The first in Joachim Trier’s masterful “Oslo Trilogy” is an electric and affecting dual portrait of two writer friends whose ambitions are challenged by the trials of life. Saturated with punk playfulness, Reprise explores the tantalizing promise—and peril—of fulfilling your creative aspirations.

Erik and Philip have been best friends since childhood and both want to become writers. While Erik’s manuscript is refused by the publishers as lacking in talent, Philip is eagerly welcomed and overnight becomes a young star in Norway’s literary scene. Soon, their young dreams clash with reality.

tarring Isabelle Adjani in a four-way love affair, Merchant-Ivory’s impeccable adaptation invokes the sordid glamor of Jean Rhys’s eponymous novel. Waltzing through cozy cafés and sexy nightclubs, Quartet dines on the bohemian hedonism of 1920s Paris while exposing the callousness of the idle rich.

In bohemian 1920s Paris, young writer Marya finds herself destitute when her art dealer husband Stephan is imprisoned. Rich art patron Heidler and his artist wife Lois offer to take Marya in for the duration of Stephan’s sentence. Heidler soon seduces Marya—and Lois painfully accepts his infidelity.

A reworking of Louis Malle’s New Wave classic The Fire Within, Joachim Trier’s Cannes hit about a young man’s fade-out is a triumph of sensitive insight and observation, a smart, sharp portrait that even finds within its heavy subject matter the chance for warmth.

Recovering drug addict Anders is given a day’s leave from his rehab center to apply for a job in the city. Over the course of one day and night, he tries to reconnect with his old friends and family in Oslo, where the ghosts of his past mistakes wrestle with the hope to see some future by morning.

On the verge of turning thirty, Julie is faced with a series of choices that force her to pursue new perspectives on her life in contemporary Oslo. Over the course of four years, she navigates love affairs and existential uncertainty as she starts deciding who she wants to become.