The studied ambiguity of the film doesn’t keep it from often achieving the suspense of an accomplished erotic thriller.
Titane wildly expands on Ducournau’s idiosyncratic interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration.
Criterion’s release of Beineix’s epic erotic drama recovers the sumptuousness and precision of its images.
The film is content to bluntly affirm that corporate attempts at compassion are always secondary to providing profit to shareholders.
Director Jacques Doillon’s shrewd ellipses emphasize time as a great and uniting humbler and thief.
Benoît Jacquot’s treatment of the text is devoid of either formal obsessiveness or a contemporary hook.
Celestine’s submission to an evil and violent man becomes an eloquent indictment of a nation’s anti-Semitism.
The film exhibits the spry subtlety of Jean and Luc Dardenne’s work.
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2015: Home Care, The Red Spider, The Measure of a Man, & More
As the festival celebrates its 50th year, it continues to be a major showcase for Central and Eastern European cinema.
Bastards is a mosaic portrait of people driven by base impulses they can’t fully understand.
There’s no shortage of bastards in this tale about the destructive power of a deeply dysfunctional family.
Alice Winocour’s take on this true story carries the superficial trappings of a period drama, but its perspective is entirely contemporary.
Immigration politics are at the forefront of Le Havre.
At its more noticeable nadir, it’s a trite and partially incomprehensible ersatz-tragedy.
What resonates most is the political context in which the filmmakers situate this twist on a father-son melodrama.
Throughout, the filmmakers find inventive ways to tell us just enough about the main characters’ backgrounds.
The film is a Gallic counterpart to American indiedom’s immigration melodrama The Visitor.
Welcome doesn’t even attempt to seriously tackle the thorny complications of France’s urgent immigration issues.
That the film was adapted from a novel is gawkily evident not only in the bare details of the above synopsis.
All Is Forgiven’s style may be hermetic, but all the better to keep the plot away from the melodrama it would’ve turned into in lesser hands.