By Angelo Muredda  “I want to do something but I can’t,” ex-filmmaker Farid (Mirsaeed Molavian) tells his estranged wife early in Achilles, Farhad Delaram’s road-movie fable about breaking through political repression and administrative corruption in present-day Iran. Delaram’s directorial debut takes its title from Farid’s self-styled nickname. Like his mythological namesake, the aloof orthotist who…

By Angelo Muredda “You need to be a brick shithouse,” steely cheerleading coach Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood) scolds her neurotic new charge Riley (Devery Jacobs) in D.W. Waterson’s Backspot, an overstuffed but energetic youth sports drama that has just enough texture to stand out. Whether Riley takes that advice or finds another way to live…

French filmmaker and ethnographer Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau’s unfinished portrait of the Kuna people becomes the scene of a postcolonial autopsy in Andrés Peyrot’s absorbing documentary God Is a Woman. Peyrot’s film follows the contemporary interventions of Kuna elders and intellectuals such as poet and professor Arysteides Turpana and filmmaker Orgun Wagua, who seek to restore, contextualize, and screen Gaisseau’s footage to the community whose images were distorted and plundered for Western consumption in the original, unreleased documentary.  

By Angelo Muredda  A sexual assault sends a young Toronto musician into a frantic two-day scramble to pay for HIV-prevention meds in M.H. Murray’s compelling feature debut, I Don’t Know Who You Are. What starts as a gentle account of Benjamin (Mark Clennon, also the story editor) ambling through a budding romance with new love…

Polish documentarian Maciek Hamela captures the devastation as well as the complicated hope of life in transit in In the Rearview, a record of his efforts to transport hundreds of Ukrainian refugees into Poland following the Russian invasion in early 2022.

By Angelo Muredda Volpi Cup winner Peter Sarsgaard comes down with a serious case of movie dementia, the romantic kind that makes you look more rakish in a blazer and scarf the sicker you get, in Michel Franco’s Memory. Though ostensibly a kinder Franco than the one who made After Lucia and New Order, the…

By Angelo Muredda The more Seoul changes, the more it stays the same in Kim Taeyang’s understated and striking debut Mimang, which tracks the shifting fortunes and life milestones of a young illustrator and a film lecturer over a series of walks and drives through the city. Bantering and flirting, they muse about romantic and…

Though The Adults is at times diminished more than it’s enriched by its echoes of other texts about wayward children skulking back to their childhood home, as well as family narratives about faded talents with arrested development (including the same-named series wherein a teenaged Cera reads as precocious as he is dissipated here), the film has enough of Defa’s own peculiar, spiky tenderness to set it apart.

By Angelo Muredda A woman’s observation that lichen has started to grow on a flower she’s been studying for weeks counts as bold narrative progress in Mark Jenkin’s decidedly low-stakes folk-horror curio, Enys Men. Shot in the same striking, hand-processed 16mm stock and set in the same seaside milieu as the director’s lauded feature debut…

By Angelo Muredda A corrupt deal with a mysterious nurse who brings death rather than life unravels a tightly wound family in Carolina Markowicz’s ambitious and sometimes inscrutable first feature, Charcoal, which is pitched somewhere between a fable, a comedy of errors, and a satire of Brazilian family values and faith as a refuge from…

By Angelo Muredda Argentine filmmaker Diego Lerman makes a satisfying if derivative riff on To Sir, With Love (1967) with El Suplente, a slow-burning social-realist drama about an educator in Buenos Aires caught between teaching, administrative inertia, and activism. Juan Minujín brings a rumpled, low-key charisma to his role as Lucio, the eponymous substitute, an…

By Angelo Muredda  “It is like bringing the dead to life,” a man says over the shattered Apple Watch he is trying to reanimate to yield a lost person’s heart-rate readings in Babak Payami’s absorbing 752 Is Not a Number, the Iranian-Canadian documentarian’s chronicle of one man’s efforts to do right by his deceased wife…

By Angelo Muredda  The past imprints itself on the present daily in So Much Tenderness, Lina Rodríguez’s third narrative feature and a companion piece to her recent documentary My Two Voices (2022), which was about the hybrid identities of Colombian-Canadian women. That diasporic experience is shared by Aurora (Noëlle Schönwald), an environmental lawyer who migrates…

By Angelo Muredda Early in Ever Deadly, an elliptical mix of concert documentary and artist’s manifesto, celebrated Inuk throat singer and novelist Tanya Tagaq jokes to an unseen audience that if they really hate the non-traditional, contemporary riff on throat singing she’s about to perform, they can always make their way for the door, since…

Eager to celebrate a theatrical box-office win, Variety recently praised the success of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s equally moving and galling Everything Everywhere All at Once, chirping that its broad appeal beyond arthouse crowds attests not only to adult audiences’ willingness to return to theatres for the right sort of movie, but also to the fact that “ticket buyers really love the concept of a multiverse.”

he room,” Adam McKay played the more comfortable role of American comedy’s slouchy, politically savvy older brother. Improbable as his progressive-daddy glow up of the past few years might seem, the Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder, former Saturday Night Live head writer, and Academy Award-winning writer-director planted the seed of his transformation early in his predominantly unserious comedy fare.

By Angelo Muredda Single mom Elena (Julia Chavez) tries to do right by her scampish ten-year-old son Tom (Israel Rodríguez Bertorelli) despite the interventions of the byzantine Texas school system in Rodrigo Plá and Laura Santullo’s minor-key drama The Other Tom, based on Santullo’s novel. The filmmakers do well to balance their kitchen-sink realism and…

By Angelo Muredda With Jean-Marc Vallée tied up in American television and Denis Villeneuve bound for Arrakis, Canada’s response to the tangled international melodramas of Alejandro González Iñárritu seemingly falls to Ivan Grbovic. Grbovic follows up his understated character study Roméo Onze with the curiously schematic Drunken Birds, which marks a step up in scale…

By Angleo Muredda “I think she’s been working for too long now,” a man deadpans about his bone-tired mother Mavis (Nosipho Mtebe) late in Jenna Cato Bass’s absorbing thriller Mlungu Wam, an allegory about how the white supremacist violence of apartheid-era South Africa reverberates into the future as demons for the children and grandchildren of…

By Angelo Muredda A young mother’s desire to give her stillborn child a name prompts a perilous trip to a mountain sanctuary in Laura Samani’s assured if familiar Small Body. Celeste Cescutti is appropriately severe as Agata, a pure-hearted stoic who risks life and limb to carry her limbo-bound child to a remote church where…

By Angelo Muredda Anahi Hoeneisen is inscrutable as a woman on the verge of either a breakdown or a breakthrough in Javier Andrade’s chamber drama Lo Invisible. Co-written by Hoeneisen and Andrade, the film unfolds, enigmatically at first and then tediously, as a series of opaque tableaux of protagonist Luisa’s tentative reintegration into family life…

Entering Riz Ahmed in the disability cosplay sweepstakes as a young drummer coping with hearing loss, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal originated as a lightly meta vehicle for husband-and-wife sludge-metal duo Jucifer to be directed by Derek Cianfrance, with whom Marder co-wrote The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). That the final result is more surprising than the rote uplift narrative suggested by its edifying logline is a testament to both Ahmed’s cagey intensity...

By Angelo Muredda “Don’t get into the Nazi stuff,” Taika Waititi’s deadbeat dad tells his son, the eponymous protagonist of the New Zealand-born actor-writer-director’s sophomore feature Boy (2010), gesturing to a swastika he once carved into the wall of his childhood bedroom, the remnant of a reformed punk’s youthful exploits. Hindsight being 20/20, it’s almost…

By Angelo Muredda “Cops are by far the biggest liars,” a subject admits early in Alan Zweig’s Coppers, which brings the filmmaker’s signature conversational style to bear on a profile of retired Toronto police officers, about a dozen of whom are interviewed at rest and in ride-alongs to the scenes of past arrests and disaster…

By Angelo Muredda Israeli filmmaker Yaron Zilberman follows up A Late Quartet with Incitement, an unnerving recreation of the days leading up to Orthodox Jewish law student Yigal Amir’s assassination of then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for his integral role in the Oslo peace process. Offering another look into the social customs by which…

By Angelo Muredda  TV-to-feature transitions are always a fraught jump for writers of sparkling, monologue-heavy prose, and Mad Men writer Semi Chellas’ American Woman is no exception. Faring a bit better than Chellas’ former boss Matthew Weiner’s dispiriting Are You Here but falling well short of the intimacy and idiosyncrasy of David Chase’s Not Fade…

By Angelo Muredda A pitch in search of a movie to ground it, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform never amounts to more than the sum of its parts, but fans of high-concept science fiction such as Cube and Snowpiercer may nevertheless appreciate the sheer number of those parts in a film that teems with ideas, but…

By Angelo Muredda  In Pain and Glory, Pedro Almódovar burrows further into his late-style period with all the “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction” Edward Said promised, with an equally frank and flattering self-portrait of the artist as an aging Antonio Banderas. Though a decade younger and a good deal handsomer than the auteur behind the…

By Angelo Muredda Spice It Up screens at TIFF Bell Lightbox on Thursday, August 15 as part of MDFF Selects: Presented by Cinema Scope and TIFF. “Spice what up?” a film professor played by Cinema Scope’s own Adam Nayman asks with disinterest early in Lev Lewis, Yonah Lewis, and Calvin Thomas’ smart and puckishly funny…

By Angelo Muredda  There’s a handy visual metaphor for auteurist progress in the way that road-movie savant Peter Farrelly trades the shaggy-dog van that carried his heroes most of the way from Providence to Aspen in Dumb and Dumber (1994) for the sleek vintage ride in Green Book. Farrelly’s first solo project since that debut…

By Angelo Muredda Ali Vatansever takes a stab at an Asghar Farhadi-style overdetermined drama about tired people in impossible situations with his second feature Saf. The film tells the two-part story of Kamil (Erol Afsin) and Remziye (Saadet Isil Aksoy), a working-class Turkish couple who struggle to live with dignity in the shadow of an…

By Angelo Muredda You almost have to admire the chutzpah of Through Black Spruce, which hits TIFF with an inscrutable mix of sheepishness and self-confidence. Don McKellar’s adaptation of Joseph Boyden’s Giller Prize-winning novel couldn’t be arriving at a worse time, a cultural moment where writers like Jen Sookfong Lee and Alicia Elliott have proclaimed…

By Angelo Muredda Late in Rithy Panh’s elegant successor to The Missing Picture, which more squarely faces his own family losses in the Cambodian genocide of the late ’70s, the filmmaker’s longtime surrogate narrator Randal Douc wonders if he has shot so many images of death in order to forget that he himself is dead.…

By Angelo Muredda It’s funny in an Austrian sort of way that Markus Schleinzer should take seven years to follow his 2011 Cannes debut Michael with a movie called Angelo. That kind of contextual anti-joke would be at home in his latest, a self-reflexive 18th-century period piece, pitched at the edge of irony, about the…

By Angelo Muredda From its YA market-friendly nonsense title to its insistent poptimist score and tired elevator pitch—it’s about that One Moment Everything Changes for a sensitive, good-looking teen who has the whole world on his plate—Giant Little Ones has a lot of strikes against it. It’s a bit of a surprise, then, that Keith…

By Angelo Muredda What can be said about Renée Beaulieu’s Les Salopes, or The Naturally Wanton Pleasure of Skin that isn’t already conveyed in the title? The Québécois filmmaker and University of Montréal film professor’s second feature—which concers a biologist whose research on the potentially scandalous connection between desire and dermatology—sits at an awkward juncture…

By Angelo Muredda There’s a moment early in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri that neatly encapsulates the playwright-turned-filmmaker’s competing instincts toward moral sophistication and childish self-indulgence. As the bereaved protagonist Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) struts through the local sign shop—the first step in her campaign to use the title’s eponymous placards to shame…

  By Angelo Muredda The first image we see in Lina Rodriguez’s deceptively modest second feature Mañana a esta hora (This Time Tomorrow) is something of a puzzle: a gradually lightening shot of a tree in a leafy park in Bogotá, standing sturdy and still. While this depopulated, evergreen overture might seem to promise an…

By Angelo Muredda Margaret Atwood’s most genre-bending, postmodern novel gets a mostly straightforward Victorian adaptation in Mary Harron’s CBC-bound miniseries Alias Grace, at least on the basis of its first two episodes. Atwood has a lot of fun with the lurid rubbernecking appeal of the story of Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon), the maid turned prisoner…

By Angelo Muredda Andy Serkis takes a left turn from performance-capture guru to prestige-pic helmer with this ingratiating and anonymously directed biopic that leaves no cliché about love and illness untapped. If there’s anything curious about Breathe, it’s the behind-the-scenes business machinations that saw Serkis taking on as his directorial debut a story that turns…

By Angelo Muredda Joachim Trier makes a sterling if somewhat noncommittal bid for post-horror with Thelma, a slow-burn supernatural thriller about a Norwegian teen (Eili Harboe) who goes away to college (and away from her morally rigid Christian parents) and finds her long dormant powers to make terrible and strange things happen reactivated by, what…

By Angelo Muredda Evan Rachel Wood works hard to put on a tough face in Carlos and Jason Sanchez’s unconvincing debut feature, the kind of miserablist festival fare that has given English Canadian cinema a bad name for too long. Wood stars as Laura, a thirtysomething house cleaner with unsavoury sexual appetites (so a moralizing…

By Angelo Muredda Boston Marathon bombing survivor Jeff Bauman gets the biopic treatment in Stronger, David Gordon Green’s lazy if intermittently affecting first major stab at Oscar glory. Jake Gyllenhaal tamps down his blinking-related affectations of prestige movies past and brings some calm, regular-guy gravitas to Bauman, who, according to the gruff, faux-Boston brogue of…

By Angelo Muredda From the moment the opening credits offer a screen-filling shout-out to the musical score by Sufjan Stevens and the handwritten titles by Chen Li, Call Me By Your Name announces itself as a Luca Guadagnino film: a love letter from one aesthete to countless others. That opening salvo might inspire a bit…

By Angelo Muredda Micro-budget Toronto filmmaker turned production maven Ingrid Veninger hits her sweet spot with Porcupine Lake, which trades some of her scrappier aesthetic instincts for a more polished veneer but keeps the heart and prickly specificity of her best work. Like Andrew Cividino’s recent Canadian indie darling Sleeping Giant, which staged its small-scale…

By Angelo Muredda  Early in Hugh Gibson’s The Stairs, we meet Marty, a recovering addict working as a social worker for drug users in Toronto’s Regent Park. A loquacious eccentric who clearly relishes the Aaron Sorkin-inflected walk-and-talk of his onscreen introduction, Marty seems equally comfortable leading a tutorial on packing safe injection kits at work…

By Angelo Muredda The youth-in-extremis movie gets a relatively fresh new face in Mijke de Jong’s Layla M., which, together with Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, positions TIFF’s Platform programme as a quality clearing house for coming-of-age melodramas with a critical difference. Here the point of distinction is the budding radicalism of the heretofore university-bound Layla (Nora…

By Angelo Muredda Repressed sexual impulses find a novel form of expression in Amat Escalante’s The Untamed, a genre film for people who find genre films distasteful. As in his Cannes-winning Heli (2013), Escalante’s knack for high-concept premises—there, using the family unit as a means to explore the insidiousness of violence—is undone by his obvious,…

  By Angelo Muredda A canny genre filmmaker with a Situationist’s knack for how people’s surroundings sculpt their blinkered worldview, Ben Wheatley is wise to make Free Fire, his first film set in the US, a crime caper with big-mouthed braggarts shooting off their guns in a confined space just large enough to let them…

By Angelo Muredda Though it’s a bit scrappy on first glance, Window Horses director Ann Marie Fleming’s drawing style has a good story behind it. After surviving a car accident while she was an animation student, Fleming resorted to the barest of shorthands in her minimalist sketches of a character she called Stick Girl, made…

By Angelo Muredda “No place in the world ain’t got no black people,” Mahershala Ali’s good-hearted drug dealer and surrogate father Juan tells prepubescent Chiron (Alex Hibbert) in the opening act of Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ accomplished but fussy sophomore feature. Juan’s attempt to instill a sense of black masculine pride in a boy mercilessly teased…

By Angelo Muredda Park Chan-wook dresses up his naughtiness under the ritzier coats of period drama and metafiction in The Handmaiden. More well-oiled machine than movie, The Handmaiden adapts Welsh historical novelist Sarah Waters’ Booker Prize-shortlisted 19th-century throwback Fingersmith, about a petty thief commissioned to act as a maid to a mentally unwell heiress, the…

By Angelo Muredda The last novel and late-career manifesto of Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields gets a visceral but disjointed adaptation in Alan Gilsenan’s Unless, which, like its source, follows the mysterious transformation of Norah (Hannah Gross), a college student who suddenly goes silent and abandons her life of middle-class comfort to camp out on…

By Angelo Muredda The elegant swan to Margaret’s (2011) ugly duckling, Manchester by the Sea is a moving but less arresting follow-up to Kenneth Lonergan’s career best. At his strongest when he is least governed by discipline and good taste, Lonergan seems a bit too tentative in this unmistakably well-crafted study of the way grief…

By Angelo Muredda Early in Nathan Morlando’s Mean Dreams—a Canadian production with American aspirations—kewpie-doll runaway Casey (Sophie Nélisse) gets moony-eyed as she remembers her dead mother’s wish to get away from the dour country that entrapped her and light out for the ocean. It might be a testament to the film’s restrained Northern ethos (in…

  By Angelo Muredda Another awards-season thoroughbred is foaled in Room, Lenny Abrahamson’s take on Ireland-born, Canada-based Booker Prize nominee Emma Donoghue’s best-seller. For all its touchy subject matter, Room is the sort of film for which People’s Choice awards were made: a lightly conceptual, sturdily acted piece of redemptive cinema that peers into the…

By Angelo Muredda Evita Perón’s luminous corpse gets exhumed for dubious ends in Pablo Agüero’s intermittently engaging Eva Doesn’t Sleep, a mixed-media survey of Argentinean history since the fall of the Perónist government in the mid-1950s. Agüero’s method is to explore the persistence of Perón’s iconography for the disenfranchised by tracking it across a series…

By Angelo Muredda An old CanLit staple whose braggadocio feels out of tune with the relative civility of contemporary Canadian letters, Al Purdy is a fitting subject for Brian D. Johnson’s doc, which also feels a bit out of time. Al Purdy Was Here operates as both an extended eulogy for the scrappy poet as…

By Angelo Muredda There’s a moment in Kazik Radwanski’s impressive feature debut Tower (2012) where a dentist tells thirtysomething man-child Derek (Derek Bogart), a better-adjusted, Torontonian Travis Bickle, that he has an impacted tooth coming in from the side long after most people’s wisdom teeth cease to bother them. Radwanski looks to another late bloomer…

By Angelo Muredda Student Oscar nominee Thomas Stuber makes his first tentative mark in features with A Heavy Heart, a close-quarters profile of unsmiling musclehead Herbert (Peter Kurth), whose heyday as a boxer in East Germany—he almost but didn’t go to the Olympics, as his friends remind him—is long gone post-reunification. Now a hired goon…

By Angelo Muredda The first thing a reader of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room will notice about Lenny Abrahamson’s mostly sturdy adaptation is a problem of perspective. The impressionistic early montage of mundane objects (a sink and a toilet, which soon become known to us as the talismanic idols Sink and Toilet) quickly gives way to…

  By Angelo Muredda You’d be hard-pressed to think of a more singular contemporary filmmaker than Yorgos Lanthimos, whose off-kilter satires are perfectly attuned to humanity’s endless capacity for self-delusion. It’s a shame, then, that to this critic Lanthimos’ English-language debut The Lobster recalls nothing so much as My Blueberry Nights (2007), in which Wong…

By Angelo Muredda Andrew Haigh branches out from his chronicles of transitory love among gay male urbanites with 45 Years, one of the shrewdest follow-ups to a calling-card picture in recent memory. The filmmaker trades the Nottingham setting of Weekend (2011) and the San Francisco clubs of his HBO series Looking for the flatlands of…

By Angelo Muredda. Early in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, an army of young Islamic rebels marches into a mosque, automatic rifles slung at their sides. It might look like the start of a proper siege if we hadn’t just seen the same men ineptly chasing a gazelle through the desert in a jeep (calling to mind…

By Angelo Muredda With all respect to David Fincher’s Gone Girl, Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is the best formalist black comedy about marriage since Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Inasmuch as its outline suggests an essay on the crisis of masculinity—one distilled to a defining image (emblazoned on the vaguely apocalyptic poster) of a patriarch shirking…

By Angelo Muredda What could be a more appropriate fate for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)—a slick film about a disgruntled director baring his soul and guts for unfeeling audiences and critics alike—than its doubtlessly smooth course to award-season glory? While the film is ostensibly an angry manifesto stumping for…

By Angelo Muredda “Songwriting is about counterpoint,” Nick Cave insists early in 20,000 Days on Earth, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s curious documentary slash postmodern biography of the Australian singer-songwriter and Bad Seeds frontman; you put two disparate images beside each other, he explains, and see which way the sparks fly. That Cave’s definition of…

By Angelo Muredda Stephen Hawking falls in love, gets disabled, and becomes the world’s best-selling cosmologist in James Marsh’s mostly undistinguished The Theory of Everything, the sort of cautious, unoffending profile that tends to arrive in swarms this time of year. For what it’s worth, Eddie Redmayne is fine as the young Cambridge scholar with…

By Angelo Muredda Slight as it is, next to the garrulous shoutiness of much of its Canadian brethren at the festival, Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu dors Nicole feels like a minor oasis. Nicely lensed in minimalist black and white by the filmmaker’s usual collaborator (and Bernard Émond vet) Sara Mishara, the film follows the post-grad ambles…

By Angelo Muredda Trading the gentle lilt of his debut The Myth of the American Sleepover for a steelier look at youth in extremis, David Robert Mitchell arrives seemingly out of the box as a skillful genre filmmaker with It Follows. The “it” in question is an otherwise unnamed, shape-shifting stalker contracted like a virus…

By Angelo Muredda Pitched somewhere between a kunstlerroman and an Archers melodrama about the psychic toll wrought by a life of artistic commitment, Whiplash is about as off-kilter as Sundance darlings get. An extended riff on sophomore helmer Damien Chazelle’s earlier short, the film stars Miles Teller as Andrew Neyman, an aspiring jazz drummer lured…

By Angelo Muredda “Some people are stuck in a wheelchair and they’re happy, and others want to kill themselves when their poodle died,” a ponderous Adonis muses early in Denys Arcand’s tiresome An Eye for Beauty. That’s one of many meaningless canards spouted in a film that mostly scans as a dumb almanac for the…

By Angelo Muredda Vintage knitwear porn for those lads and lasses who’ve been hankering to see Harry Potter’s first onscreen bout of gay sex, Kill Your Darlings puts a slick YA sheen on Allen Ginsberg’s Columbia days. Not content to trace the origins of the “New Vision” young Ginsy (Daniel Radcliffe) co-conceived with fellow dreamboat…

By Angelo Muredda While Coriolanus seemed designed to show us that Ralph Fiennes could direct as well as star in Shakespeare, The Invisible Woman scans as a cannier power play, a consistently underrated actor-director’s audition for high-toned costume dramas about major historical figures (Charles Dickens, here). As a director’s portfolio, it’s not so bad: certainly…

By Angelo Muredda Since her breakthrough in Bruce McDonald’s Dance Me Outside, Jennifer Podemski has had a grounding effect on the countless Canadian TV shows and films she’s cropped up in, singlehandedly recalibrating the sombre melodrama of Degrassi into something like realism. Podemski is an especially valuable player in Peter Stebbings’ Empire of Dirt, a…

By Angelo Muredda An overeager new entry in the cinema of reformed douchebags, Don Jon is the feature debut you would expect from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, an affable star who’s keen to show his directorial (and pectoral) chops at all costs. And show them he does, in a host of obnoxious if admittedly muscular montages that…

By Angelo Muredda Not a Lana Del Rey cover, dommage, but a riff on his usual concerns of voyeurism, Gallic family strife, and the ambiguity of pretty girls, François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful is an accomplished trifle. We’re in Ozon country from the first shot, a young peeping Tom’s through-the-binoculars gaze at his sunbathing teenaged…