Two restless, intractable talents dominate European biopics of female stars, little known to the American public.

Though set shortly after World War I, the film has surprising resonance today.

Isabelle Huppert delivers a gimlet-eyed, ferociously single-minded performance as yet another tense, driven character.

A coming-out film with the novel approach of exploring the dynamic between a mother and her two sons—one biological, one she has taken in—who fall in love.

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.