Birthday Spotlight: Catherine Deneuve

A very happy 77th birthday to the porcelain beauty of French cinema, CATHERINE DENEUVE. Equally at home in psychological dramas as she is is light-hearted musicals, Deneuve has maintained a stellar career for nearly 60 years. But her best work is still her iconic films of the ‘60s, where she was the captivating center of some of the era’s best filmmakers doing some of their best work. If you’re looking for some beautiful escapism, her first two musicals with Jacques Demy, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG and THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT are the closest movies come to being actual candy. Or, if you’re up for a more tortured, sexually repressed version of Deneuve, Roman Polanski’s REPULSION and Luis Buñuel’s BELLE DU JOUR are two of the best films of that decade and, when watched back to back, tell a story of the sexual awakening that was the 1960s.

All of these movies are available on #criterionchannel and @hbomax, except Repulsion, which is available for digital rental.