New Delhi, July 30 -- LOS ANGELES - The distance from a ten-minute standing ovation on the Croisette to the Netflix autoplay queue is wider than it sounds. "A Private Life," Rebecca Zlotowski's wry French thriller, crosses that distance today, arriving on the platform fourteen months after its world premiere at the 78th Cannes Film Festival drew one of the Out of Competition section's most prolonged shows of approval.

The film represents something more pointed than a prestige title finding a streaming home. Jodie Foster, the two-time Academy Award winner for "The Silence of the Lambs" and "The Accused," delivers the performance of her later career here, entirely in French, in a genre she has rarely inhabited on screen, alongside one of t...