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Following its world premiere as the Berlin Film Festival opener, Francois Ozon’s “Peter von Kant” has been acquired by Strand Releasing for U.S. distribution.

Represented in international markets by Playtime, the critically acclaimed movie is inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s cult film “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” with Denis Menochet playing the tormented filmmaker, opposite Isabelle Adjani, who stars as his muse.

Ozon previously told Variety that the movie was a “universal tale of passion, timely as ever” and “explores the relationships of domination, control and submission in the creative world.”

“Peter von Kant” marks Ozon’s sixth movie that played in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. He won the Silver Bear for his 2018 film, “By the Grace of God,” and “8 Women” 20 years ago. He also debuted “Water Drops on Burning Rocks,” another adaptation of a Fassbinder work, at the festival in 2000.

Playtime...

After a trio of films that saw François Ozon feeling out the far extremes of his interest and ability — 2016’s monochrome interwar melodrama “Frantz,” the winking De Palma-esque mindfuck “Double Lover,” and last year’s journalistic Catholic priest exposé “By the Grace of God” — the precocious and pétillant “Summer of 85” finds the prolific French auteur circling back to the kind of lurid, playful, and unapologetically queer psychodramas that first made him famous in the late ’90s. But it wouldn’t be right to characterize this stormy coming-of-age story as a return to form, as that would imply some kind of desperate scramble back to the safety of the shore.

In truth, Ozon was never off his game so much as he was simply testing the outer limits of the board. And his 19th feature isn’t a retreat back to the Patricia Highsmith-inflected likes of “See the Sea,...

The coronavirus has made everyone a bit sensitive, with good reason, inspiring memes around such now-sensitive movie titles as delayed 007 entry “No Time to Die” and Emily Ting’s culture-shock indie “Go Back to China.” To this list of inappropriately named movies we might add “Why Don’t You Just Die!” — except that Russian director Kirill Sokolov’s pitch-black horror debut, which nixed its April 10 theatrical plans in favor of a straight-to-streaming option two weeks later, is the kind of deranged Grand Guignol bloodbath that’s wrong in all the right ways. So, in a sense, it fits.

Set almost entirely in a corrupt cop’s Moscow apartment, “Why Don’t You Just Die!” is a neatly conceived dark-comedy chamber piece — à la the Wachowski siblings’ clockwork-perfect queer-noir “Bound” or Sidney Lumet’s airtight but otherwise diabolical “Deathtrap” — in which a simple setup spirals into unimaginably twisted mayhem. A tough, agitated young...

by Daniel Walber

Few things were more inevitable than a Francois Ozon film in which Jérémie Renier makes out with himself, however briefly. It’s the erotic cherry on top of a career of rule-breaking sexual escapades and pastel pastiche. Double Lover often feels like a return to some the director’s early ideas, including the effervescent camp of Sitcom and the throbbing sexual ambition of Criminal Lovers.

Yet this newest feature does at least begin with a grounded plot than these earlier films. Chloé (Marine Vacth) is a young woman with a recurring, potentially psychosomatic stomach problem. Naturally, she goes to therapist, the affable and reassuringly-sweatered Dr. Paul Meyer (Renier). Chloe sinks into one of his welcoming leather chairs, settles her feet on the fuzzy carpet, and tells him her story. The sessions go so well that, before you know it, they’ve moved in together...