Climax

Gaspar Noé wrote five pages, cast twenty dancers who were mostly not actors, and shot Climax in fifteen days in an abandoned boarding school outside Paris. It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2018 and won the section's Art Cinema Award — the warmest reception of his career from a festival that had spent two decades treating him as a provocation to be survived.

The opening stretch is a run of long takes on the dance floor: a company rehearsing a routine to a set of French house and disco records, filmed by Benoît Debie in unbroken movement that finds and loses bodies as the camera drifts. Sofia Boutella, a dancer before she was an actor, leads a cast that includes Kiddy Smile, Romain Guillermic and Souheila Yacoub, and the choreography by Nina McNeely is the film's real screenplay. Then the sangria goes round.

It holds 68% on Rotten Tomatoes and, more tellingly, a 3.76 average across nearly half a million Letterboxd ratings — the widest audience of anything Noé has made. Critics who had refused Irréversible tended to concede this one, largely because the formal control is so visible: the camera work, the soundtrack of Cerrone, Aphex Twin and Daft Punk, and the decision to let the ensemble improvise inside a structure they could not see the shape of. Watch it for the dancing; the rest is what Noé does with a room.