Film

François Ozon's adaptation of Camus's The Stranger arrives as something rare: a literary film that earns its fidelity. Benjamin Voisin plays Meursault with an unsettling stillness — a man who feels neither compelled to lie nor capable of performing the emotions his world demands. Shot in luminous black-and-white, the film moves with the patient fatalism of the novel, building toward a beach, a gunshot, and a courtroom where indifference becomes its own kind of indictment. In colonial Algiers, a Frenchman who kills an Arab might escape consequence — but a Frenchman who refuses to mourn his mother, or explain himself, or pretend? That, apparently, is unforgivable.