Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has apparently been…
It’s rather rare for debut features to world premiere in Competition at Cannes. The second-tier lineup, Un Certain Regard, is the festival’s typical launchpad for…
It’s been over a decade now since I caught Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture at the Vancouver Film Festival. The director’s chronicle of his memories…
War stains the soul. It can haunt its victims like a specter, and the appropriately titled Ghost Trail centers on a scarred man who hovers…
Suspended Time Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has…
In Aude Léa Rapin’s sci-fi drama, Planet B, the French government has imprisoned dissidents in a virtual prison. Bodies are kept in a vegetative state…
In a concise opening, Thierry de Peretti’s In His Own Image introduces its heroine Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo), a young and passionate photographer who seems to…
The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and…
Patricia Mazuy is one of the greatest directors working today, but you’d hardly know it from how often her films are screened or talked about.…
A French drama exploring a complicated, ultimately toxic marriage told from the perspective of a desperate wife and mother, Valérie Donzelli’s Just the Two of…
There’s a difference between a breakfast of scrambled eggs (with sausage, tomatoes, and mixed peppers) and a proper omelet. The combination of the same ingredients…
The Book of Solutions Michel Gondry feels like an artist from another time, even if that time wasn’t very long ago. The only movie he…
Michel Gondry feels like an artist from another time, even if that time wasn’t very long ago. The only movie he directed with any real…
Perhaps more well-known as a former Cahiers du Cinéma critic and the frequent co-screenwriter with the likes of Jacques Rivette, André Techiné, and Chantal Akerman,…
In Mona Achache’s Little Girl Blue, actress Marion Cotillard first appears as herself. As Achache gives her a wig, brown-colored contacts, perfume, a cherished necklace,…
There’s a mystery at the heart of writer/director Iris Kaltenbäck’s debut feature film The Rapture, but unlike the reams of true-crime documentaries and adjacent media…
Death hangs over the first moments of The Temple Woods Gang, the riveting seventh feature from French-Algerian filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaimëche. Grizzled military retiree Pons (Régis…
There are strange goings-on in the Stains suburbs of France, an assemblage of stark high-rise buildings that are home to a collection of everyday working-class…
Patricia Mazuy, now six films deep in a three-decade-plus career with Saturn Bowling, has always risked a certain, tantrum-centric filmmaking, favoring characters with shared psychoses…
Sebastien Marnier’s latest breezy, twisty thriller The Origin of Evil may lack any deeper interrogation in its Agatha Christie-reinvention of deception, but its strong ensemble…
Reinventing the superhero genre often entails energizing it, usually with piled-on camp (as with Troma Entertainment’s The Toxic Avenger and, more recently, Marvel’s Deadpool) or…