Maxime Girard

Disaster movies tend to inhabit the close-but-not-too-close realm of the ‘what if?’, but Quentin Reynaud’s taut drama evokes a reality that is painfully immediate, as the world combusts around us. Alex Lutz (recently seen as the son in Gaspar Noé’s Vortex) plays a man determined to escape with his elderly father (the ineffable André Dussollier) from a wildfire that is rapidly approaching their forested area of southern France. The pair know all the local roads, and the secret detours, but when they are caught in a dead end, they seem to be running out of possible exits. At once road movie, claustrophobic jeopardy thriller and portrait of a prickly but tender father-son relationship, this finely acted and executed film expertly lays on the heat.

Parody of the acclaimed Australian series of the 80s, Return to Eden. Wealthy heiress Stephanie Harper marries athlete Craig Danners, without suspecting that he only wants her money and is having an affair with her best friend, Crystal. Craig and Crystal have a plan to get rid of Stephanie and steal her fortune by making her suffer a terrible accident, which leaves her face disfigured. She is saved by the handsome Doctor Danley, who performed a plastic surgery on Stephanie that turned her into a completely different and beautiful woman. Stephanie starts plotting her revenge against Craig and Crystal, who believe that she died in the accident.

The Inspection is a mighty film without (luckily) any morality in the end — it is a story about what can and what cannot be told to children. A school teacher receives a visit from an educational inspector, who is trying to coherently react to the parents’ complaints. It turns out she spends too much time telling children about the horrible events of the 20th century, in particular about the Holocaust — all in contradiction to the logically drawn school curriculum. She is deeply convinced that while one cannot talk too much about the genocide of the European Jews, it is way too easy not to say enough, not to warn and not to explain.

Simon, a young orphan, has an extraordinary power : he can take on the appearance of people he’s already touched. When his best friend dies in an accident, there is no witness. Simon decides to steal his place in his family. Ten years later, the truth will get more and more difficult to bear and to hide...

Paris, 1978. In a male-dominated music industry, Ana uses new electronic machines to make herself heard, thus creating a new sound that is destined to mark the decades to come: the music of the future.