Expansive, breathtaking, and thrillingly unclassifiable, Holy Motors is writer-director Leos Carax’s first feature since Pola X (1999), and only his fifth in three decades. Both a lamentation for and celebration of cinema, the film opens with Carax himself, walking down a long corridor to a movie-theater balcony that overlooks a roomful of motionless, stony-silent spectators. After this dream-like prologue, we are introduced to the movie’s main character, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant, Carax’s frequent collaborator), a professional chameleon who inhabits nearly 12 different personas over the course of a single day.
