Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard (who played Edith Piaf in La Vie en rose) stars in this gritty, moving and emotionally raw love story from Cannes Grand Prix winner Jacques Audiard (Un prophète)

French director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) is one of the most accomplished filmmakers now working, blending taut storytelling with a subtle but scrupulously detailed visual style. His new film Rust and Bone, which has already set box-office records in France, boasts the same carefully wrought sensibility. Broke, homeless, and drifting, Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) scrambles to make a living for himself and his young son. Ali focuses on his burgeoning career as a back-alley boxer, dreaming of making it big as a mixed martial artist. Taking work as a nightclub bouncer, he crosses paths with Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), who works as a killer-whale trainer at an amusement park, commanding the beasts with an ease absent from her interpersonal relations. After Stéphanie suffers a terrible accident, the unlikely pair falls into a tender, tentative courtship. Audiard constructs this character study with masterful precision, blending naturalism with dreamily impressionistic visions and tense, staccato cutting. His two leads generate an irresistible chemistry in their strange romance: Schoenaerts is that rare combination of imposing presence and vulnerability, while Cotillard gives a bold performance, emotionally raw and achingly soulful. An unconventional and deeply felt study of human frailty, Rust and Bone proves Audiard’s most assured cinematic turn to date. (France, 2012, 120 min, color, 35mm, Rated R, In French with English subtitles • Director/Co-Writer: Jacques Audiard • Co-Writer: Thomas Bidegain • Cast: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts)

“Cotillard is astonishing, as is Schoenaerts as a boxer who helps restore her sexual identity. Audiard’s hypnotic film means to shake you, and does.” -Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE

“Rust and Bone is a strong, emotionally replete experience.” – A.O. Scott, NEW YORK TIMES

“The masterful writer-director Jacques Audiard draws vivid performances from Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts for this gripping French romance about the body and the soul.” – J.R. Jones, CHICAGO READER

“A movie that defies categorization, slips convenient genre boundaries, and leaves viewers feeling haunted and inspired in equal measure.” – Ann Hornaday, WASHINGTON POST

“Romantic but pitiless, fearlessly emotional as well as edgy, Rust and Bone is a powerhouse.” - Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES

“This is a sensuously assembled, almost tactile film that earns its redemption and sears itself in memory.” – Chris Vognar, DALLAS MORNING NEWS

“Audiard, who made the uncompromising prison saga A Prophet, is like a gritty, realist Douglas Sirk – throwing his characters into whirlwind scenarios that are filled with big emotions and fateful turns of events.” – Steven Rea, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

“An unusual and unsettling love story, Rust and Bone shows once again that Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard is as close to perfect as any female has ever been onscreen.” – Linda Barnard, TORONTO STAR

“Rust and Bone is a movie about letting go of shame and making way for the advent of pleasure. Let that be your guide to watching it as well.” – Dana Stevens, SLATE

“The entire shebang is like a Frenchified homage to the tough-tender universe of everything from The Champ to the Bogart-Bacall duets.” – Peter Rainer, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

“An effective and moving drama about the strength of the human spirit and the will to survive.” – Colin Covert, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

“Rust and Bone takes its characters — and us — someplace touching and hard fought.” – Lisa Kennedy, DENVER POST

“By turns brutal and tender, Rust and Bone is a bullet train of heightened melodrama that refuses to derail.” -Rick Groen, GLOBE AND MAIL

“You should just go see it, because it has a visual command and powerful narrative undertow all its own.” – Andrew O’Hehir, SALON

“The movie takes a contrived-sounding romance and turns it into a visceral, idiosyncratic exploration of battered bodies in search of souls.” – Jon Frosch, THE ATLANTIC

“It’s a marvelous movie, gorgeous and thoughtful and deeply felt.” – Linda Holmes, NPR