Cannes
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Cannes 2018: Birds of Passage review
★★★★★ From the duo behind Embrace of the Serpent comes another extraordinary movie full of ethnographic detail and mystical symbolism. In Birds of Passage, a revenge tragedy plot involving the burgeoning market in weed is transformed into a riveting form of acid western. Set in the arid coastal Guajira region of Colombia, among an indigenous…
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Cannes 2018: Wildlife review
★★★☆☆ There Will Be Blood and Little Miss Sunshine actor Paul Dano turns his hand to directing in Wildlife, which opened the Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, Dano’s directorial debut is a sincere and often handsome portrait of American suburban melancholia. It’s 1960: a “heck…
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Cannes 2018: Our picks of the festival
The red carpet unrolls, the paparazzi mount their step ladders, and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina kiss above the Palais du Cinema under an azure sky. The talk in the build up to 71st Cannes Film Festival has been far less sunny. The controversial face-off with Netflix and the banning of selfies on the red carpet…
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Cannes 2018: Palme d’Or lineup announced
With the lead-up dominated by thinkpieces over Netflix’s exclusion from this year’s Cannes competition lineup, it was something of a relief to finally be able to discuss the film’s that would be vying for the Palme d’Or and Un Certain Regard accolades. With 18 out of a potential 20 Palme d’Or contenders announced, we could perhaps…
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Cannes 2017: The Square, Palme d’Or winner
★★★☆☆ Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund first achieved international acclaim with his withering wintry take on middle-class masculinity in Force Majeure, causing quite a stir when it showed three years ago here in the Un Certain Regard sidebar.Now competing in the main competition, his new film The Square is a grander and more ambitious project, moving…
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Cannes 2017: The Day After review
★★★☆☆ With a director as prolific as South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo, it’s not particularly surprising that he has two films showing at Cannes this year: Claire’s Camera, a colourful novella of a movie starring Isabelle Huppert; and, up for the Palme d’Or, The Day After.Bong-wan (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo) is a celebrated author who manages…
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Cannes 2017: I Am Not a Witch review
★★★★☆ The debut from Welsh-Zambian director Rungano Nyoni, I Am Not a Witch created quite the stir on premiering in Cannes. It’s the tale of a young orphan girl played by nine-year-old Maggie Mulubwa, who is accused by villagers of being a witch.The tone is set by the comic police inquest into the girl with…
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Cannes 2017: A Gentle Creature review
★★☆☆☆ Sergei Loznitsa first came to prominence with 2012’s In the Fog, a powerful drama of guilt and suspicion. His new film A Gentle Creature is loosely based on a Dostoyevsky short story and is redolent with the suffering and heaviness of the great Russian worrier. Despite a first half of great promise, the film…
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Cannes 2017: Walking Past the Future review
★★☆☆☆ The only Chinese film scheduled to screen in the official competition at Cannes this year is Li Ruijun’s underwhelming Walking Past the Future, which is being shown – quite rightly, as it happens – as part of the Un Certain Regard section.We first meet young woman Yaoting as she waits to pick up an…
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Cannes 2017: Rodin review
★☆☆☆☆ Sculpture is the art of turning lifeless stone into something that looks alive, flesh, living bodies and movement. Jacques Doillon’s Rodin, in competition at Cannes, does precisely the opposite, turning living beings – passionate artists, no less – into lumps of lifeless clay.Vincent Lindon, who deservedly won the Best Actor award here with The…