--- description: Find out why Holy Motors (2012) was selected for the list title: 100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades: Holy Motors (2012) image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6c28b928e3a2f549/698a3ef747ca3843db3bafe6/top-100-movies-2010s-holymotors.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Jul 26, 2023 # _Holy Motors_ (2012) by [TIME Staff](/author/time-staff/) ## TIME Staff Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close  Denis Lavant in Holy Motors. Denis Lavant in Holy Motors.Courtesy Mongrel Media Movies often have meaning beyond their components. We stammer to explain what a film is about, only to find words drifting away from us. All we know is that a movie has picked us up, like an Oz-style tornado, and left us somewhere we didn’t expect to be. That’s the effect of Leos Carax’s extraordinary, exhilarating and not-fully-sane [_Holy Motors_](https://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/19/holy-motors-leos-carax-flirts-with-a-cinematic-masterpiece/ "undefined"), an ode to the life of the imagination as it’s reflected in art, and in cinema specifically. The magnificently acrobatic French actor [Denis Lavant](https://time.com/5720170/best-movie-performances-2010s-decade/ "undefined") plays a mysterious gent named Monsieur Oscar, who’s whisked off to his job every day in an elegant stretch limo (its driver is the equally elegant Edith Scob, who, as a young woman, played the disfigured daughter in Georges Franju’s _Eyes Without a Face_). Oscar’s job, as far as we can discern it, is to play-act: One moment he’s a killer for hire, the next he’s a dying man attended by his grief-stricken niece. At another point he’s the ex-lover, perhaps, of a mysterious woman in a film-noir trench coat, played by a pensive Kylie Minogue. Then he’s a raging gnome in a green velvet suit, invading a fashion shoot in Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Set in the most beautiful Paris imaginable, a city of silvery graveyards and shuttered department stores teeming with art nouveau specters, _Holy Motors_ is exuberant and melancholic at once, an expression of everything movies can mean when they take us to places beyond meaning. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/100-best-movies/6296122/holy-motors-2012/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/100-best-movies/6296122/holy-motors-2012/"},"headline":"Holy Motors (2012)","datePublished":"2023-07-26T11:32:40.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-03T00:17:30.458Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/100-best-movies/6296122/holy-motors-2012/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6c28b928e3a2f549/698a3ef747ca3843db3bafe6/top-100-movies-2010s-holymotors.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"creator":"TIME Staff","articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6c28b928e3a2f549/698a3ef747ca3843db3bafe6/top-100-movies-2010s-holymotors.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/100-best-movies/6296122/holy-motors-2012/","name":"Holy Motors (2012)"}}]}] ```