Film Reviews & More
The 77th Cannes Film Festival concluded with a shift to the new generation. Notable awards went to Sean Baker’s Anora and Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
★★★☆☆ Catherine Corsini arrives in Cannes with Homecoming, an adeptly told family drama which boasts some stand out performances. Fifteen years after a tragic incident, Kheìdidja (Aissatou Diallo Sagna), a single mother, returns to Corsica with her two daughters to look after the children of a wealthy family.
Cannes’ 75th edition came to a close with a Palme d’Or for Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness. It was a fittingly ironic moment for the wealthy, star-studded audience to applaud a satire that eviscerates the wealthy and celebrity-obsessed upper-classes. It was Östlund’s second Palme d’Or and, although well-deserved, felt symptomatic of a festival which was fine at best.
★★★★☆ A highly flammable love affair smoulders in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a painter with a spark in her eye. Although she is always aware of convention and tradition, she also knows how to bend the rules to further her own pursuit of art. She smokes a nifty little pipe and is fearless.
★★★☆☆ Acclaimed Austrian director Jessica Hausner enters the race for this year’s Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival with Little Joe, a modest work of satirical sci-fi starring Emily Beecham and Ben Whishaw as two genetic engineers who create a “happy” plant.
★★★★☆ Following his 2016 Palme d’Or triumph with I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Sorry We Missed You, a furious denunciation of zero-hours Britain. We begin in a familiar place: in the dark. A man with a Mancunian accent is being interviewed for a job.
★★★★☆ From its powerful far right-baiting opening image of a football-mad French kid of Arabic heritage draped in the country’s iconic flag to an...
★★☆☆☆ Arch American indie icon and silver fox Jim Jarmusch lurches up the Cannes Croisette with the opening film The Dead Don’t Die, an...
The Cannes lineup for its 72nd edition was announced today. Following a falling out with Netflix and the increasingly heavyweight competition of Venice, the...
The 71st edition of the Cannes Film Festival came to a close earlier today with Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda winning the coveted Palme d’Or...
★★★★★ Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Ayka follows a young woman over five days bitterly cold days in a city she doesn’t really know. Attempting to flee...
