Released in the USA by Music Box Films on the Friday prior to the strategic July Fourth weekend, the latest film by Anne Fontaine has achieved an outstanding performance in North America after two months in theaters.
Agnus Dei / The Innocents is currently coming close to crossing the $1 million mark at the North American box office ($965,000 to date).
Anne Fontaine's film, produced by Éric & Nicolas Altmayer (Mandarin Production) and sold by Playtime, has enjoyed a highly positive critical reception in the USA. The Wrap was full of praise: "The dialogue is superb, both powerful and understated, bolstering the emotional authenticity of the performances." According to the free cultural weekly magazine, The Village Voice, "If there's a war movie we haven't seen enough of yet, it's one told from the female perspective, one that further obscures who the good guys and bad guys really are." Variety, which first discovered the film at Sundance in January, confirms it as Anne Fontaine's best film in recent years, comparing it to Of Gods and Men: "Although less austere and ultimately more sentimental than Xavier Beauvois' film [...], Fontaine’s film (which might have been titled Of Gods and Women) unfolds at a revealingly slow pace and with an appreciable sense of mystery."
Agnus Dei is Anne Fontaine's second major success in North America, after Coco Before Chanel, which took over $6 million in ticket sales.
Fontaine is currently in production on Reinventing Marvin, a screen adaptation of the best-selling debut novel En finir avec Eddie Bellegueule by Edouard Louis, starring Finnegan Oldfield and Isabelle Huppert.
