TITANE is a blast. From the opening scene it just says: here’s what I think of your sentimentality. Euro-cinema doing what it has always done best: being high fashion, provocative, and wildly innovative — The Neon Demon, Irreversible, Enter the Void. A genre mash-up, kind of a Rosemary’s Baby (defiant homage to Polanski?) involving (uh) intimacy with a car. The script might have used a little work, but you’re continually intrigued: stunningly beautiful, ludicrously violent, unpredictable set-pieces – choreographed almost like a musical. Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.

Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.