An Impossible Love

Director: Catherine Corsini
Cast: Virginie Efira, Niels Schneider
Guardian review: 5 stars

“This is a mother-daughter story with the erotic intensity of a love story and the pathos of a coming-of-ager – though darker, messier and more unresolved than is traditional. It is based on the 2015 novel by French author and screenwriter Christine Angot (the co-author of Claire Denis’s recent film Let the Sunshine In), which is in turn avowedly based on her own upbringing in Châteauroux in central France, returning the writer to the personal theme which has long haunted her: emotional cruelty and abuse.” – Peter Bradshaw

Girls of the Sun

Director: Eva Husson
Cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Emmanuelle Bercot
Guardian review: 4 stars

“A feminist war movie: impassioned, suspenseful, angry. For some, its robust action-film rhetoric will sit ill with contemporary issues and events – a rhetoric which might otherwise pass unnoticed in a conventionally peopled movie about, say, fighting for the allies in the second world war. Like that sort of film, Girls of the Sun is unsophisticated enough to be sure where right and wrong are placed, and incidentally to have faith in the efficacy of warzone journalism. We have all learned a shrugging cynicism about journalists who are “embedded”. Girls of the Sun begs to differ. For me it is heartfelt, forthright and muscular.” – Peter Bradshaw

By the Grace of God

Director: François Ozon
Cast: Melvil Poupaud, Denis Ménochet, Swann Arlaud, Josianne Balasko

This drama about abuse in the Catholic church had been the subject of legal challenges, only recently clearing those hurdles to allow for its release in France. The plot follows Alexandre, who discovers accidentally that a priest who abused him when he was a child is still working with children. He decides to get back in touch with his childhood friends who were also victims of the same priest, with the objective of seeking some kind of justice. But the church will not take lightly to them speaking out.

High Life

Director: Claire Denis
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth
Guardian review: 5 stars

“Bodily functions abound in this captivating journey through the void of space. Lactation, ejaculation and gestation clue the viewer in on what Denis might be getting at through an elliptical story, in which an eclectic cast play a collection of death-row inmates forced to cohabitate on a self-sustaining station in orbit. Their assignment – to explore black holes in the hopes of harvesting their rotational energy for the citizens of Earth – is sold to them as an opportunity for heroism. However, it’s not long before they realise that they’re all but guaranteed to perish in the process. Mission drift sets in, and the on-board doctor, Dibs (Juliette Binoche in a French braid of Rapunzelian proportions), starts conducting experiments of her own with captives Monte (Robert Pattinson) and Boyse (Mia Goth).” – Charles Bramesco

The Fall of the American Empire

Director: Denys Arcand
Cast: Alexandre Landry, Maripier Morin, Maxim Roy, Rémy Girard, Vincent Leclerc

Not to be confused with Denys Arcand’s 1986 sex comedy, The Decline of the American Empire, this film explores what might happen when a no-hoper with a wasted education unexpectedly stumbles on two bags of cash after a robbery gone wrong. With shades of noir and melodrama, as well as a solid dose of satire, The Fall of the American Empire is at its heart an exploration of extravagance, social inequality and the machinations of capital.

Last Year in Marienbad

Director: Alain Resnais
Cast: Giorgio Albertazzi, Delphine Seyrig
Guardian review: 5 stars

“Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad is now 50 years old, but it is more brilliant than ever – profoundly mysterious and disturbing, a para-surrealist masterpiece whose nightmarish scenario appears to have been absorbed from Buñuel and Antonioni and transmitted onward to Greenaway. In a colossal, eerie mansion, the well-dressed classes pass the time at some eternal house party. Are they in limbo, in hell, in heaven? One handsome man (Giorgio Albertazzi) expectantly approaches a beautiful woman (Delphine Seyrig), alluding to their clandestine romantic encounter the previous year – but she claims never to have met him before. Who is telling the truth? What really happened last year? What is really happening now?” – Peter Bradshaw

Girl

Director: Lukas Dhont
Cast: Victor Polster, Arieh Worthalter, Oliver Bodart

At 15, Lara, an aspiring ballerina and transgender girl, starts attending a distinguished dance academy. Comfortable with her gender identity and supported by her family in her dreams to be a professional ballerina, she nevertheless struggles with the seeming snail’s pace of her gender reassignment therapy, as well as harassment from her classmates, until impatience gets the better of her and leads her to take matters into her own hands.

Revenge

Director: Coralie Fargeat
Cast: Kevin Janssens, Matilda Lutz, Vincent Columbe, Guillaume Bouchède
Guardian review: 3 stars

“Is the rape-revenge genre just a way to bring the dual spectacles of rape and violence to a male audience? This is a French movie from first-time feature director and screenwriter Coralie Fargeat, and there is no doubt that it is smart, gruesomely violent and stylishly made. The Day-Glo colours in the burning sun are as fierce as the retributive action brought by the plot. It has been hailed as a subversive feminist take on this form – although it is open to question whether the film would look all that different if it were directed by a man.” – Peter Bradshaw

The Image Book

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: n/a
Guardian review: 4 stars

“The Image Book is a work that reprises many of Jean-Luc Godard’s familiar ideas, but with an unexpected urgency and visceral strangeness. It’s an essay film with the body-language of a horror movie, avowedly taking Godard’s traditional concerns with the ethical status of cinema and history and looking to the Arab world and indirectly examining our Orientalism – Godard cites the Conradian phrase for a culture held ‘under western eyes’ … The Image Book is the signature Godard irony-mosaic of clips and fragments, with sloganised, gnomic texts, puns in brackets, sudden fades-to-black, unpredictable, unsynchronised sound cues which appear to have been edited quite without the usual concern for aural seamlesness, and vast, declamatory orchestral chords.” – Peter Bradshaw

The Sisters Brothers

Director: Jacques Audiard
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, John C Reilly, Riz Ahmed, Jake Gyllenhaal
Guardian review: 4 stars

“[A] resoundingly enjoyable and funny movie, adapted by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain from the Booker-shortlisted novel by Patrick DeWitt. The scene is 1850s Oregon and John C Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play the quarrelling Sisters Brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, two rangy and disreputable guys liable to come riding into town up to no good. They are in fact assassins, working for a shadowy person nicknamed the Commodore. Their latest mission is to travel to San Francisco – a Babylonian centre of worldly pleasure which astonishes and excites these rather provincial men – in order to whack a certain individual called Hermann Kermit Warm.” – Peter Bradshaw

Sink or Swim

Director: Gilles Lellouche
Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Guillaume Canet, Benoît Poelvoorde, Jean-Hugues Anglade

A film right out of the feelgood dramedy box, Sink or Swim is an underdog story with an underwater twist. A group of world-weary middle-aged misfit men decide to join an all-male synchronised swimming team at the local pool and, surprising everyone with their sudden ambition, decide to try to make their way to the world championships.

The Wild Boys

Director: Bertrand Mandico
Cast: Anaël Snoek, Mathilde Warnier, Vimala Pons, Pauline Lorillard, Diane Rouxel
Guardian review: 3 stars

“Anaël Snoek is cruel, swaggering Tanguy, a teenage boy who looks like a cross between a young Tilda Swinton and Draco Malfoy. At boarding school, Tanguy is a junior member of a gang of delinquents, the entitled sons and heirs of the rich elite. One night, the boys rape a female teacher while gripped by a collective rage they call Trevor … As punishment, the five are packed off to be ‘re-educated’ by a grizzled Dutch sailor called The Captain, who has a track record for taming wild boys. (He also has the coordinates of his favourite island tattooed on his penis.) The gang’s final destination is a lush super-fertile paradise island, where they feast on indecently phallic fruit that causes a sexual metamorphosis, transforming them from male to female.” – Cath Clarke

Jean Paul Gaultier: Freak & Chic

Director: Yann L’Hénoret
Cast: Jean Paul Gaultier, Stéphane Bern, Daphné Bürki

Documentary-maker Yann L’Hénoret followed fashion’s self-styled “enfant terrible” Gaultier over six months, though the conception, design and execution of his Fashion Freak Show – a theatre show, a cabaret, a revue and a fashion show. Immersive and extravagant, the film captures the designer’s eccentricity as well as the highlights of his long and storied career, including clips from Catherine Deneuve, Madonna and more.

• The Alliance Française French film festival runs around Australia from 5 March to 10 April. Check the website for local dates and screenings