Maurice Pialat never shied away from exposing the darkest corners of the human experience, and his third feature remains his most boldly confrontational. Unblinking in its surveyal of a sick woman’s final days, The Mouth Agape bears tough, unadorned witness to the realities of end-of-life care.
All the skeletons come crawling out of the closet in Claude Chabrol’s late-career masterpiece, which twists the knife into the sordid hypocrisies of French provincialism. With a touch of murder and a sprinkle of incest, this devilish cinematic feast exposes the rotten core of generational wealth.
Before he won acclaim for Of Gods and Men, French actor-turned-director Xavier Beauvois scored with this excellent, layered police drama, featuring an award-winning performance from Nathalie Baye.
