A veritable who's who of French acting greats-Nathalie Baye, Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel and Léa Seydoux among them, all led by rising star Gaspard Ulliel-headline Quebecois enfant terrible Xavier Dolan's excoriating, blackly humorous family drama. Ulliel is young writer Louis, a successful dramatist, who returns to his hometown and his estranged family to try and effect some sort of reconciliation, or, barring that, at least to let his mother (Baye), brother (Cassel) and sister (Seydoux) know that he is dying.

This being a Dolan film about the ties that bind, things go horribly awry from the very start (see: I Killed My Mother (2009)). Simmering resentments boil over into scalding verbal attacks and denunciations. Dolan is unflinching in his depiction of broken family dynamics, and his group portrait-brilliantly acted by a superb cast-makes for unforgettable viewing.

"Dolan's [film] is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness-and yet [it's] a brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction..." Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Xavier Dolan – Director (January 8 only)