Thomas Bidegain, the screenwriter of well-renowned French films A Prophet, Rust and Bone and this year’s Palme D’Or winner Dheepan, makes his directorial debut with Les Cowboys, which might be the first “French western” I’ve heard of. In what might be a cheeky acknowledgment of his appropriation of the Western, Bidegain opens his film at a country-western festival in France. Alain (Francois Damiens) and his family attend, with Alain having a ball as he sings “Tennessee Waltz” for the crowd and dances with his 16-year-old daughter Kelly (Iliana Zabeth). But when it’s time to leave Kelly is nowhere to be found, and after several days of searching a letter written by Kelly comes in the mail saying she’s run off with her Muslim boyfriend Ahmed. Kelly tells her family not to look for her, but Alain never stops searching, taking his son Kid (Finnegan Oldfield) with him throughout Europe as he spends years trying to track down Kelly.

It’s surprising that Bidegain’s screenplay turns out to be the weakest link in Les Cowboys given his writing background. While he’s undeniably inspired by Hollywood classics like The Searchers, it’s like he’s confused a basic and lacking approach with a classical one. Alain is a one-note character, more or less repeating himself throughout (find a lead, aggressively interrogate people about his daughter, freak out, get another lead, wash rinse repeat). Damiens does a fine job as Alain, but his intimidating presence vanishes as the monotony of his character sinks in. And then Bidegain, possibly aware of his own story going nowhere, suddenly changes things up by switching the focus to Kid in the second half as he heads off alone to Afghanistan. It would be a nice change of pace and setting if Oldfield didn’t have the charisma of a wooden block, mostly keeping his face expressionless and his mouth shut while travelling with an American he encounters on his trip (John C. Reilly in a wasted cameo). At least the scenery looks quite nice, thanks to cinematographer Arnaud Portier.

But if Bidegain wants viewers to join in on his film’s long, plodding journey, he has to make his characters worth following. Alain and Kid are too underdeveloped and stale to bother caring about, and even though Les Cowboys shouldn’t really be about the mystery surrounding Kelly, her whereabouts become the most involving element of the film. Putting aside Bidegain’s other problems—like his awkward attempt to shoehorn 9/11 into the narrative—Les Cowboys never gets out of the gate because, as a character-based drama, it fails to provide a single character worth investing in.

The 2015 Cannes Film Festival jury shocked everyone when they awarded Jacques Audiard the Palme d’Or for his social realist drama turned hyper-violent thriller, Dheepan. This decision was met with very mixed reactions on social media. People seemed to be confused about why a film that didn’t receive much buzz when it premiered during the festival was taking the top prize. Others were just surprisingly pleased. I fall into the latter category, as Dheepan is an extraordinary achievement on a number of levels: its concentration on the frightening reality of escaping one war zone for another, as well as its simultaneous micro-level commentary on French poverty and macro-level commentary on civil war in Sri Lanka (or simply civil war, in general).

Dheepan tells the story of its titular character and his attempt to rebuild his life after his wife and children were killed in Sri Lanka. He, a woman he meets at random, and an abandoned nine-year-old girl they found come together as a faux family in an attempt to escape the Sri Lankan civil war for a better life in France. Unfortunately, the area of France that they move into is dominated by gangs who use the territory for distribution of narcotics and other illegal activities. Dheepan is forced to sit back and watch as the environment he has brought his makeshift family unit into becomes more and more dangerous, and eventually he reaches his breaking point.

Although there are hints of Audiard’s fascination with international politics in his 2008 film, Un Prophete, Dheepan doesn’t feel like anything the director has done before. The biggest reason for this his choice to portray Sri Lankans in a French environment, rather than the French themselves as Audiard has primarily done in the past.

If one is going to discuss Dheepan, it’s difficult to do so without commenting on its explosive ending. The film retains great suspense throughout, as it implies the family’s eventually going to get mixed up in some sort of intense or violent encounter, but it’s hard to predict the final fifteen minutes. Those who have seen Un Prophete know that Audiard is capable of executing abrupt and graphic acts of violence in truly shocking ways, but he takes this idea to its extreme in Dheepan. No other film that I saw at Cannes this year affected me in such a visceral way.

That being said, it’s difficult to make up one’s mind on an ethical level about the penultimate sequence. In war there is often no clear “good” side, and knowing who to cheer for can be difficult. But somehow, Audiard convinces us to love the main character even when he is delusional or violent or straddling the line between protagonist and anti-hero. It’s a complex ending and one that will take repeat viewings to fully understand. But it’s not a perfect film. Dheepan nearly forgets about one of its characters in the third act and the ending feels a bit out-of-place despite being refreshing and uplifting. However, the minor flaws are completely overshadowed by everything that it does right. Dheepan fully deserves the enormous accolade it received and is sure to continue receiving as the rest of the world is exposed to it.

In what will more than likely go down as the biggest disappointment of the year in film for me, Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone isn’t something that I would label as bad but I certainly couldn’t call it very good either. After three straight works of brilliance, this is definitely a step back for him as a filmmaker, though more than anything else that’s due to his screenplay (he co-wrote again with Thomas Bidegain, his collaborator on A Prophet). There isn’t much to fault here when it comes to Audiard’s direction; Rust and Bone is a visceral punch to the gut at times, and there’s a palpable physicality in the lives of these two characters which he is able to capture with a strength that few others would be able to succeed at on this level.

No, the problem here is in the writing, which is all over the place in terms of its narrative, its characters and its authenticity. Rust and Bone centers on the relationship between the brutish Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) and the recently crippled Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), the two coming together early on after a horrific accident that leaves her without her legs. Whenever the film is focusing on the relationship between these two, it is absolutely on point. The contrast between the incredibly physical presence of Ali and the emotional struggles that Stephanie faces when her physicality is taken away from her is poignant, and both actors deliver phenomenal performances.

Schoenaerts, who exploded onto the scene with his powerful work in Bullhead, has an immediately intimidating approach that makes you fear him but he fuses this character with so much heart that it’s hard not to root for him, even when he’s making mistakes when it comes to his career or parenting his young son. Cotillard provides the perfect contrast, matching that physical, internal approach with a devastating rawness that is absolutely heartbreaking. Audiard manages his leads well and has two actors who deliver in every moment, shining individually but even brighter when they are able to share the screen. It’s when the two are split up that the script begins to fall apart, with subplots that don’t add much of anything, thin supporting characters and glaring narrative contrivances.

Even with the extensive 155-minute running time of the much more subtle A Prophet, Audiard created a pace that move it along so well that it never dragged for a moment, but running at a brisker 120-minute duration this one feels like it runs at least an hour longer. Rust and Bone ratchets the drama up to a level that is strangely aggressive for Audiard, hitting the audience far too loud at times without ever achieving the kind of emotional strength that Read My Lips or The Beat That My Heart Skipped were able to. For the first time, Audiard lets the melodrama control his picture more, presenting it in a way that embraces that as opposed to presenting the more gritty, authentic approach that he has shown such skill within.

This becomes especially troublesome in the film’s final act, where the contrivances are taken to an eye-rolling extreme that actively works against that raw emotional anguish Cotillard and Schoenaerts bring to their roles. Rust and Bone probably has a little more going for it than it does against, but with Audiard’s magnificent track record going into it, the inconsistencies in the writing are surprising and very disappointing. The two leads deliver incredible work, but this is a prime example of how much a bad script can impact an overall picture.