which I review for the American Interest:
Many of our most formative experiences—the extremes of pain or joy, moments of terror or sexual ecstasy—can’t be represented within the conventions of so-called realism. In his new film Jeanette, The Childhood of Joan of Arc, writer-director Bruno Dumont (Outside Satan, Hadewijch) attempts to bring his audience inside two of these most personal and disorienting forms of experience: childhood, in which we have not yet learned what to expect from ordinary life; and religious vision, in which those rules are suddenly and terrifyingly overturned.