This Thursday, Jan. 23 at BUFS, escape to Portugal for the intergenerational family drama, Frankie.

Frankie (Isabelle Huppert), a matriarch and movie star facing the end of her life, assembles her loved ones for what will likely be the last time in Sintra, Portugal. She invites her son Paul, her stepdaughter Sylvia with her husband and daughter, her current husband and her ex. She also brings her friend Ilene (Marisa Tomei) in the hopes that she might hit it off with Paul, but she isn’t expecting Ilene to bring her lover (Greg Kinnear), or for him to propose, leaving Frankie’s final scheme hanging in the balance.

“The scenes that Sachs creates among Huppert, Tomei (who also featured in Sachs’s Love Is Strange), and Kinnear (a standout in Little Men) show the writer-director at his best, striking a balance between melancholy and wit,” says David Sims in The Atlantic. “Huppert can communicate Frankie’s imperiousness in her sleep, but she excels at capturing the loss of control felt by a woman who, after blazing an impressive trail through life, is struggling to come to terms with the impotence of death.”

Nominated for the Palme D’Or at Cannes, the film also features a supporting cast studded with top-notch character actors including Brendan Gleeson, Vinette Robinson, Jérémie Renier and Pascal Greggory.

Tickets for all BUFS shows are available at the Film House in the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre (PAC) on the evening of screenings. General admission is $9.50 or $7 for Film House members, plus tax. Free BUFS memberships are also available on screening nights.

Visit the BUFS web page for this season’s selection, with additional titles being added to the calendar as they are confirmed. Look for the red B that indicates a BUFS-hosted screening.

For more than 40 years, BUFS has been bringing the best in independent and art house cinema to the Niagara region. The society is supported by the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Brock.