“La Belle Noiseuse” (Jacques Rivette, 1991) Jacques Rivette’s four-hour masterpiece about the act of artistic creation turns the male gaze back on itself. True, it’s hard to think of the actress who’s needed to be naked onscreen for the longer duration of time in a single movie than Emmanuelle Beart is in this a single.The characters that

The film is framed as the recollections of Sergeant Galoup, a former French legionnaire stationed in Djibouti (he’s played with a mix of cruel reserve and vigorous physicality by the great Denis Lavant). Loosely based on Herman Melville’s 1888 novella “Billy Budd,” the film makes brilliant use from the Benjamin Britten opera that was likewi