Holy Motors

Leos Carax's Holy Motors arrived at Cannes 2012 as Carax's first feature in thirteen years (since the troubled Pola X in 1999) and was the cinephile event of that festival. It did not win a prize, but topped most year-end critics' polls and is routinely placed in canonical lists of the 2010s.

Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant, in nine roles across one film) travels Paris in a white limousine driven by Édith Scob (in the most beautiful late-career role she could have hoped for). At each stop he becomes someone else: a beggar woman, a motion-capture performer engaged in monstrous sex, a knife-wielding sewer-dweller named Merde, a dying old man receiving a niece's tearful goodbye. The reasons for the appointments are never explained. Eva Mendes appears for the Merde sequence; Kylie Minogue arrives for a heartbreaking late musical number on the rooftop of an abandoned department store.

The film operates as a love letter to the act of performance, to cinema's history of bodily transformation, and to a Paris that may or may not still exist. Lavant's performance (physically prodigious, emotionally inexhaustible) is one of the great acting feats of the century. Critics from Cahiers du Cinéma to Sight & Sound have placed the film among the best of its decade.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most exhilarating genuinely strange film of the 2010s, the kind of work that justifies the existence of art cinema as a category. A reminder that European cinema can still be a place where the rules don't yet exist.