An abiding presence at the Cannes Film Festival, where he has twice won the Grand Prix, French writer-director Bruno Dumont (Flanders) is arguably one of the most celebrated and least understood auteurs of the contemporary European film scene. Hailed as a neo-Bressonian wunderkind for his remarkable debut Life of Jesus (1997), a portrait of grinding life among provincial French youth, the onetime philosophy teacher returned two years later with Humanité, an opaque detective story that baffled many observers and even incensed some of Dumont’s staunchest champions. Subsequent films, the notoriously carnal Twentynine Palms (2003)— a kind of metaphysical horror exercise …

If you’re heading off to Sundance in a few weeks (or just wincing at the January film releases), you may want to make a stop off in Queens. First Look, the annual showcase of new international cinema, opens today at the Museum of the Moving Image and offers filmgoers many compelling reasons to shake off the post-holiday doldrums and to leave the Netflix cave. It also suggests the expansiveness of independent cinema worldwide. Curated by Dennis Lim (editor of Moving Image Source, the Museum’s multimedia magazine) and the museum’s film curators, Rachael Rakes and David Schwartz, the series presents a …

A former philosophy professor, 52-year-old writer-director Bruno Dumont got his start making commercial films in the ’80s, eventually penning a novel that served as the basis for his extraordinary 1996 debut La Vie de Jesus. Filmed in the tiny provincial hamlet of Bailleul, France, where Dumont grew up, this story of a listless gang of moped-riding teens has nothing at all to do with the Gospels: it is an oblique title for a movie that begins and ends with a death, and whose epileptic protagonist is an odd-looking, hauntingly inexpressive adolescent. Humanité, which won the Grand Prix at the 1999 …

The Cannes lineup is in a bunch of places: here’s the link to Indiewire’s piece. Quick take: Inarritu’s Babel, Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, new films by Bruno Dumont, Pedro Almodovar, Ken Loach and Aki Kaurismaki, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (which we have a tiny preview of in the new issue — more when it comes out), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s follow-up to Distant all in Competition. Andrea Arnold’s Red Road the sole first feature in Competition. (I’m wondering what happened to Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain — Variety reported that it would be the festival “somewhere” just …