It’s fair to guess that American fans of French cinema will expect more from a new film pairing Gerard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve than will the countrymen of these Gallic superstars. Even those of us dedicated to seeing every foreign language film in release haven’t seen much of them in recent years, certainly not like the late 1970s and 1980s, when Depardieu was as familiar a sight as any American actor. Discounting his generally ill-advised supporting appearances in American films, Depardieu hasn’t been seen in a starring role in the US since the 2001 comedy The Closet. Nor can I recall Deneuve on the big screen since 2002’s campy melodrama 8 Women.

Near the end of Steven Zaillian’s new movie version of Robert Penn Warren’s famous novel All the King’s Men, the camera quickly pans down a wall in the Louisiana statehouse, past a relief image of Huey P. Long. The infamous but also idolized Louisiana governor and US senator in the 1930s was the unmistakable inspiration for Warren’s Willie Stark, the ball-of-fire, self-proclaimed champion of the downtrodden poor who climbs and schemes his way out of rural obscurity to the governor’s mansion. Promising to defend his wretchedly deprived supporters from the state’s oligarchy of oil and gas interests and the old landed elite, this dubious people’s tribune builds them roads, schools and hospitals, while aggrandizing himself politically and financially.

If there’s been a more charmingly whimsical, beguilingly inventive feature film in the last decade than Michel Goundry’s The Science of Sleep, I can’t recall it. Goundry’s movie is, in a certain limited sense, one of the most visionary of recent years. It seems to have grown out of an artist’s preoccupations and fancies.