"White Material" a gripping story of war, delusion/French director Claire Denis

SAN FRANCISCO (Hollywood Reporter) – With "White Material," a taut, unforgettable film, French director Claire Denis returns to Africa. But it's not the place she knew as a child or the comparatively innocent world of her debut feature, "Chocolat."

Instead, the unnamed country where the film's story transpires is a ruined paradise overtaken by poverty and near mythic violence; human savagery has been unleashed and the unspeakable is primed to happen and does.

In her strongest work since "Beau Travail," Denis creates the threat of imminent danger through stillness and austerity rather than action. She's helped immeasurably by an astringent, fully committed performance from her leading lady, a gaunt, impossibly resolute Isabelle Huppert, who is as hard and unforgiving as the patch of land on which her character, a stranger in a strange land, has staked her claim and hacked out an existence.