Film: Guillaume Nicloux's "Valley of Love." Starring Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardie. 2016

Needing to come to terms with the suicide of their adult son, Isabelle and Gérard meet each other at Death Valley. It is many years after their divorce and they are fulfilling the final wish of their son. Though they don't understand the purpose of their actions and only hope for the impossible - that their son might come back to life - they slowly experience transformation. Anguish chips away at their defenses; they gradually reveal the intimate details of their current lives. We sense that they need each other despite their emotional roadblocks.
This is a brilliant film that captures the wide range of ambiguity that's left after messy human relationships have ended. The heat, wind, sun, tedium, fear: every scene can be understood as an outward, physicalized expression of this couple's emotional pain, their state of slow timeless endurance, their desperate expectations of the magical. The director has created a beautiful and safe place for the audience to experience catharsis.  -- dp