Menu
© 2026 The Couch Critic
Browse 77 movies from Point du Jour
On March 29, 1947, peasants armed with sticks and knives attacked the French garrisons in Madagascar. The revolt would end twenty months later with the death of the last insurgents, shot down by the expeditionary force. France, accustomed to memory lapses, knew nothing of this insurrection and its trail of torture and abuses. In Madagascar, well after independence, the events of 1947 were never discussed. For more than a generation, parents refused to speak of them to their children. It wasn't until the 1980s that the silence was broken.
Jan 1994
Samvel and Avo, Erik and Karen live in the land of a century-old conflict, rooted in the rubble of the Russian Empire. In Nagorno-Karabakh, people live, dream and prepare for a tragedy that is always on the horizon. Over 3 years, Alexis Pazoumian films the epilogue of the black garden, a land where war waits for no one.
Mar 2024
Documentary about director Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. In 1960, Jean-Luc Godard films for the first time Anna Karina and falls in love. His cinema is transformed by it forever. Spanned from "Little Soldier" to "Crazy Pete" through "A Woman is a Woman", "My Life to Live" andd "Alphaville", this documentary tells how, during five years , Godard and Karina consciously mixed cinema and private life, with constant will to film "as in true life" and to live "as in film"
Jan 2007
Thirty-six years ago a new era in global terrorism was born. Just moments after lift-off on the morning of September 6, 1970, passengers on TWA's flight 74 from Frankfurt to New York were startled to hear an announcement over the plane's PA system: "This is your new captain speaking. This flight has been taken over by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." Minutes later, travelers on another New York-bound plane, Swissair Flight 100, faced the same chilling reality. Featuring first-hand recollections from former hostages, flight crews, and their captors, Hijacked, an hour-long documentary from award-winning producer Ilan Ziv, tells the story of what would be known for more than three decades as the blackest day in aviation history.
Feb 2006
There is a place where wild songs are sung that mimic the flight of birds; people for whom nothing else exists when they sing, who raise their eyes to the sky and let themselves be carried far away from here. This place is the Basque Country. It all started with a musician searching for new harmonies in these centuries-old songs. Then came the recording: a singer, the mountains, and between them, a microphone. And then everything became intertwined: the stories in the film, the stories in the songs, people's lives.
0
Unemployed youths, many looking to leave the country for want of better options, are swelling the ranks of gangs that sow violence in Zinder, in Niger. Aïcha Macky explores the origins of the radicalization that is spreading through her hometown and the prospects for escaping it.
Apr 2021
An extraordinary journey through the material that makes up our habitat: concrete and its ancestor, stone. Victor Kossakovsky raises a fundamental question: how do we inhabit the world of tomorrow?
Oct 2024
A French documentary or, one might say more accurately, a mockumentary, by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick.
Oct 2002
Intimately following 1st and 6th graders at a public elementary school in Tokyo, we observe kids learning the traits necessary to become part of Japanese society.
Apr 2024
This documentary bears witness to the events that took place more than thirty years before the filming of this movie, on October 17, 1961, in Paris, during the Algerian War. It is a work not only about historical truth but also about memory. Constructed primarily from interviews conducted with those involved in the events, along with archival footage, photographs, and radio broadcasts from the time, our investigation proves that nearly 200 Algerians were killed (drowned, tortured) that night and in the days that followed by the French police. "A Missing Day" seeks to ask two key questions: how could such events have unfolded in the capital of a Western democracy barely thirty years ago? And why have they been silenced ever since?
Jan 1992
Using their bare hands, married couple Htwe Tin and Thein Shwe draw oil from a pit they drilled themselves on the land next to their house. There are lots of these “artisanal” oilfields dotted around Myanmar, where people have swapped crop cultivation for selling the oil they pump from the ground by hand.
Aug 2021
Television documentary about Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990), one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th Century.
Jan 2017
Written and directed by Hitchcock historian Noël Simsolo, this 2004 French television documentary explores the earliest years of Alfred Hitchcock's film career, beginning with his success in the production of The Lodger (1926) and following the filmmaker through his transition to sound films and his early thrillers.
Nov 2004
Oct 2016
Nov 2003
Accompanying from a place to another the poet who spent years in exile far from his native land of al-Birwa, in Haifa, Cyprus, Tunis, Amman, Paris, Cairo and Ramallah.
Feb 1998
“Marilyn vs. Marilyn” tells the story of a little-known period of Marilyn’s life – the years she spent in New York, trying to became a ‘serious”’ actress, taking lessons with Lee Strasberg and setting up a production company with her photographer and trusted friend, Milton Green. Based on hitherto unpublished – and magical - photos from the Greene archives, the film focuses on the photographic image of a woman who remains one of the greatest legends in the history of cinema… and an enduring enigma.
Aug 2002
Jan 2005
Nov 2020
The documentary tells two very different human fates in the 1920s Soviet Union. Nikolai Vavilov was a botanical genius, Trofim Lyssenko was an agronomist who made great promises and fake inventions. Each of them tried to solve the country's nutritional problem, but only one succeeded.
Jul 2018