Oscar Actors: Binoche, Juliette–Celebrating 40 Year Career

Binoche gives a performance of staggering emotional rawness and resolve in Dumont’s compassionate depiction of the prodigiously gifted and prodigiously gossiped-about sculptor Camille Claudel. Drawing on surviving letters and documents written by or concerning its subject, the film follows three tormented days in which she is unjustly condemned to an asylum in Provence and forbidden the tools necessary to practice her art by her dourly devout brother (Jean-Luc Vincent), following an episode in which she began to destroy her own work. “A deeply sombre, deeply affecting film… Binoche endows her role with dignity, which accumulates into a tragic grandeur.” —The Guardian

Received wisdom that Michael Ondaatje’s lauded 1992 novel was “unfilmable” was treated to a stern rebuff when Minghella’s visually and emotionally extravagant adaptation hit screens, starring Ralph Fiennes as the titular patient, in fact a Hungarian cartographer grievously wounded when caught in the crossfire of World War II, Binoche as the French Canadian nurse who becomes his caretaker and confidante, and Kristin Scott Thomas as the one our patient loved and lost, their affair recalled in extensive flashbacks threaded through the picture. “The triumph of the film lies not just in the force and the range of the performances—the crisp sweetness of Scott Thomas, say, versus the raw volatility of Binoche—but in Minghella’s creation of an intimate epic: vast landscapes mingle with the minute details of desire, and the combination is transfixing.” —The New Yorker

Science fiction as done by Claire Denis is science fiction unlike anything you’ve ever seen, a bold experiment to the outer limits of genre, where no woman has gone before. Robert Pattinson, in a performance of quiet intensity and gravitas, is first encountered living alone with an infant on a spaceship adrift in the dark of space. Flashing back from this somber, beguiling opening, Denis introduces us to the former crew of this prison ship, on which Pattinson’s stubbornly celibate Monte is among the condemned guinea pigs at the disposal of Binoche’s diabolical filicide “Dr. Dibs”—inspired, per Denis, by Medea of Greek tragedy—who busies herself with attempting to prove that a child can be conceived and born in outer space between sessions in the ship’s “fuck box.” Troublingly erotic, intensely physical, and headily philosophical, Denis’s first fully English-language film is a work of mastery and melancholy, a film following a voyage into the unknown that is itself exactly that.

A genre-bending explosion of pure cinematic effervescence pairing Binoche and Denis Lavant, both at the beginnings of storied careers. Binoche plays the gamine mistress of a superannuated Paris gangster (Michel Piccoli), while Lavant stars as a street hustler who becomes ensorcelled of her, with his propulsive, thrashing dance/sprint set to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” surely one of the most exhilarating passages in all of French cinema. Equally indebted to the rebellious spirit of the Nouvelle Vague and the swooning romanticism of Frank Borzage, Carax’s film pits young love against venal age, with a stolen virus hanging in the balance—the relevance to the then-raging AIDS crisis is not coincidental.

Evoking the air of eager optimism that accompanied the Prague Spring thaw of 1968 and the air of disillusion and distrust that followed the Soviet crackdown in summer of the same year, Kaufman’s adaptation of Milan Kundera’s beloved novel, among other things a contemplation of the interrelation of sexual and political liberty, stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin as, respectively, a womanizing brain surgeon-turned-dissident, his wife, and his bohemian mistress. An achingly honest adult drama of the sort that American studios have almost entirely ceased to invest in and the product of an extraordinary confluence of talent in front of and behind the camera, with Academy Award–winning photography by Sven Nykvist. “Binoche’s performance… is both self-aware and unself-conscious… The film swells with her excitement and engagement.” —Mark Asch, Reverse Shot