WHATEVER happened to the French-Romanian filmmaker Radu Mihaileanu?

Long absent from the screen, after taking the world cinema stage by storm with his 1998 war drama Train Of Life, he returns at last with The Concert (15).

Showing at City Screen, York, from today for a week, it stars the beguiling Inglourious Basterds star Mélanie Laurent and French screen legend Miou-Miou in a story that begins 30 years ago, when famed conductor Andrei Simoinovitch Filpov (Aleksei Guskov) was relieved of his duties after hiring Jewish musicians to play in the Bolshoi Ballet.

Shunned by his peers, Filipov assembles his own orchestra of has-been musicians and embarks on an audacious journey that will lead him to re-claim his crown in Paris.

A second French film, Catherine Corsini’s Lady Chatterley-style love story Leaving (15), also opens at City Screen today. Kristin Scott Thomas follows up her earlier French-speaking role in I’ve Loved You So Long by playing Suzanne, a bored bourgeois housewife who decides to go back to work after growing tired of her monotonous middle-class life in the south of France.

Husband Samuel (Yvan Attal) creates a consulting room in their back garden for her to practise her physiotherapy, but soon his gesture backfires. Ivan (Sergi López), the man hired to help set up the studio, starts to pursue Suzanne, kick-starting a fiery relationship that leads to violence and chaos within the family dynamic. Frustratingly for the 9 to 5 among you, all but one of the screenings will start at midday (today, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday), but there is a 6pm show on Sunday.

For tickets, phone 0871 902 5726 or book online at picturehouses.co.uk