A ravishing 1980s time capsule, François Ozon’s queer romance whisks us off to the French coast where the sun shines bright and earworms from The Cure and Bananarama are on at full blast. Like the changing ocean tides, the wistful fleetingness of youth only intensifies the passions of first love.

While the American tradition of the romantic comedy has waned in recent years, Justine Triet’s portrait of a woman at a crossroads in the courtroom and bedroom proves the beloved genre is alive and well in France. A feminist revision of the romcom—proving the familiar can still be unpredictable.

Arnaud Desplechin’s whirlwind dramedy doesn’t fully reject Christmas joy, but it does give the undersung holiday traditions of dysfunction and discomfort their time in the spotlight. Starring a formidable French cast, this festive film’s thorny exterior makes way for little glimmers of tender hope.

A Borgesian matryoshka doll of storytelling, Mysteries of Lisbon is Chilean maestro Raúl Ruiz’s magnum opus—a sumptuous period epic in six parts. Playing in its rarely screened extended version, this sweeping melodramatic saga is Dickensian in scope and magisterial in novelistic ambition.

Vendettas are executed, passions bloom and wane, and all roads lead back to Pedro in this diaphanous concluding episode of Raúl Ruiz’s elaborate masterwork. As its final secrets are revealed, Mysteries of Lisbon finds the ephemeral sum of a life in the stories we tell ourselves and each other.