French actress/singer Jeanne Balibar is seen rehearsing, recording, performing, and practicing with a singing coach for an opéra bouffe by Jacques Offenbach. The Portuguese director Pedro Costa, a friend of Balibar's who did the camera work himself, filmed her in long, static shots in which all attention is focused on her performance. Costa also portrays the creative process, for instance in a scene in which Balibar and her guitarist Rodolphe Burger...

Hilarious and frequently surreal, the stop-motion extravaganza A TOWN CALLED PANIC has endless charms and raucous laughs for children from eight to eighty. PANIC stars three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse who share a rambling house in a rural town that never fails to attract the weirdest events. Cowboy and Indian’s plan to gift Horse with a homemade barbeque backfires when they accidentally buy 50 million bricks. This sets off a perilously...

An aspiring poet joins a cynical team of journalists in nineteenth-century Paris. When he agrees to write rave reviews for bribes, achieving material success at the expense of his conscience, and soon discovers that the written word can be an instrument of both beauty and deceit in this sumptuous adaptation of Honore de Balzac's epic novel, Lost Illusions.