Faces Places

A late-career triumph of lovingly handcrafted humanism, Agnès Varda’s Academy Award–nominated penultimate film sees the octogenarian director joining forces with the thirty-something street photographer JR. Crisscrossing rural France in their roving camera-mobile—a truck that produces larger-than-life portraits of the people they meet, which are then pasted onto local walls—the pair encounter an array of farmers, former miners, dockworkers, and others whose stories form a collage of a country where meaningful traditions persist in the face of encroaching modernity. A detour-rich road movie, a charming intergenerational buddy film, and an ode to artisans of all stripes, Faces Places finds Varda making new memories while revisiting old ones, yielding what is ultimately a bittersweet, puckishly profound reflection on the ephemeral nature of art, relationships, and life itself. (Criterion)