Elle

Paul Verhoeven is a masterful satirist because he’s also kind of a terrible satirist. Elle is a borderline schizophrenic satire, and instead of hectoring and finger-wagging from a safe distance, Verhoeven identifies with the damned and demented. That discomforting point-of-view was enough to sully Verhoeven’s reputation among pearl-clutching establishment critics during his heyday, but subsequent waves of young and outsider critics helped restore the faith. The only fear was that his acclaim might not overlap with his relevance, but lo and behold, Elle is the most Verhoeven-y thing you could want: perverse, funny, disturbing and insane. It’s the work of a master operating at the height of his powers, a devastating and insidiously dense piece, with a stunner of a lead performance from Isabelle Huppert as a woman who forms a strange relationship with her rapist. Huppert is practically incapable of falseness, the perfect star for a film obsessed with ugly truths. D.B.