The concept sounds (improbably) even more pretentious than the sex club in Post Tenebras Lux (Hegel room, anyone?), but in fact, Gonzalez's sensibility is far less austere, more sentimental, even sugary. "Always follow the clues in dreams," says Ali, the female partner, and the film obliges by shifting freely away from the main location—a visual analogue to the "sensory jukebox" that, appropriately, emits M83. There isn't so much actual sex as the idea of it, the function it serves for…

Opening shot contains an entire world: the warm glow of the summer sun; Jacques' (Pierre Louis-Calixte) lean figure, garbed in yellow and orange, pacing back and forth in anticipation; and a superb visual joke that fuses the erotic charge of a cruising scenario with, essentially, an inversion of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. The environment, here, is as hermetic as that of Stranger by the Lake (and also populated solely by men), but the film itself seems far more expansive,…

Firmly split on this one, which seems about right given that Nolan is simultaneously over-praised and undervalued (though I consider myself a partisan of his). But there really is no getting past the gulf between its staggering, brilliant conceit—which attempts to do no less than to demonstrate, with increasing temporal and spatial immediacy, the parallel planes upon which a war is fought; to enfold the immediate ground-level experience of those events within a larger historical understanding of one of the…