If French writer-director Martin Provost were the head of a fashion brand, it would be the kind of house that turns out exceptionally well-made, classically designed upper-mid-market gear for an older clientele who know what they like and don’t want any silly logos or bizarre color combinations. It’s chic, if just a touch safe, outfits that maybe nod cursorily toward contemporary silhouettes and trends but won’t look dated in five years’ time.

Indeed, his latest, Love Lessons, is like a cinematic look book for Soeur or Sézane, the major-name female cast (including Emmanuelle Devos, Chiara Mastroianni and Carole Bouquet) dressed in elegant linen frocks and jaunty, faintly maritime separates that suit the seaside vibe of Dieppe, in Normandy, where the story takes place. If it were a perfume, it would smell of ozone, salt and rosemary. What the story is actually about almost doesn’t matter — just enjoy the quiet luxury of it all, with the ever-endearing Fabrice Luchini in the lead doing yet another bumbling, bourgeois gentleman of a certain age.

If you really must know what the plot is, then suffice to say it’s a dating movie with senior citizens, a sex comedy for the post-menopausal set but one where we never see any actual sex. Also, there’s no mention of needing Viagra or lubricant. But who needs such fripperies when you have the aphrodisiacs of beautiful property, elegant clothes and a steady stream of amorous literary quotations in such abundance?

Luchini plays Emile, a beloved high-school French teacher whom we first meet giving his very last class. His retirement starts the moment the school bell rings. Naturally, his lesson on Jean de La Fontaine’s fable about “Love and Folly” will be prescient of events to follow. When Emile gets home, he finds a letter from his wife of many years, Barbara (whom we never meet), who has left him for some guy with a camper van.

Emile is unsurprisingly upset, but not exactly crushed. The last question a student asked him was whether he still loves his wife, but Emile never answered as the bell went off. His sister Perrine (Helene Alexandridis), who looks after their aged mother (Evelyne Istria) in a beautiful cliffside house that may or may not be in danger of falling into the sea (metaphor alert), is not surprised Barbara skedaddled. She and Emile had little in common, and he really never got over his first love as a teen, Lala.

Speaking of Lala, it just so happens she has finally returned to Dieppe after years away working as a flight attendant, and although she’s in her 60s she’s played by Devos (star of Provost’s 2013 hit Violette) so she’s still a knockout. Provost playfully choreographs the action so that she and Emile keep missing each other by mere meters as they circumambulate around Dieppe. Lala is there winding down the affairs of her late father, while Emile is checking out whether he likes bathing in the sea with a gaggle of locals the same age, for example, or having a fun fling with animal-rights activist Nadege (Bouquet, rocking a head of tidy cornrows that somehow neither looks daft nor too culturally inappropriate for a white lady).

Because of the rule of threes, there’s one more potential love object in the mix for Emile to consider: Audrey (Mastroianni), a woman who just found out her husband has been having an affair. Distraught, she’s left him and her two teenage sons to be alone in Dieppe, but she accidentally runs into Emile while he’s putting books in the free book box on the road. His recommendation that she read Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (good choice) helps her to discover a love of literature (less convincing) and then she takes a job working as a housekeeper at his mother’s place. Soon, she and Emile find themselves attracted to each other, but then he meets Lala again and that passion flares up once more.

Viewers well versed in the ways of romantic fiction won’t be that surprised by how this little pas de quatre works out as Emile dithers and deliberates over each woman’s charms. Meanwhile, they work out their own assessments of what they want in life and the whole thing comes to a satisfying, reassuringly muted conclusion. Throughout, the film will cut to one of Emile’s former students as they recite a poem or a chunk of prose straight to camera, works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Yourcenar or Arthur Rimbaud, among others. Presumably the display is meant to reassure viewers that the good literary taste of their generation will survive into the next, but it feels a bit more like a recital put on for the grandparents by kids bribed by the elders. But like so much else here, it’s all about posing and pretend, not actual substance.  

David Krumholtz is clarifying where he stands in his career after announcing he was taking an “indefinite break” from acting.

The Supergirl and Oppenheimer actor took to social media to explain what led to the decision.

“Firstly, I am very well. And I feel very loved,” he shared in an Instagram post. “Secondly, I never used the word ‘retiring’ or ‘quitting.’ Instead, I said that I decided to put my career on hold.”

He continued, “I don’t expect anyone to understand, but the outpouring of support for my decision has been deeply heartwarming. I am wildly grateful, as more than one of my biggest dreams have come true as a result of being an actor. Grateful to all who support and believe in me.”

Krumholtz said he is in a moment “where the weight of those dreams and ambitions has become surprisingly oppressive,” adding, “That’s a me problem, not a Hollywood as a whole problem. There are no rules that guarantee success, but I know this: an amazing career in this business consists of a small handful of triumphs, but not without a mountain of disappointments. I love my mountain of disappointments, I do, but I’m human and my mountain is starting to sting more than it used to.”

“Need time to figure that out, let it heal,” he added. “My mental health is vital to my family. My career has run the gamut. I’m in disbelief. But I find myself at a crossroads between the inherent self involvement being a professional actor requires, and a burning desire to give more of myself to others in need, in whatever way I can. And so, for the time being, I’m pursuing that goal. There’s still more work to come. Stuff to be seen. And as always, I really hope you enjoy what I’ve put out there. Just,… gimme a sec.”

Krumholtz previously took to Threads to say he was “frustrated, fed up, [and] fried,” posting that he had decided to put his acting career on hold.

“I kinda sorta put my acting career on hold the other day. It’s been something I’ve been petrified to do for years,” Krumholtz said in a now-deleted post on Threads. “Specifically, the fear was that I’d go broke and not be able to handle being out of the game. But I sent the definitive email.”

Read Krumholtz’s Instagram post below.

The good news about Insidious: Out of the Further, the sixth entry in the hit horror film franchise created by Leigh Whannell and James Wan, is that it deals with a new set of victims. After all, we can all agree that the poor Lambert family has been through enough in the previous installments.

The bad news about the new Insidious movie is that, well, it’s still an Insidious movie. Which means that we have to sit through the spectacle of some unlucky individuals dealing with the Further, that purgatorial netherworld inhabited by demons and the dead that forms the basic mythology of the series.

It’s never a good sign when a horror film stops dead in its tracks to explain things to a main character and, by extension, the audience. But that’s exactly what happens here when the central character Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor), a single mother with a young daughter, visits Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), a tattoo artist and part-time medium. Clare conjures up the spirit of now-deceased recurring character Elise Rainier (series mainstay Lin Shaye) to explain exactly what the hell is going on with Clare’s mysterious encounters with three ghostly-looking alta kockers who show up at the most inopportune times. By the time the lengthy scene is over, you’ll wish you had been taking notes.

It turns out that Gemma, whose mother died under horrific circumstances when she was a little girl (an incident harrowingly depicted in the opening sequence), is not only someone who has the ability to enter the Further, which is bad enough, but also a “Courier,” meaning that she can transport things from there to the physical world. It’s a rare talent that greatly interests Cyrus (Sam Spruell), a cult-leader entity who very much wants to escape his confines. To that end, he enlists the services of the aforementioned elderly trio, his Acolytes, to move in next door to Gemma and move things along.   

Director-screenwriter Jacob Chase, who has experience with this sort of material thanks to his 2020 horror film Come Play, establishes tension in the opening moments and steadily ratchets it up from there. He certainly knows his way around jump scares, both of the cheap variety (cue the sudden loud noises!) and the more thoughtful kind. His skills are evident in the film’s two most effective sequences — the first involving Gemma venturing into a pillow fort constructed by her daughter Maya (Island Austin, very convincing at looking utterly terrified) that turns into an endless labyrinth featuring demons at every corner.

In the second, Gemma, a dentist by trade, attends to an elderly patient, one of the Acolytes, who clearly has not been paying attention to oral hygiene. The ensuing encounter, probably the most gruesome cinematic dental scene since Marathon Man, will scare you into scheduling a deep cleaning post-haste.  

Otherwise, Insidious: Out of the Further proves routine in its elaborate plot machinations that remind you how tiresome a place the Further can be. There are plenty of Easter egg references to the previous films, including the reappearance of numerous demonic entities and the Red Door that serves as an entranceway to the Further’s various portals.

The most notable carryover, of course, is Shaye’s now iconic character of psychic paranormal investigator Elise, who didn’t let her death in the original 2011 film deter her from appearing in all the follow-ups. She pops up here again to guide Gemma through her travails, carrying a lantern like an otherworld Diogenes and clearly taking no crap from a spectral punk like Cyrus. When Gemma thanks her after being rescued at one point, Elise casually responds, “It’s what I do.”

After a while the film’s sustained creepiness gives way to self-parody, with all the grotesquely made-up performers portraying the demonic figures starting to look like exhausted Comic-Con attendees after a very long weekend. It all mainly serves to indicate that this is a series that has long reached the point of steadily diminishing returns.