Enthusiasm is to be expected from a postulant nun, but there are worries about Hadewijch (Julie Sokolowski). Fingers knotted around her crucifix, surrendering her starvation diet of bread crusts to ...

With all the cultural focus on religious extremism and faith-driven acts of violence since 9/11, very few films have captured the experience of spiritual ecstasy without parody or condescension. (One ...

To borrow from Rogers & Hammerstein: How do you hold twenty-nine palms upon your hand? The answer is to jam the stems into your stigmata. French pseudo-artsploitation practitioner Bruno Dumont's ...

Drama. Starring Julie Sokolowski and Karl Sarafidis. Directed by Bruno Dumont. (Not rated. 105 minutes. At the Roxie Cinema.) Everybody loves movies. They love movies for the stories and the ...

How do you solve a problem like "Hadewijch"? Sabrina Lechene, left, and Julie Sokolowski in 'Hadewijch.' The titular nun in Bruno Dumont's French drama won't eat, she won't dress warmly -- sacrifices ...

Following in the grand tradition of austere European filmmakers, Bruno Dumont gives religious faith quite a workout in his new film, “Hadewijch.” Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone ...

A former philosophy professor, 52-year-old writer-director Bruno Dumont got his start making commercial films in the ’80s, eventually penning a novel that served as the basis for his extraordinary ...

The disturbing, violent, neo-Bressonian work of the French film-maker Bruno Dumont has waxed and waned in potency over the years: his Life of Jesus (1997) and the bizarrely compelling Humanity (1999) ...

Bruno Dumont’s austere, grimly luminous film “Hadewijch” takes its title from the name of a 13th-century poet, Hadewijch of Antwerp, whose work “The Paradoxes of Love” describes the agony and ecstasy ...

"Hadewijch," an unsettling exploration of a young Christian girl's overwhelming faith in God, is one of Bruno Dumont's more balanced works, an intimate psychological portrait pregnantly poised between ...