Augustine

It’s ironic that a movie about social restrictions is at its best when it restrains itself—that is, when it treats its characters as characters rather than figures, and its plot as drama rather than statement. Full Review

Everything depends on the subtlety of the direction and the charisma of the performances. Augustine is intellectually satisfying partly because it communicates its ideas at the level of feeling, through the uncanny power of Soko’s face and body. Full Review

Sokolinski, a French pop singer better known at home as Soko, is fully in tune with Winocour’s sharp vision. Her intense, almost accusatory turn feels like the opposing image of Keira Knightley’s intellectual neurosis in 2011’s similarly themed “A Dangerous Method.” Where that film found some lightness within the dark, this one drags an historic darkness into the light. Full Review

Plays like a gothic prequel to David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method," one in which human flesh is viewed as both horrific and erotic terrain. Full Review

The film is something of a paradox, simultaneously passionate and dispassionate, its ending tethered to both bruised triumph and a sense of things falling apart. Full Review