Arnaud Desplechin reaches Shakespearean heights with his intimate yet expansive new film, three varied but interlocking episodes in the life of his hero, with the wondrous experience of first love between Paul (Quentin Dolmaire) and Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet) at its core. An NYFF53 selection.

Catherine Deneuve stars as the imperious, terminally ill matriarch of a wildly dysfunctional family in Desplechin’s hilarious, heartbreaking, stylistically playful holiday fable. An NYFF46 selection.

One of the most beguiling, profound films ever made about the elusive art of acting, Desplechin’s first English-language work stars Summer Phoenix in a fascinating, almost feral performance as a rebellious child of London’s Jewish slums who becomes a celebrated stage actress in late-19th-century London.

In the late 1940s, at the progressive Menninger Clinic, two mavericks (Benicio Del Toro and Mathieu Amalric) bonded, not simply as therapist and patient, but as friends united by their personal experiences as outsiders in Desplechin’s extraordinarily intelligent and moving adaptation of Georges Devereux’s landmark work. An NYFF51 selection.

Desplechin risks everything to achieve the sublime in this wild, consistently surprising seriocomedy starring Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos as ex-lovers who once again cross paths just as their lives are falling apart. An NYFF42 selection.

A young medical student discovers a shriveled, severed head in his luggage, plunging him into a Kafka-esque mystery that touches on the lingering legacy of the Cold War. Desplechin’s feature debut is an absorbing, offbeat thriller set in the shadowy world of international espionage. An NYFF30 selection.

In the Company of Men features a young businessman who goes to ruin trying to outmaneuver his arms-manufacturer father. Desplechin did for Edward Bond’s play what Louis Malle did for Uncle Vanya: the dramatic action itself, shot with a hyperactive handheld camera, alternates with footage of the actors auditioning, rehearsing, and gearing up to perform.

In the wake of a young man’s suicide attempt, his family (played by several Desplechin regulars, including Emmanuelle Devos) gathers in their house in the country, where complex interrelationships play out against a tense vigil. This rarely screened, Jean Vigo Prize–winning featurette is an incisive, poignant examination of the myriad ways we deal with tragedy.