With the feel of a period film (it’s not one), André Cayatte’s Le dossier noir (US: Black Dossier) is a multi-layered mystery that winds through a large cast of characters in a French provincial town. When the relatively young Jacques Auchard (Jean-Marc Bory) arrives in town as the new examining magistrate (“They hire them from nursery schools now?” one citizen asks), he is immersed immediately in a budding maze of suspicions, accusations, and resentments surrounding the recent and mysterious death of a man named Le Guen who had just given a secret dossier naming local fraud to his friend Dutoit (Antoine Balpêtré), who reports to Auchard that it’s been stolen from his home. The story ripples outward from here — viewers are advised to pay close attention — through a wide variety of revelations and relationships, unearthing corruption, adultery, and murder, yet questions still linger at the film’s conclusion. While he was the biggest name in the cast, Bernard Blier doesn’t appear until well past the one-hour mark, playing the overconfident Commissaire Noblet from Paris who arrives to take control of the case. While some might find it 15 or so minutes too long, the film is a tour-de-force in storytelling and craftsmanship, the pacing gaining momentum with each turn of events (the final act in which law enforcement aggressively interrogate four suspects, each in a different room, playing one off the other, is brilliantly done).