The performances by the likes of Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgard, and Naomie Harris are so graceful that it’s tempting to overlook some of the more bizarre plot turns.

Followed by a smitten camera, Léa Seydoux’s face combines a Mary Cassatt apple-cheeked purity with the sullen roughness of a young Kate Moss in the latest take on the French classic novel by Octave Mirbeau.

Though rife with sexual violence and graphic dialogue, the last film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival was also the most elegantly made in the competition: Paul Verhoeven’s blunt, button-pushing, stinging comedy.

Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, a posthumously published novella about a devious widow who goes husband-hunting for both herself and her daughter. It has intrigue, musings on marriage, and a fascinating female lead.

Director Ben Wheatley adapts J.G. Ballard’s dystopian and predictive novel into a strikingly stylish film, heightening the tone of the book and its excesses.

The Family Fang rises above standard family dysfunction fare and is fearless about pursuing some of its darker themes to the fullest.

This coming-of-middle-age film gives us a hero who has nothing and plops him in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert. It becomes a subtle examination of aging and alienation that isn’t afraid to laugh at itself.

Based on 17th-century stories by the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, who inspired the Brothers Grimm, one tale ends with a sting, another ends in triumph, and the third concludes somewhere in the middle. All of them linger.

In this intensely moving movie, long, lovingly shot sequences of the titular food fits perfectly in the genre of culinary-based films in which food has metaphorical, cultural, and even spiritual significance.