The French-language debut from Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the director of Drive My Car, which got a best picture nomination in 2021. The film’s stars Virginie Efira, a Belgian actress once best known for comedies, and Tao Okamoto, a Japanese actress with a number of Hollywood credits, shared the best actress prize at Cannes for All of a Sudden. It’s an unconventional adaptation but no less powerful for it: Hamaguchi wrote the screenplay based on a book of letters written between a philosopher on the brink of death and a medical anthropologist. In All of a Sudden Efira plays the leader of a French nursing home trying out a bold new theory for ensuring quality of life. A chance encounter with Okamoto’s Mari, an avant garde theater producer who is dying of cancer, sparks a series of long conversations between the two women about care, capitalism, and life itself.