Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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(The) Man On The Train (L'homme du train) (2002)

In this terrific, slow-burn French crime thriller, cool but full of heart, two men, one a slippered, pipe-smoking retired literature teacher and the other a leather-jacketed former stunt double, meet by chance in the week both men face a potentially life-changing Saturday - the teacher is scheduled to have triple bypass surgery, the Fonzi is robbing a bank - and both men are of an age that they are starting to contemplate the life paths they didn't follow, that the other did.

★★★★☆

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Things To Come (L'Avenir) (2016)

Anyone who saw Isabelle Huppert in Elle is likely to want to rush to see her in this and she is magnificent again as a fiftysomething philosophy teacher who, following the death of her mother, separation from her husband and a cancelled publishing deal, discovers herself completely unencumbered for the first time in years: the film opens with fervent student demonstrations and Huppert's grace in defeat, acceptance of loss and hopefulness is contrasted with the unrest of the students and others, like former pupil Fabien, a revolutionary-in-the-making after Che Guevara, and his friends who are young and passionate fighters for change.

★★★★★

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