Montreal World Film Festival

Friday, August 29-----One of the treats of the Montreal World Film Festival are the free outdoor screenings on the Place des Arts of classic and recent European, American and Canadian films. Every evening, Cinema Under The Stars is presenting films on a huge screen with enormous speakers that beckon people to what is literally a cinema street party.

This year's selection of films includes: CHARIOTS OF FIRE
(United Kingdom 1981), the Oscar winning true story of British track athletes competing in the 1924 Summer Olympics; 
LE CHIEN JAUNE DE MONGOLIE / DIE HÖHLE DES GELBEN HUNDES, a German-Mongolian film from 1981 by director Byambasuren Davaa about a little nomad girl Nansa finds a puppy in the Mongolian steppe; THE LIVES OF OTHERS, the German Oscar winner from 2007 about the secret police intrigue in East Berlin in the 1980s; SOME LIKE IT HOT (United States 1959), the classic Billy Wilder drag comedy starring Festival honoree Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe;  TOUS LES MATINS DU MONDE (France 1991), Alain Corneau's fictionalized account of the lives of the 17th century French musician-composer Sainte Colombe and his brilliant, flamboyant student, Marin Marais.

Also playing has been DEVDAS, an epic love story set in the early 20th century by Indian director Sanjay Leela Bhansali; VIOLETTE NOZIÈRE, the Claude Chabrol thriller based on a notorious murder trial of the 1930s, starring Festival honoree Isabelle Huppert; YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (United States 1974), the Mel Brooks parody of old Frankenstein pictures; L'IVRESSE DU POUVOIR (France, Germany 2006), another Claude Chabrol/Isabelle Huppert collaboraton based on a real-life French scandal; MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, director Brian de Palma's cool spy thriller starring Tom Cruise; THE RIGHT STUFF (United States 1983), a chronicle of the birth of America's space program, directed by Philip Kaufman; HEAVEN'S GATE (United States 1980), the notoriously overbudget Western tale by Michael Cimino and featuring an all-star cast including Festival honoree Isabelle Huppert; and TESS
(France 1979), director Roman's Polanski's evocative adaptation of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", with Nastassia Kinski in her star-making performance.

Closing the Cinema Under The Stars program this Labor Day Weekend are MADAME BOVARY (France 1991), an adaptation of the Flaubert classic starring Isabelle Huppert and directed again by Claude Chabrol;  TSOTSI (South Africa 2005), the 2006 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film by director Gavin Hood; UNDERGROUND
(France - Germany - Hungary 1995), director Emir Kusturica's surrealistic epic on his native Yugoslavia; and LA VIE EN ROSE
(France 2006), a biopic on the life of French chanteuse Edith Piaf, with an Oscar winning performance by Marion Cotillard.

Sandy Mandelberger, Montreal FF Dailies