Maybe you've seen them, maybe you haven't, but French thrillers are making a comeback in North America. That's good news for people uninterested in art houses solely for the sake of watching foreign films: You don't have to be a Francophile to appreciate smart, meticulously generated suspense, and that's exactly the appeal of several French movies hitting American theaters this year. A steady mixture of warm reviews and positive word-of-mouth appears to have helped Guillame Canet's breathlessly entertaining drama Tell No One land an impressive $240,858 at 18 locations. Earlier this year, veteran auteur Claude Lelouch, long known for his cinematic explorations of eroticism and lawbreaking, remained thematically consistent with a delightfully complex story of double-crossing novelists and dysfunctional families called Roman de Gare. The movie made over $25,000 on two New York screens when it opened in late April, and eventually pulled in more than $1.5 million after expanding to theaters around the country. It's not hard to argue that Tell No One and Roman de Gare put most recent American thrillers to shame. North America, once the haven of film noir, appears to be outsourcing.

As journalist Erica Abeel recently observed in an interview with Canet, "French filmmakers are currently making the best old-style Hollywood thrillers." It's not the first time for a country that has a long history of borrowing from American cinema, and often improving on it. At the beginning of the French New Wave in the early 1960s, former Cahiers du Cinema critics like Jean Luc-Godard discovered Hollywood genre films and decided to make their own loopy versions. The results were often strangely philosophical and experiment works, ranging from Godard's Breathless to François Truffaut's ambitious Shoot the Piano Player.

Near the end of last week, Defamer spread the rumor that Picturehouse, once the indie arm of New Line Cinema and currently dangling from the edge of the hulking entity known as Warner Bros., has its days numbered. Now that New Line is history and Warners, like many studios, has faced increasing cutbacks, it may give short shrift to the shingles responsible for handling artier fare. Along with Picturehouse, this also includes Warner Independent Pictures, whose recent release slate includes David Gordon Green's magnificent Snow Angels.

Defamer suggested that Picturehouse president Bob Berney might wind up at WIP or head up a new, currently anonymous company. On Friday, Variety's Anne Thompson put it in more coherent terms: It appears quite likely that WIP and Picturehouse will merge together as a single company, with current WIP president Polly Cohen working alongside Berney. Whatever happens, let's just hope that the final result still leaves room for the sharp selection of independent and foreign titles that Picturehouse has handled since its birth three years ago. Defamer points out that Marion Cotillard's unexpected Oscar win for La Vie en Rose matters less than the flop of Run, Fatboy, Run, while the John Simpson-directed horror film Amusement might get dumped on DVD. It was just last year, however, that the company helped edgy fare like The Orphanage and Rocket Science get the sort of release most studios would never try. Let's hope that bravery lives on, somewhere.

Not many people care to admit it, but Hollywood is run by fear. Fear is an emotion generated by things that are not known or understood, and in the movie business, no one ever knows what's going to happen. (William Goldman was right when he said, "Nobody Knows Anything.") All those accountants, producers, publicists, entertainment TV shows, ad campaigns, etc. are all an attempt to get a handle on the unknown, an attempt to control the uncontrollable. Anything can happen. The world's biggest movie star can jump up and down on a couch and suddenly become a weirdo outcast. Or the star of a dismal turkey like Showgirls can turn around and find herself cast in a Woody Allen film. This fear, in essence, is why so many movies are so bad. The more investors and business people try to control their investment, the more they clamp down on it, and the more it gets smothered.

See, movies can live and breathe like an organic life form, but they have to have a chance. If brave producers step back and let the movie come to life in the hands of a genuine artist, they could wind up with something extraordinary like Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (229 screens), a film that somehow pleased critics both highbrow and middlebrow, won a handful of Oscars and has nearly grossed $75 million. This film has already entered the cultural canon as a classic of cinema. More or less the same can be said of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (224 screens), which, having lost the Oscar for Best Picture, is now in a position of being an underrated underdog. But those are exceptions to the rule. No one is immune to the fear: a few years back the Coen Brothers teamed up with sleazy producer Brian Grazer, of all people, and came up with their first dud, Intolerable Cruelty.

Once again it's time to complain about the Academy's foreign film rules and point out the great films ineligible and/or disqualified from being nominated in the category. The Hollywood Reporter has a surprisingly long article about the annual controversy, in which the trade lays out everything you wanted to ever know about the Oscar for "Best Foreign-Language Film." Basically, the usual complaint is that such an award can't always truly honor the best foreign-language film, only the best foreign-language film that falls within certain guidelines.

Some of this year's obvious exclusions are Ang Lee's Lust Caution, which was denied submission by Taiwan because the film is hardly representative of the country's film industry, and Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was passed over by its potential submitter, France, in favor of Persepolis (as was La Vie en Rose), which could have settled just fine with being an Animated Feature nominee. Other disappointments include The Band Visit, which was denied for having too much English dialogue, and The Kite Runner, which can't be submitted by Afghanistan because it was directed by Marc Forster, a Swiss-American, and featured an international crew. Afghanistan ended up with no submission, while Israel had to quickly substitute The Band Visit with Beaufort and Taiwan had to replace Lust Caution with Island Etude.

Last year, the Academy retooled some of the restrictions for its foreign-language category, although now it appears they could use some more tweaking. Also, I would like them to retroactively honor excluded films of the past, which they could do in some way without revoking the Oscars it has handed out (except the one for Tsotsi -- that one was really undeserved, and I'll say it again and again).

The record 63 films eligible for the foreign-language Oscar were announced last month by the Academy, and Cinematical's Eric D. Snider comments on that list here.

It's been eight months since Helen Mirren won an Oscar for her title performance in The Queen, yet people are still clamoring to give her and the film more awards. (As Cinematical's Christopher Campbell told us last week, they're even giving prizes to the movie's dogs.) Now The Queen has been nominated for six European Film Awards, including best picture, actress, director, screenwriter, composer, and editor.

How can that be, when it's a 2006 release? Because unlike the Oscars, which go by the calendar year, the European Film Awards run from July-June. So anything released in Europe after July 1, 2006 is eligible. That means that in the EFA actress category, last year's Oscar winner Helen Mirren is up against Marion Cotillard (for La Vie en Rose) -- who may very well be nominated for an Oscar this year. Kooky!

After The Queen, the next top-nominated film is another contender from last year's Oscars, The Last King of Scotland. It got five EFA nods, for picture, director, actor (James McAvoy), cinematographer, and composer.

Note that for all the awards, the nominees must be European by birth, or else have a European passport. This means, for example, that the American star of Last King of Scotland, Forest Whitaker, was ineligible, even though others in the film -- and the film itself -- qualified. The films themselves must be "European" in the sense that most of the key participants -- director, writer, leading actors, etc. -- must be from Europe. For the EFA's purposes, Israel and Palestine are considered part of Europe (even though they're, um, not.)

Three other films earned three nominations each, including best picture: La Vie en Rose, The Edge of Heaven, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The sixth best picture nominee is Persepolis -- its only nod.

As IndieWIRE reports, the nominees were announced Saturday at the Seville Film Festival. The EFA's 1,800 members will vote, and the winners will be revealed Dec. 1 at a ceremony in Berlin. This is the 20th year of the EFA awards.

A lot of countries have small film industries, and there's often an "obvious" choice when it comes to selecting an entry for the Oscars' Best Foreign-Language Film category. But not France! France has such a large, thriving movie industry that it can pick and choose, and even snub deserving films in favor of other deserving films.

Case in point: France has announced its entry for the 2008 Oscars, and it's not La Vie En Rose, the Edith Piaf biopic that received rapturous reviews in the United States (including one from our Erik Davis) and seemed like a lock for an Oscar nod. Instead, it's Persepolis -- which won the Jury Prize at Cannes earlier this year and has nothing but positive reviews so far at Rotten Tomatoes. James Rocchi reviewed it at Cannes, calling it a "masterpiece"; Kim Voynar saw it at Telluride and offered her approval, too.

It's hard for me to imagine a movie coming out of France this year that's better than La Vie En Rose, but the consensus is that Persepolis might be just such a film. It certainly isn't an out-of-nowhere choice. Furthermore, its subject matter -- a little girl's story of living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution in the late '70s and early '80s -- is weightier and more serious than that of La Vie En Rose.

Meanwhile, for lovers of La Vie En Rose, there is still hope that its star, Marion Cotillard -- undoubtedly the best thing about the film -- will be nominated for Best Actress. If that doesn't happen, THEN I'll start working up some serious outrage.

Some would argue that in order to be a great artist, one would have to suffer great tragedies throughout life. In the case of France's Edith Piaf -- a legendary singer and performer loved by all, feared by most and hated by no one -- her constant suffering replaced passion for the craft, and with the new biopic La Vie en rose (or La Môme), we feel bad ... but it's really the only thing we feel. The opening night film at the 57th Annual Berlin Film Festival includes all the tasty little ingredients one has come to expect from a biopic about a singer/songwriter and performer and musician, including the unbearable-to-watch upbringing in which Edith is forced by her mother to live on the streets, sick and on the verge of dying.

Eventually she is rescued by her strict, inconsiderate father, only to be tossed into the hands of her frigid grandmother (the madam of a whore house) as if she were a stray animal in desperate need of a roof over her head. Then we get the moment in which our main character (in this case, Edith) learns she has a talent for singing and, if properly utilized, could garner her a nice chunk of change. We also get the rise to fame -- the cheers, the front page headlines, the obligatory montage -- the whole wing, bam boom. Somewhere in between, a little love affair is thrown in, with a touch of betrayal, then everything is capped off with a pinch of cancer and the unfortunate steady decline of a star.

I just bought a ticket to Berlin. Actually, no, I didn't, but if money and time weren't an issue I'd be there in a heartbeat to see the world premiere of La Vie en Rose. This Edith Piaf biopic will open the Berlin International Film Festival on February 8.

La Vie en Rose is titled after one of Piaf's most famous songs -- a song so famed, it's part of the Grammy's Hall of Fame. Edith Piaf was an extraordinary talent; by far one of my favorites singers of all time, her life was as interesting as her voice. She spent four years of her childhood blind and touring with her father in the circus. She performed in nightclubs, then became a French icon right before one of the world's most tumultuous times in history, World War II. She found herself in the middle of murder investigations, helped prisoners of war escape during the French Resistance and wrote the haunting, unforgettable lyrics for her still-sung ballads. Her talent and life experiences are all ingredients that could make for an incredible script.

Biopics can be difficult to make, though. What do you cut out of a lifetime? Martin Scorsese could have found a few things to get rid of while making his Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator -- he might have shaved off an hour from the three hour epic. Even Walk the Line, Johnny Cash's biopic -- and, like Piaf, an internationally respected musician -- was a little over two. Between the music, lovers, heroism and fame I'm not sure what Olivier Dahan will choose to omit. But no matter what he does, as long as "La Vie en Rose" and "La Via, L'Amour" and -- okay, I'll stop -- play throughout the film, I will be content.