Simone Signoret

If springtime in Paris isn't going to work for you this year, rent a movie and pretend -- until you can book a flight and go. Here are my Top 10 picks for films that best show off the French capital. For scenes from these memorable films, go to latimes....

With the blithely spiritual "Forever," documentary vet Heddy Honigmann set out to find life in a cemetery. She succeeds at Père-Lachaise, the fabled Parisian resting place of Marcel Proust, Heloïse and Abelard, Maria Callas, Modig- liani, Simone...

French director Jean-Pierre Melville is the great poet of crime cinema, and 1963's "Le Doulos"--starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and set in Paris, the most criminally romantic city in the world--is a tour de force. Freshly subtitled by the always-expert...

French director Jean-Pierre Melville is the great poet of crime cinema, and 1963's "Le Doulos" -- starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and set in Paris, the most criminally romantic city in the world -- is a tour de force. Playing for a week at the Nuart in...

FLOWERS, love letters and lipstick kisses by the hundreds - all so apropos of Paris, the world's capital of love and destination for romantics everywhere. But something was amiss. The scene was not a charming cafe, nor an elegant hotel room, nor a...

4 stars (out of four) Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army of Shadows"--a 1969 French film classic now getting its first U.S. theatrical release--is a dry, dark, terrifying tale of WW II France as experienced by a handful of Resistance fighters, mostly doomed,...

From The Times: March 25, 1997 Backstage at the Oscars, the press kept a tally along with the rest of Hollywood of the number of wins for "The English Patient." Director Anthony Minghella, who won best director, acknowledging the sweep, said it would...

From The Times: April 5, 1960 "Ben-Hur" last night proved as big an Academy Award winner as it has been on the big screen. Sweeping all before it, its horses, light and dark, its chariots and its filmic makers triumphed in 11 categories for an all-time...

Here's how painstakingly Jean-Pierre Melville filmed his masterpiece, "Army of Shadiows" (1969), about the French Resistance: For the scene of German soldiers marching down the Champs Elysees and into the camera, he hired dancers to execute the goose-...

Indifferently received when it debuted in France, never before theatrically released in the United States, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 "Army of Shadows" stands revealed as a classic film that a trick of fate has made as relevant now as when it was made....

Big question: Jean-Pierre Melville's take on the French resistance during WWII was made in 1969 but not released in the U.S. until now. Was it brought here on foot? Catch it: "Army of Shadows" is a morally ambiguous look at the necessity, the...

From The Times: April 5, 1960 The motion picture industry turned out a nimble, smooth-as-glass, expertly produced 110-minute commercial for its particular branch of the visual art in handing out its collection of golden Oscars at the Pantages Theater...