Two brothers who are at polar opposites, one an indie rock star, the other a heavy-metal loving, B-movie making slacker who still lives at home with his parents and is longing to find his place in the world, are at the centre of this gleeful, touching and manic rockumentary about The National. The band consists of two pairs of brothers, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Bryan and Scott Devendorf and lone front man Mat Berninger who in a bid to support his younger brother invites him on tour to work as part of the crew.

You can almost feel the dust on your skin in Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez’s debut feature The Golden Dream. It’s the dust of the precarious journey from Central America towards the US, undertaken by four teenage Guatemalan kids intent on finding a better life north of the final border. And of the gritty immigrant experience of jumping train after train, and struggles with the authorities, where each new stage presents new challenges, and more acts of betrayal than of kindness are to be found along the way.

Director Jim Mickle and writing partner Nick Damici made a big splash on the horror scene back in 2007 with fierce debut Mulberry St. Since then they have impressed with low-key apocalyptic vampire flick, Stake Land, and a reimagining of the well-regarded Mexican cannibal horror, We Are What We Are, which they turned into a story of female empowerment and a slight on organised religion. Cold in July may not be what their ever increasing fan base expected them to do next but that’s exactly what makes it so satisfying.

Given that Jersey Boys is about a singer, Frankie Valli, whose voice - or so we are told within the first five minutes - constitutes "a gift from god", it's a shame Clint Eastwood's film of the stage musical smash hit doesn't feel more heaven-sent. There are thrills to be had across the two hour-plus running time and enough Italian-Americanisms to make audiences feel as if they may have wandered into Goodfellas-lite.

Camille Claudel was not only Rodin’s student, mistress and muse, but a talented sculptor in her own right. Some years after the two parted, her mental health started to decline. In 1913 her family committed her first to a psychiatric hospital, then an asylum; but their actions appear to have been needless and cruel, the family persistently ignoring doctors’ recommendations that Camille be released. She would remain locked up until her death, some 30 years later. 

Bruno Dumont’s outstanding film charts three days near the start of Claudel’s incarceration in the asylum, during which time she eagerly awaits a visit from her brother Paul, in the hope that he will agree to her release. Despite its bleak subject and the director’s trademark austerity in plotting and presentation, this is the Frenchman’s most accessible film to date, distinguished by a performance from Juliette Binoche of heartbreaking intensity.

Dumont (Humanité, Hadewijch, Outside Satan) is known for his use of non-professional actors, whose lack of vigour somehow suits his morose stories. He’s rarely ventured towards professionals, and certainly never one of the standing of Binoche; she approached him, with Claudel conceived as the subject for their collaboration.

What follows is a neat conjoining of custom and departure for the director, a star sharing the screen not just with non-professionals, but women who are actually suffering from mental illness, their real-life nurses playing the sisters in charge of Claudel and her fellow patients. Such background is worth knowing, because the result is remarkable.

The action is derived from Camille’s diaries and medical records, and depicts the isolation of an intelligent, passionate and largely cognisant woman (whose most pronounced condition is paranoia) living amongst others with far more serious mental problems. We hear her ponder her “confinement and idleness”, not knowing why she is confined, wondering bitterly, “is the joke going to last long?” She walks the grounds and surrounding countryside, usually alone, sometimes reluctantly in the company of others, unable or unwilling to practice her art (psychologically, it may be a fine line between the two), her paranoia occasionally getting the better of her, particularly at meal times, which adopt an almost comical routine of suspicion.

With Binoche guiding the interactions with her unlikely co-stars, presumably improvising, her scenes with them are alternately heartwarming and heartrending, depending on Camille’s state of mind, and the sympathy or hostility she feels, at the time, for her companions. One such is played by a young woman named Alexandre Lucas (pictured above, with Binoche) whose beautiful soul beams through her disability;  her character’s fondness for Camille – at one moment savagely rejected – is terribly affecting.

You might think the approach would be limiting, yet director and star conjure everything we need to know about the psychological torture Claudel must have gone through, the loneliness and desperation, the frustration of an artist no longer able to make art and a human being no longer trusted to exist in the world. There is little told of her history, her previous life; Binoche in close-up is all we need.

Dumont occasionally switches to the man on whom Camille’s hopes of liberation rest, the loathsome Paul (stage actor, Jean-Luc Vincent, pictured right, in a rare screen performance). As Paul makes his way through the countryside towards her, we listen to the internal monologue of a writer and egotist, whose religious fervour – buoyed by self-justifying hypocrisy – doesn’t include sympathy or compassion for his sister.

It’s a tough subject, brilliantly conceived, beautifully photographed and acted. It feels impossible to single out the “better” or “best” performances of Binoche’s career, she’s so consistent. For me, this bears comparison with her work in Three Colours: Blue, another performance marked by emotions passing through and across her  face – joy turning to despair, eager anticipation succumbing to fear – like the sun competing with passing clouds.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Camille Claudel 1915