Raul Ruiz, who died this year, has left us with a surreal four-hour story, set in 19th-century Portugal, that reclaims cinema as the language of dream

Briefly

She has been dubbed 'the new Bardot', but one thing's for certain – Ludivine Sagnier is a consummate shape-shifter. John Walsh meets the actress in Paris

Starring: Romain Duris, Marina Foïs, Catherine Deneuve

Deneuve is reunited with Depardieu in a deliciously retro boardroom farce

Starring: Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve

A meat-processing worker mounts his bike in search of his pension; but the real story is that, although Gérard Depardieu has become porky, his career is still in good shape

One of cinema's legends, the French New Wave's irresistible rogue and embodiment of cool, is back. Geoffrey Macnab reports

C'est l'amour – all that joie de vivre and yet it ends with a Gallic shrug

Camp? Well, let's put it this way. Kneehigh's stage adaptation of Jacques Demy's Gallic, unashamedly romantic and singularly through-sung 1964 movie musical was only half way through its cod introduction when I was assailed by a sudden Proustian memory. It was of an edition of Just a Minute in which Kenneth Williams was given, as his subject, the phrase "Honi soit qui mal y pense". "Translated into yer actual English," the great man averred, "that means 'Honest sweat killed many a ponce'."

Profile: François Truffaut - They were the Lennon and McCartney of French cinema. And then Jean-Luc Godard spurned his oldest friend

If there is one scene that sums up the work of the French film-maker François Truffaut (the subject of a major retrospective at the BFI next month), it's a moment midway through his 1976 film, Small Change, about children growing up in a small town in France. A baby boy called Gregory is left alone in a high-rise apartment. He is playing with a pet kitten that refuses to come in from the window ledge and then gets stuck. Gregory playfully tries to rescue the kitten, loses his grip and falls downward to his certain death... but he doesn't die. "Gregory went boom!" the little youngster tells the adult onlookers as he dusts himself off on the ground dozens of floors below. His mother faints. Gregory makes no fuss. Nor does Truffaut. In his universe, no harm should ever be allowed to come to children. The film-maker was, as one friend described him, "a kind soul" and "a treasure trove of tenderness".

I spent most of New Year's Eve following a stag hunt in the forests around Chantilly, just outside Paris. Few things are as exhilarating, as anyone who has ever ridden in a hunt here will tell you. Where most fox hunts run across open fields and meadows with hedges, French hunts are usually conducted in deep forests. It is a great day out (if you're not a stag), a day full of pomp and ceremony, where you will see 50-year-old men with aggressively styled hair and bright pink tunics, fortysomething millionaires in long black cloaks and tilted berets, unbelievably sexy quinquagenarian women with lipstick-slashed mouths and tight green quilted vests – and the mistress of the hounds, dressed up in all her finery (including a stag tooth stock pin) and looking something like Catherine Deneuve on a horse. They sip from hipflasks, gossip about local politics, flirt, and follow the hounds across the mud and the snow.

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