Within the first 10 minutes, you feel you are safely in the hands of a master.

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.

Jacques Audiard’s moody heartbreaker, the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or last year, daringly places a rough-and-ready, documentary-ish shooting style alongside confident, startling artistry.

Arnaud Desplechin’s latest film encompasses many lives in one. Like all our parallel lives, some make more sense than others in this rich, thought-provoking, and overstuffed film.

Meryl Streep has recently undertaken to play Florence Foster Jenkins in a film by Stephen Frears that will come out later this year. French writer/director Xavier Giannoli, though, has beaten that production to the punch with his deluxe variation of Jenkins’s biography.

Slapstick meets The Bad Seed in Julie Delpy’s fitfully charming tale, marked by contradictory impulses and abrupt, bewildering shifts in tone.

Within 11 days’ time, New Yorkers can see a significant slice of current French films that have won acclaim at Cannes and earned praise back home.

For brutal emotional impact, there is nothing like this film out now, It’s a highlight at this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series.

The annual festival offers up a wide range of moods, styles, and responses to the shifting times we inhabit. This year’s offerings draw on nostalgia, gazing back at feminism’s 1970s heyday.