Personal Shopper

Working for the second time with French director Olivier Assayas, Stewart gives a superb performance in this mysterious, compelling story, balanced cleverly between the known and the unknown. Following their work on the excellent, Cesar Award-winning Clouds of Sils Maria, the pair revisits some of the same territory -- the world of elite celebrities and the regular people who work for them. But Personal Shopper steps directly into the supernatural as well, treating it not as a jump-scare gimmick but simply as a reality.

Assayas, whose career has hardly followed any kind of conventional path, successfully tells his story in a most unusual way, with Stewart frequently onscreen alone, yet still creating a tension between a professional exterior and an uncertain interior. A long sequence in which she simply texts should have been a bore, but it's riveting. Meanwhile, the ghost sequences don't follow any kind of traditional genre rules, and, notably, the main character never even sees them. This is a highly uncommon movie, but for bold viewers, it's a bracing, entrancing experience.