★★☆☆☆ Nicolas Winding Refn – or NWR as he prefers to sign himself now – returns to Cannes with fashion world-based horror movie The Neon Demon. The film is a postmodern Women Beware Women and, despite the presence of two […]
★★☆☆☆ When Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne premièred Two Days, One Night at Cannes two years ago, they explained that it was their first western. As they return to the Croisette with The Unknown Girl, they describe it as an old-fashioned […]
★★☆☆☆ Writer-director Corinna McFarlane’s The Silent Storm is anything but silent. Or nuanced. Or subtle. Set on a remote, nondescript island off the coast of Scotland in the late 1940s, it is a raucous, disjointed cacophony of marital disharmony, community […]
★★★★☆ Once director John Carney returns to his native Dublin for Sing Street, a 1980s-set coming-of-age crowdpleaser with real depth, heart and wit to match its toe-tapping musical beats. Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a 14-year-old kid who’s forced to move from […]
★★★★☆ In an age of Marvel multiplex hegemony, Chicken – from London-based filmmaker Joe Stephenson – is the kind of low-budget British indie which restores faith in cinema as a means of genuine storytelling with well-rounded, engaging characters. Receiving a […]
★★☆☆☆ You may find yourself with a weak script, borrowing cultural currency from a song written over thirty years ago, shooting a film, in another part of the world, and you may ask yourself: ‘Well, why did they make this?’ […]
★★★☆☆ Personal Shopper sees former Twilight star Kristen Stewart continue her Cannes run with a bracingly mad little ghost story that reunites her with Clouds of Sils Maria director Olivier Assayas. As with the former film, Stewart plays Maureen, someone […]
★★☆☆☆ The camera passes over some scrubland, tracking close to the ground like a sniffer hound and then out over a pond of algae-covered water where, in the middle, a couple of bubbles break the surface and a grisly object […]
★★★☆☆ The first words that come to your mind after seeing a film by Pedro Almodóvar are usually ‘flamboyant’, ‘over-the-top’, or perhaps ‘fabulous’. His latest offering, showing at the 69th Cannes film festival, is more likely to have you thinking […]
★★★☆☆ Not to be confused with the plethora of superheroes currently smashing each other to bits on our cinema screens, Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic is an effective, comic road movie which doesn’t quite dare to be as radical as its […]
★★★★☆ It’s been a busy year for Jeff Nichols. His Midnight Special received its premiere in Berlin back in February and now his fourth feature, Loving, arrives at Cannes. Playing in competition, it should confirm Nichols’ reputation as a mature […]
★★★★☆ There are a lot countries which are apparently no longer for old men. However, despite treading some familiar territory, British director David Mackenzie’s new film Hell or High Water proves itself a brilliantly executed, sharply written genre gem. The […]
★★★★★ Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is the newest addition to the Criterion Collection, a magnificently dark noir thriller comprising one of Humphrey Bogart’s signature roles. Bogart plays Dixon ‘Dix’ Steele, a grouchy, hot-tempered Hollywood screenwriter who finds himself […]
★★☆☆☆ Hired to Kill, the cult film from notorious Greek director, disgraced journalist and purveyor of bottom- of-the-barrel trash TV, Nico Mastorakis, cannot, for most viewers, be recommended in good conscience. A bargain bin clone of 1985’s Commando, Hired to […]
★★★★☆ When Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) first stepped into the ring, onto the screen, and into the hearts and minds of cinema audiences back in 1976’s Rocky, few would have predicted him making it to the seventh round. Even fewer […]
★★★☆☆ The buzz competition title of this year’s Cannes so far, German director Maren Ade’s third feature Toni Erdmann is a well-made, occasionally hilarious, sometimes touching drama about a career-centric daughter contending with her prankster father. Peter Simonischek plays Winfried […]
★★★★★ “No ideas but in things” wrote William Carlos Williams, the patron saint of Jim Jarmusch’s sumptuous sonnet to poetry and ordinariness, Paterson. The film presents us with a week in the life of bus driver and lunchtime poet Paterson […]
★★★☆☆ Following up his arthouse hit Stranger by the Lake, which played in Un Certain Regard in 2013, agent provocateur Alain Guiraudie returns to Cannes and the main competition with Staying Vertical, an impishly surreal comedy that delights in shocking, […]
