Frantz

"Love, loss, and war. It’d take you less than a minute of googling to find five masterful films that already cover those themes. It’s much harder to find a new film that can spin those ideas into a different ball of yarn. This is where Frantz surprises; it takes a seemingly standard post-war story and twists expectations – slightly but frequently – in order to find a fresh truth about what war, love and loss do to us."

"The results are oddly more artificial than the 1932 original ['Broken Lullaby'], and considerably less moving."

"Slightly over-polite, but the sense of festering postwar anger and pain is strong."

"As if shedding a skin, the film shucks off its elegiac, white-gloved manners to explore a slippery realm of secrets, lies and moral uncertainty that eventually leads her to consult a priest for advice on how to proceed."

"Ozon is often at his best when working with women, and he has a fabulous talent in Paula Beer to bring his protagonist, Anna, to vivid life. She's stunning in the role."

"Francois Ozon's post-WW1 period piece about a German widow and a French solder takes on xenophobic hatred that's as timely as Trump, making Frantz is a film of its time ... and ours."

"More than once, "Frantz" hints that it will reveal itself as a homoerotic reworking of "Broken Lullaby." But Ozon has something simpler and no less intriguing up his sleeve"

"[Ozon's] story is one that's subtler and digs deeper while it keeps exploring how both political and personal questions are dealt with within a moral framework and how that framework itself is also open to interpretation."