• A painter, Damien (Damien Bonnard, who appeared in “Les Misérables”), leads a comfortable existence with his wife, Leïla (Leïla Bekhti), who restores antiques, and their young boy. While on vacation, Damien acts oddly, he’s spastic, hungry, sleepless, ready for anything and everything without seeming completely delusional.

  • Many a filmmaker has shot the inner city, the tough neighborhoods, in order to highlight the plight of the locals. In press documents for “Les Misérables” director Ladj Ly has said, “I hope the President [of France] watches the movie, so he can get a sense for what’s going on here.”Making movies is a personal project, innately, but not all stories are autobiographical. This one is. Ly has grown up in the same city of Montfermeil

  • For "Dunkirk" Christopher Nolan cast the puppy-eyed lead singer of One Direction, Harry Styles, as a British soldier during the famed 1940 evacuation. This is entirely appropriate. I say this because the British Army fought World War II with the ferocity of a boy band. I don’t understand why the British feel such a reflex to celebrate it.

    Here’s a trip down the the pathway of British military performance in World War II: the British spent a month fighting in France, during which time they got whipped by a German army that was riding horses ten years earlier.

  • Book author Léo (Damien Bonnard), is conducting research on wolves in the Lozère region of Southern France. It’s hill country, where grassy plateaus are dotted by the occasional rock formation and sheep farms, just like the one Leo encounters on his path, complete the landscape. Leo meets a shepherd by the name of Marie (India Hair). Nine months later, their baby is born. What could possibly go wrong with such a quaint pastoral tableau?