Female Film Critics 24/375
Winner of the prestigious Best Director Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, French director Claire Denis tackles tough emotional fare in Both Sides of the Blade. It dramatizes three people’s lives hurtling into passionate, tense moments.
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Spending time with an old and not entirely extinguished flame when in a supposedly happy relationship is always a bad idea. It will be an ill-advised test of willpower at best, and at worst the height of hubris. That’s what happens in director Claire Denis’s romantic drama Both Sides of the Blade, which Denis wrote with co-screenwriter Christine Angot, based on Angot’s 2018 novel Un Tournant de Vie (A Turning Point of Life). They’ve created a visceral, intense slow burn about a destructive love triangle that spirals out of control with the help of stars Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon, and Grégoire Colin. Denis won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival for her work on the film.
Read moreInspired by Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, French director Claire Denis’ Beau travai moves that apocryphal story from the vastness of the ocean to the desolate expanse of the desert bordering the Red Sea. Set in the East African country Djibouti at a French Foreign Legion outpost, Chief Master Sergeant Galoup narrates in flashback from Marseilles his self-destructive obsession with Gilles Sentain.
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