Morano manages a significantly downbeat and uncompromising debut.

School teacher Sarah (Olivia Wilde) and police officer Phil (Luke Wilson) are on a road trip with their son. But when he is abducted...

The late films of René Clément are even more neglected than the early and middle films of René Clément, which is to say, very neglected indeed. Falling somewhat between the generation of Jean Renoir and that of the nouvelle vague, he may have been seen as a dangerous professional rival, but he certainly was no friend to the emerging Cahiers du cinema cinephiles, declaring at the time of Fahrenheit 451's production that each Truffaut film was worse than the one before.

Almost effaced from film history apart from a couple of unavoidably impressive titles, Clément remains a stylish professional whose devotion to the thriller genre would have been considered admirable if he were American, but sits awkwardly with our expectations of French cinema: we have room for Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jean-Pierre Melville only.

Clément's last four films are all twisty thrillers, the kind of films that spend ages setting...

(René Clément, 1952; StudioCanal, 12)

René Clément (1913-96) worked for years on documentaries before making his feature debut immediately after the second world war with La bataille du rail (1946), a celebration of the role of railway workers in the Resistance. It won the international jury prize at the first Cannes film festival, and his most famous movie, Forbidden Games (Les jeux interdits), also about the second world war, won an Oscar as best foreign language movie.

Set in 1940, this delicate, beautifully paced film centres on a middle-class five-year-old (Brigitte Fossey), orphaned by the Luftwaffe while fleeing from Paris, and her new friend, a young peasant lad (Georges Poujouly), who become obsessed with the rituals of burial as the war goes on around them. The film is both deeply moving and darkly comic, and the performances of Poujouly and the infinitely expressive Fossey (both of whom had acting careers as adults) are among...

★★★★☆ This year sees the centenary of the birth of not only one of French cinema's, but also the world's, most celebrated directors. Often referred to as the 'French Alfred Hitchcock', René Clément had a penchant for the macabre and mysterious, as reflected in four films newly released by francophile UK distributor StudioCanal. Starring Brigitte Fossey, Frank Langella, Oscar-winner Faye Dunaway and Mia Farrow's sister Tisa amongst others, Forbidden Games (1952), Gervaise (1956), The Deadly Trap (1971) and And Hope to Die (1972) perfectly reflect the otherworldliness and surreal atmosphere which pervaded much of Clément's work.

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