Elle

Paul Verhoeven's Elle opened in 2016 and won Isabelle Huppert the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama and the Académie's César for Best Film. Huppert was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, her first Oscar nomination. Verhoeven, the Dutch director who had spent two decades in Hollywood (Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct) before retreating to European art cinema with Black Book, made Elle as his first French-language feature.

Adapted by David Birke from Philippe Djian's 2012 novel Oh…, the film follows Michèle Leblanc (Huppert), the formidable head of a successful Paris video-game company, after a violent home invasion by a masked attacker. Michèle's response to the attack (and her unsentimental relationships with her ex-husband (Charles Berling), her son's girlfriend, her senile-imprisoned father, and her business partner Anna's husband Patrick (Laurent Lafitte)) operate at the centre of a film that refuses every conventional victim-narrative arc.

The film's commitment to Huppert as the centre of every frame, and Verhoeven's distinctive willingness to hold morally uncomfortable scenes for longer than audiences expect, produced one of the most divisive films of its festival year. Stéphane Fontaine's photography of Michèle's Boulogne-Billancourt house, Anne Dudley's score, and Huppert's central performance combine into a film that has become one of the most-discussed late-career achievements of one of Europe's most accomplished living actresses.