Things kick off simply, if not innocently, in Céline Sciamma’s masterful period film.

Once in a while there is a work of art so specific, so complex, so new in its oldness and old in its newness, that it moves the craft, our craft, to another level of seeing.

There's almost no single moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire that couldn't be captured, mounted, and hung on a wall as high art.

With elements of the surreal and supernatural dotted in among the erotic, the film's panoply of extraordinary images adds up to a haunting melancholic masterclass.