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© 2026 The Couch Critic
Browse 71 movies from Camera Lucida
Is a spectacular journey across 4 billion years of evolution exploring how the Moon has been essential in setting up the pace to create life on Earth and how it has been a source of inspiration and fascination for men ever since
Mar 2015
Accompanied by a child, the mathematician Galileo observes the firmament with a telescope. Ten years ago, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome for having supported the idea of an infinite and centerless universe, based on the work of Copernicus. By dint of observations and calculations, Galileo seeks proofs for his hypothesis of a cosmic system where the Earth is "an ordinary celestial body, one among thousands". From Padua to Venice, the mathematician shakes certainties by confronting the power of a Church which wishes to maintain its absolute power in the "crystal spheres" where Ptolemy has hitherto locked up the world.
Nov 2019
Founded in 2012 by Laurence Equilbey, the Insula Orchestra performs on period instruments and experiments with new concert formats. In summer 2018, the French conductor and her ensemble will present a little-known work by Mozart at the Parisian cultural center La Seine Musicale: the incidental music to "Thamos, King in Egypt". In 1773, the author Tobias Philipp Freiherr von Gebler asked his fellow Freemason Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to compose incidental music for his heroic drama "Thamos, King of Egypt". The boy wonder composed two choruses and five interludes for the play, which took up the Egyptian theme popular in the 18th century.
Sep 2018
Every night, a father tells his son a bedtime story. As if by challenge, the child always chooses the same book, with scores, orchestra photos and images of animals. It’s about Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals”. Under the impetus of the gentle complicity of father and son, this somewhat austere book is transformed, comes to life and makes music: the carnival animals come to life...
Jan 2010
Go inside the building that has been the source of some of the greatest moments in music, ballet and opera.
Nov 2015
Man has always sought to seek further afield. After the seafaring explorers of the 16th century, 21st century cosmologists today navigate more celestial oceans, with each mission providing an ever-broader and more impressive cartography of our surroundings. At the avant garde of modern technology, these strange travellers are actually immobile, and their vessels are powerful and spectacular telescopes, on the Earth or in space, constantly widening the limits of our knowledge and giving form to our dreams of infinity. From Hawaii to Australia, via South Africa and China, we set out on an incredible scientific and human adventure to visit the planet's greatest cosmic exploration centres to discover the new challenges involved in understanding the universe. A journey on Earth and in the heavens that will take your breath away!
Apr 2019
Apr 2016
Jun 2019
10-year-old Ellie is fascinated by nature and birds, she spends her time reading about them. One day, a few miles from school, she goes onto a little island on the Loire River to take a bird book back to the library. It's an island full of birds.
Apr 2023
Melody Gardot performs her new album Sunset in the Blue, from the Radio France studios accompanied by a trio of musicians and 40 instrumentalists from the in-house orchestra.
Dec 2020
Elliott Erwitt has spent his entire adult life taking photographs, of presidents, popes and movie stars, as well as regular people and their pets. His work is iconic in world culture while his life is largely unknown.
Jul 2019
Nov 2005
Making full use of Drottningholm Theatre's unique 18th-century baroque theatre machinery, as well as his deep creative understanding of the profound drama of the work, stage director Pierre Audi creates a production of ZOROASTRE that completely accords with the spirit of Rameau. True to the form of the tragedie lyrique, choreographer Amir Hosseinpour's dances perfectly match the weight and meaning of both plot and music. The ensemble, Les Talens Lyriques, reinforced with musicians from the Drottningholm Court Theatre Orchestra and Chorus, is expertly and passionately led into the musical stratosphere by musical director Christophe Rousset. This intensely dramatic production is captured live in vibrant High Definition video and true surround sound.
Jan 2006
A young woman, Antonia, returns to her island of birth, Corsica, after one of her relatives has disappeared at sea. She is torn back and forth between her old love Ettore and the dumb Alexander. The quest for Antonia's place in the masculine environment of armed nationalism is an excuse for all kinds of peregrinations in the spectacular landscape of Cap Corse - a landscape that itself becomes a leading character.
Aug 2010
In 1965 Ingmar Bergman filmed “Persona”, the cult film that brought together all of the Swedish filmmaker’s obsessions and became a turning point in his career.
Feb 2018
In the fall of 2010, Bozon and co-conspirator Pascale Bodet commandeered the first floor of Paris’s famed Centre Pompidou for 10 days of screenings, lectures and performances that amounted to a counter-canonical history of French cinema. During the ensuing merriment (entitled Beaubourg, la dernière Major !) audience members were invited to observe the daily making of this film, directed by Bozon and written by Axelle Ropert, about an inexperienced young journalist (Laure Marsac) sent to the Pompidou to interview a maverick artistic impresario (Thomas Chabrol). The result is an unexpected love story that is also a record of this landmark exhibition, featuring cameos by Raul Ruiz, Paul Vecchiali, Luc Moullet and more !
Nov 2010
A musical and visual account of the life and exceptional and immortal work of the French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937).
Jun 2026
In February 1972, the American president Richard Nixon went to China to meet Mao Zedong. In the context of the war in Vietnam and the cold war, this encounter marked a turning point in Chinese‑American relations. John Adams, a major musical figure of the last forty years, made this event of contemporary history the subject of his first opera. Nixon in China tackles the political thaw instigated by ping-pong diplomacy, begun by the invitation of the American table tennis players by their Chinese counterparts, one year before the presidential visit. A mesmerising work in which the pulsations and repetitions typical of minimalism are combined with melodic lines of great lyricism. For its entry into the Paris Opera repertoire, this work has been entrusted to the director Valentina Carrasco, who underlines the importance and the mediating power of Chinese national sport in history.
For her first production, Marina Hands chose "Six Characters in Search of an Author," a play by Luigi Pirandello that premiered in Rome in 1921. A team rehearsing is interrupted by six characters in search of an author willing to write their story, which has gone from drama to drama. Luigi Pirandello had the brilliant idea of doubling the conflictual relationships within this dysfunctional family with another type of dispute: the characters rebel against the false truth of the actors and actresses playing out their story. Filmed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris's 6th arrondissement.
May 2025