In Christian Schwochow’s Cracks in the Shell from 2011 a young drama student, belittled by her drama teacher, goes on to win the leading role in a play and takes her method acting to dark, dangerous places. In Schwochow’s new film Paula, young artist …Read more

Full as it is with often complicated imagery and complex symbolism, it is perhaps a relatively simple image in Nicolette Krebitz’s film Wild that is most telling: a young woman named Ania (Lilith Strangenberg), having begun an obsession with wolves a …Read more

It is 1919, and a distraught young Frenchman visits the grave of a German soldier. That scenario could mean many things, but in Frantz, the family of the titular departed take it he is an old friend of their deceased. The soldier’s mother and fiancée …Read more

In 2017 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema celebrates its 22nd year of showcasing the diversity and exuberance of Gallic cinema. With new works by the likes of Bruno Dumont, Francois Ozon and Nicole Garcia, the festival co-presented with UniFrance featur …Read more

Asghar Farhadi’s films unfold at the pace of real life, with unexpected, but realistic twists waiting around each corner, yet they are also tone poems filled with the dread of the darkest of thrillers. His ability to balance the two is what makes him …Read more

Léo (Damien Bonnard), the hero of Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical is a lost man. When we first meet him he is driving aimlessly seemingly looking for purpose. He thinks he finds it when he discovers the beautiful young Yoan (Basile Meilleurat) on …Read more

Life at times can seem like a series of unending struggles; the struggle to be a providing parent, the struggle to express true feelings, and the struggle to overcome grief. Struggles that never end but subside into temporal moments where we experien …Read more

The Brand New Testament is an aggressively quirky outing from Belgian filmmaker Jaco Van Dormael. Our heroine Ea is stuck in an apartment with her brutish father and meek, abused mother. As it turns out, said father is God, who engineers the world wi …Read more

With red frosted noses, sleepy bobble eyes, and oversize, oblong heads, the stop-motion munchkins of My Life as a Zucchini are figures approached with curious affection. The trim and snug Swiss-French co-production about an orphaned boy is a moving a …Read more