Stéphane (2023)

Co-directors Timothée Hochet and Lucas Pastor's quirky found footage French comedy gets an exclusive streaming release on Arrow.

Timothée (Bastien Garcia) is trying to make a short film to enter in a competition. His attempts to make an FBI thriller haven't got very far when he meets Stéphane (Pastor) who wanders into shot one day and, when he realises a film is being made, demonstrates his ability to create explosions. Admiring Timo's equipment, Stéphane convinces Timo to accompany him to a local camera shop to buy something that will allow him to make his own movies in 4K. An altercation between Stéphane and the shop owner results in Timo missing his train home. 

After kicking the railway station bin to pieces, Stéphane offers to drive Timo home himself but they actually end up at Stéphane's boat and, after a drunken night, travel on it to Stéphane's personal island where Stéphane shows Timo around a house that's curiously empty of possessions. Nevertheless, the two of them decide to make a film about the Second World War with Timo also shooting a secret documentary about Stéphane on the side. But are Stéphane's regular outbursts of violence something Timo should be worrying about a bit more than he actually is?

STEPHANE is the kind of comedy that has you constantly wondering if everything is suddenly going to take a turn for the horrific, and I'm not going to spoil it and say whether it does or not, suffice to say that the (real) film-makers do a fine job of keeping you on a knife edge of wondering if what you're seeing is something you can safely laugh at or if there's actual cause for concern. It's not as brilliantly silly as the work of, say, Quentin Dupieux, but as a first feature it shows a great deal of promise and if you're a fan of French black comedy you won't want to miss it. Oh, and make sure you stay until the credits are over. Here's the trailer:

STÉPHANE is currently streaming exclusively on Arrow

Cypher (2002)

Vincenzo Natali's second feature (after 1997's CUBE) gets a digital release from Signature Entertainment.

Morgan Sullivan (Jeremy Northam) gets a job working as a corporate spy for DigiCorp. He is assigned a new name and identity & is instructed to record all the talks at the conferences he is sent to attend so they can be sent back to the company. During one such set of meetings he meets Rita (Lucy Liu) in a hotel bar. Later she waylays him and gives him medication that allows him to see 'the truth', that the conference talks themselves are a cover for yet more brainwashing.

Morgan ends up at a rival company who recruit him as a double agent to spy on DigiCorp but the real prize apparently lies in 'The Vault' - a vast underground repository of information into which he is sent with a special coded disc. But who can he actually trust, and is he even actually Morgan Sullivan?

Set in the same kind of late 1990s / early 2000s SF - type world as films like Andrew Niccol's GATTACA (albeit with a somewhat lower budget), Vincenzo Natali's CYPHER offers a Philip K Dick-inspired plot where no-one, least of all the central character, knows exactly what's going on and how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together until the climax.

It's all entertaining stuff, with a tactility to its technology (discs frequently being slipped into sleek CD readers, physical documents being passed in secret) that would be lacking from anything made today. Northam, best known at the time for period dramas, makes for an engaging hero and David Hewlett from CUBE pops up in a supporting role. Here's the trailer:

Vincenzo Natali's CYPHER is on digital release from Signature Entertainment now