Growing up on a struggling farm in the middle of rural France is no easy task. But imagine growing up there with an Edward Scissorhands-style back brace strapped to your body at all times, making you walk around town like a pre-teen metal monster.

Such is the sad fate of 11-year-old Christophe, the disjointed young hero of animator Louis Clichy’s moving feature debut, Iron Boy (Le Corset), which premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar and was just picked up by Sony Pictures Classics.

What makes this hand-drawn coming-of-ager stand out from other entries to the genre is Clichy’s attention to detail, especially the way he portays rugged country living in the 1980s, at a time when French agriculture was consolidating and family farms faced extinction. The director, who previously worked on Pixar hits Wall-E and Up, contrasts hard-knocks rustic realism with poetic flights of fancy whenever Christophe manages to escape his world and find his own voice, adding lyricism to an otherwise harsh existence.

Life already seems tough enough for the boy, who lives with his dad (Dimitri Colas), mom (Aurélie Vassort) and rather brutish older brother (Rod Paradot) on a farm that can no longer make ends meet from day to day. It suddenly gets much tougher when Christophe begins to lose his balance, leading to a slew of medical examinations that determine he needs to wear a brace to correct some kind of spinal condition.

Iron Boy is thus born, and he’s definitely not happy about it. Forced to walk around, and even sleep, in a steel straightjacket with his neck permanently raised high, the once carefree Christophe begins to shut down to both his classmates and family. It all seems lost for a while until he crosses paths with Michel (Alexandre Astier), a pipe organ player at his local church who decides to take the boy on as a page-turner, eventually teaching him how to play himself.

The film’s best scenes feature Christophe emerging from his metal shell and into the loftier realms of classical music — in this case the heart-rending melodies of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem (also memorably used by Terence Malick to score The Thin Red Line), which he listens to on a Walkman while riding his bike between home and church. Framing Christophe’s stiff little body against the surrounding green fields or the buildings of his drab provincial enclave, Clichy powerfully captures those eureka moments you have as a kid when your world is suddenly opened up by beauty, and you realize you’re not alone.

Christophe’s life also changes when he meets Clara (Brune Moulin), a rebel girl in his mandatory swimming class who eventually takes a liking to him. As two small-town outlaws, they form a bond that involves, among other things, shoplifting from local businesses and using Christophe’s back brace as a cover whenever the metal detector goes off. Like Michel, Clara pushes her friend to see beyond the limited horizons of his existence, helping him survive a difficult year that he literally spends in bondage.

Despite Christophe’s many efforts to escape his origins, Clichy never portrays his home front as a horrible place, but rather as a loving household torn apart by financial worry and alcoholism. Their younger son’s back issues are indeed the least of the family’s problems, especially when a deal made with a more enterprising neighboring farmer winds up going bust.

This leads to a finale that can strain credulity somewhat, although it brings a level of emotion that feels earned rather than fabricated. Carrying on a very French (and also Belgian and Swiss) tradition of arthouse animation films — Persopolis, My Life as a Courgette, I Lost My Body, etc. — that blend realism and fantasy, autobiography and imagination, Iron Boy offers an honest and graceful depiction of growing up in a working-class household, where nothing is ever handed to you except the will to be free.     

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for Netflix’s The Boroughs.

The Boroughs from Will Matthews and Jeffrey Addiss marks a major reunion between A League of their Own costars Geena Davis and Bill Pullman, who portrayed wife and husband in the 1992 Penny Marshall-directed film about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League.

A League of Their Own starred Davis as Dottie Hinson, catcher for the Rockford Peaches and sister to Lori Petty’s Kit. Pullman appears towards the end of the film as Dottie’s husband Bob, who’s been fighting in World War II, and he had a “very specific” recollection of portraying the discharged soldier.

“I come into it from the war. I’ve been injured. It’s in the script that I got shot in my foot, and I was at rehearsals we had in Chicago. The DP, [Miroslav Ondříček], had a limp, and I thought ‘This is kind of interesting, you know, to be doing these scenes, and he’s kind of there watching rehearsals, and he’s limping. And then in comes Tom Hanks, and I realized he’s decided to have a limp,” Pullman told Deadline. “[I thought] ‘This is a lot of limping people here, I might have to change [my performance].’ Because you know, you’re very self-conscious with your acting. My leg’s not really broken, but I’m acting it, and I just wanted to be as real as possible. So I just stuck with watching what [Miroslav] did and mimicked that.”

The pair had also previously appeared in rom-com The Accidental Tourist (1988), based on Anne Tyler’s 1985 novel of the same name, as Davis pointed out, speaking highly of their “natural connection” from past collaborations. The Thelma & Louise star also recalled working with the “formidable” Alfre Woodard on the ‘80s sitcom Sara. Woodard plays Judy, one of the core six ensemble in The Boroughs.

A textbook example of how good casting lifts all boats, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning features five outstanding up-and-coming British and Irish millennial actors — Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo, Daryl McCormack and Lola Petticrew — at the helm of a strong ensemble alongside well-chosen supporting players and non-professionals. The core quintet play a gang of working-class friends who’ve known each other since high school but are now facing tough adult choices in economically depressed Birmingham, England. Their liquid, nervy, interlocking performances make this British director Clio Barnard’s best feature in a while, although it still doesn’t reach the high-water mark set by her haunting, innovative debut The Arbor.

Adapted by Enda Walsh (Die My Love, Small Things Like These) from a novel by Keiran Goddard, Buildings offers a hearty, quintessentially British-Irish café fry-up of gritty realism, class consciousness and masculine despair, all washed down with tannic, milky mugs of message-bearing melodrama in the tradition of Ken Loach. That sort of package usually plays well in Cannes, where this debuted in the Directors’ Fortnight strand, although the end result is ultimately a bit flat and underwhelming.

The poetically present-tense title refers to the spectacle of high-rise buildings from the mid-20th century being blown to smithereens that the characters here remember observing years ago in their old neighborhood. Indeed, back in the 1990s and 2000s, municipalities across the country were happily demolishing Brutalist eyesores made to house the poor. Authorities often dispensed empty promises that projects would be replaced with better structures, ones less vulnerable to crime, damp and black mold, and not flawed by the kind of dangerous cost-cutting construction that led to London’s Grenfell Tower burning down in 2017, killing 72 people. Just to underscore the point, throughout Barnard and editor Maya Maffioli splice in archive footage of imploding tower blocks collapsing into clouds of dust in which, according to Oli (Lycurgo), he could see the face of the devil himself. But given how often Oli was high on drugs in those days, such Satanic visions probably just meant it was a Tuesday.

True to form, the film opens with Oli getting stratospherically high on booze, cocaine and maybe some heroin at his own birthday party in The Castle, a local pub everyone has been going to for years. (Some of the background artists and characters with only a few lines are locals and staff from an actual Birmingham pub.) The party has reunited Oli with his four oldest friends from school days: longstanding couple Patrick (Boyle, from stage’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), a food courier with a bachelor’s degree, and Shiv (Petticrew, arguably best known for an indelible turn TV’s Say Nothing), a carer for her children and aged mother, who now have two young daughters (Skyla-Rose Steward and Elsie Mae Vitello-Minshull); aspiring developer and permanently simmering pot of rage Conor (McCormack, Wake Up Dead Man); and working-class hero made good Rian (Cole, Peaky Blinders and Skins), who went off to work in finance down in London and now makes more in a month than all the others put together do in a year.

The woozy, choppily edited party sequence, featuring lots of handheld, cellphone-style footage and glassy slow-motion interludes, clearly illustrates the camaraderie and profound affection between the five main characters, who tease and tickle one another like sportive, overgrown puppies. But underneath the smiles, hugs and wisecracks, fissures and fraught moments can be glimpsed, such as a sozzled Conor almost getting into a pointless barroom fight or Rian giving Patrick and Shiv the kind of look you see in a cat just before it knocks a glass vase off the table.

Goddard’s novel is broken up into a series of first-person interior monologues from each of the principles and covers a considerable span of time, and it’s clear Walsh and Barnard have struggled to keep that polyphonic symphony going in the film. The transitions here are sometimes jarring and lack finesse, creating a choppy rhythm as we jump around from character to character. We’re able to gauge how much time has passed by how far along the construction has come on the apartment complex Conor is supervising, seen rising floor by floor in time-lapse, mirroring the demolition footage elsewhere.

It turns out that Rian is partially bankrolling the project, a set of flats which will house either “yuppies” (or, as one old boozer calls them, “yippees”) or a younger generation of clients in need of state-subsidized housing like the protagonists’ parents. Patrick clearly is hoping for the latter, and he says as much in several inebriated speeches full of progressive political rhetoric. But his idealized vision of a past paradise of social cohesion that late-stage capitalism destroyed doesn’t reckon with the snakes that were always there in this imaginary Eden, including a personal betrayal that’s close to home and only comes slithering out in a moment of drunken weakness.

Boyle puts extra meat on Patrick’s bare bones with a soulful performance that meshes precisely with Petticrew’s turn as the slight-in-stature but formidably strong-willed Shiv. The two actors both hail from Northern Ireland but nail the tricky nasal tones of the “Brummie” accent, as do the rest of the main cast, none of whom are from the Midlands. It’s obvious that there was space created in the production process for the cast to build a sense of fraternal solidarity through improvisation and spontaneity on set, an ease that comes through in the way they interact via dance and touch. But that physicality has to do a lot of heavy lifting to persuade us that it’s plausible that these five very different people would still be pals at this stage in their lives.

Although they’re meant to be all roughly the same age, Conor and Oli look like they’re from different generations, even though the actors are only five years apart. That partly stems from the way McCormack projects the gravitational pull of a man grappling with forces and feelings far beyond his control, which prevent him from seeking help when everything starts to go south. All sweet-natured Oli needs to worry about, apart from getting over some major addictions, is how to make sure he’s got enough money to pay for dog food for his adorable mutt, Lulu. Rian is similarly hamstrung by inarticulacy and masculine angst, but his storyline feels the least convincing, as if fashioned only to prove money can’t buy happiness, even if Cole convincingly suggests unspoken depths.  

Barnard has always coaxed layered, thoughtful performances from her cast and knows this kind of battered but unbowed community like the back of her hand. But the drama here feels too diagrammatic, foretelling a tragic fate from the first scene onward as everyone parties down like their lives depend on it. You just know that before the end credits roll one of them will have lost their raging battle with the dying of the light, and just as there will be hangovers in the morning, there will be a funeral wake in that very same pub.