BFI LFF: L’Amant Double (The Double Lover) (2017)
★★★☆☆
François Ozon is on quirky erotic form in L’Amant Double, a mystery of psychoanalysis and seduction.
★★★☆☆
François Ozon is on quirky erotic form in L’Amant Double, a mystery of psychoanalysis and seduction.
★★★★☆
Xavier Beauvois’ The Racer and the Jailbird stars Adèle Exarchopoulos and Matthias Schoenaerts in an intense, high-speed love affair.
★★★★☆
Brimstone is an almost unbearably violent take on the Western with a strong female character at its centre.
★★★★☆
Philippe Van Leeuw’s Insyriated is a suspenseful microcosm of Syria’s civil war played out through its effects on one family and the hard decisions they have to take to survive.
★★★☆☆
Laurent Cantet’s Return to Ithaca creates a poignant microcosm of Cuban society as an expat returns to rejoin his old friends’ reunion.
★★★★☆
Scribe is an enjoyable old-school noirish thriller by Thomas Kruithof, starring François Cluzet.
★★★★☆
Divided into stalwarts of French cinema and non-professional actors, Bruno Dumont’s crime caper Slack Bay exposes the grotesque in everyone.
★★★★☆
Rodin is a ploddingly, inexplicably uninteresting biopic of the revolutionary sculptor by Jacques Doillon.
★★★★☆
As a heart intended for transplant passes from teenage accident victim to middle-aged-mother recipient, humanity, compassion and medical professionalism triumph in Katell Quillévéré’s moving Heal the Living.
★★★★☆
Isabelle Huppert is elegantly transgressive in Paul Verhoeven’s disturbing Elle.
★★★★☆
The Dardennes brothers’ The Unknown Girl is a bleak examination of guilt and personal responsibility.
★★★☆☆
God is alive and living in Brussels, Jaco Van Dormael’s The Brand New Testament takes on the Jealous One with quirk and fancy. And an enormous gorilla.
★★★☆☆
A fast-paced and tense police thriller, Hans Herbots’ The Treatment plumbs the murky depths of child abuse and male impotence.
★★☆☆☆
In Jonas Govaerts’ Cub, solid filmmaking and worthy performances fold under the excessive weight of tropes and contrivances in this full-on descent into torture porn.