If last week’s review of Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep was about a movie that tried to make real life look like a comic book, Christian Volckman’s first feature-length film, Renaissance, tries to make a comic book look like real life. The basis of the movie’s imagery is motion capture technology, by which the movements of an actor’s body are recorded by sensors attached to his clothing (used memorably by Peter Jackson in the…

Michel Gondry’s latest film, La science des rêves (The science of dreams), opened last Friday in Washington under its American title, The Science of Sleep. After an extended period working in the United States, notably in collaboration with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman on Human Nature and the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry has returned to his roots and set this film in his old stomping ground, the 18th arrondissement of Paris. As…

End of the year picks, pans, and best of lists are starting to leak out and soon will be flooding that dead air between Christmas and the New Year. The Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association got a head start and just released their “Best Of” list for 2004. Surprisingly, Michel Gondry’s surreal “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” claimed top honors as Best Film. Gondry also won for Best Director. The DC critics collective…