Selected by Scott Foundas | Former Variety Chief Critic

“The Max of Claude Sautet’s 1971 MAX ET LES FERRAILLEURS is a Paris detective (the sublime Michel Piccoli) in charcoal topcoat and matching fedora, hovering like an angel of death over a criminal underworld whose prize catches keep slipping through his fingers. A former judge who quit the bench after being forced to free a guilty man, he now devotes himself to the pursuit of justice — or at least his notion of it — at any cost. The ‘ferrailleurs’ are a motley crew of scrap collectors, all equally washed up. And there is, of course, a woman who comes between them all: a high-class prostitute named Lily, played by the luminous Romy Schneider (Sautet’s muse in five of his films). That is the broad outline of MAX, though really it’s just the tip of the iceberg. By turns a morality play, a heist picture and a doomed, noir-ish romance, Sautet’s masterful film keeps reinventing itself with our every successive effort to pin it down.” – S.F.

Scott Foundas is an acquisitions and production executive in the feature films division of Amazon Studios. Previously, he served as Chief Film Critic for Variety, the world’s oldest entertainment trade publication, in addition to which his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice and the LA Weekly, where he was chief critic and film editor from 2003-2009. As a programmer, Foundas served six years on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, and has been a consultant to the Telluride and Cannes film festivals. In 2013, a Spanish-language collection of his reviews, interviews and essays entitled “Time Stopped” was published by the Mar Del Plata Film Festival in Argentina.