Cannes
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Cannes 2019: Oh Mercy! review
★★☆☆☆ It’s time the Cannes Film Festival called a moratorium on screening the works of French director Arnaud Desplechin until he can come back with work as good as A Christmas Tale. Co-written with Léa Mysius, Oh Mercy! has no business competing for the Palme d’Or.
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Cannes 2019: Portrait of a Lady on Fire review
★★★★☆ 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…
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Cannes 2019: Little Joe review
★★★☆☆ 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.
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Cannes 2019: Sorry We Missed You review
★★★★☆ 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.
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Cannes 2019: Les Misérables review
★★★★☆ 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 unsettling and mayhem-filled finale, Ladj Ly’s gripping play on Victor Hugo’s humanist masterwork, Les Misérables, is uncompromising, angry-as-hell political cinema. Set over the course of two days during last year’s World…
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Cannes 2019: The Dead Don’t Die review
★★☆☆☆ Arch American indie icon and silver fox Jim Jarmusch lurches up the Cannes Croisette with the opening film The Dead Don’t Die, an undeadpan comedy which dies halfway through and fails to reanimate itself. Jarmusch’s previous exercises in genre have been triumphant morphings of cinema staples into his own world view. Down by Law…
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Cannes 2019: Palme d’Or lineup announced
The Cannes lineup for its 72nd edition was announced today. Following a falling out with Netflix and the increasingly heavyweight competition of Venice, the 2019 programme feels like it had something to prove – and it looks to have delivered. About half of the official competition appears to be made up of old hands and…
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Cannes 2018: Kore-eda’s Shoplifters wins Palme d’Or
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 for his devastating, brilliant and unconventional family portrait Shoplifters. This year’s Cannes began under a cumulus of clouds: the spat with Netflix, the selfie ban, the Harvey Weinstein scandal, a selection…
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Cannes 2018: Ayka review
★★★★★ 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 from a terrible situation, but only finding an indifferent world and uncaring people, the Kazakhstani director has made one of Cannes 2018’s most formidable entries. Ayka (Samal Yeslyamova) is a 25-year-old…
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Cannes 2018: At War review
★★★★☆ Stéphane Brizé and Vincent Lindon are fast becoming the Scorsese and De Niro of French social realist cinema. Their latest effort, At War, depicts union workers involved in strike action and a fight for self-respect and dignity. At War is a gripping leftist polemic about the plight of the working class when faced with…