Cannes

★★★☆☆ In 1997, Naomi Kawase became the youngest winner of the Camera d’Or for her first feature Suzaku. She has returned seven times in total and this year enters the main competition for the fifth time with Radiance, a thoughtful meditation on seeing and cinema.Misako (Ayame Misaki) works for a company that provides audio description…

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★★★☆☆ April is the cruelest mum in Michel Franco’s Un Certain Regard entry April’s Daughter. The Mexican director and Cannes favourite has produced another disturbing character study, following Tim Roth’s obsessive nurse in Chronic which screened a mere two years ago.April’s Daughter stars Pedro Almodóvar regular Emma Suarez as April, an estranged mother who after…

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★★★☆☆ Taylor Sheridan is a wonderful screenwriter in his own right, as the startling thrillers Sicario and Hell or High Water both contest. However, he’s a terrible writer of film titles. From the idiomatic blandness of Hell or High Water to the latest flatulence of Wind River.Fortunately, the latter – his debut as a director…

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★★★☆☆ ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was an activist group set up in New York to draw attention campaign for those impacted by AIDS. They were a pressure group who specialised in public and well-publicised acts of civil disobedience. The Paris branch of ACT UP is the subject of writer-director Robin Campillo’s new…

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★★☆☆☆ “Please do not touch the exhibits,” say the signs in most museums. In competition at Cannes, Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck is a touchy-feely cabinet of wonders which occasionally enraptures but also drags, never quite achieving the promise of its title.It’s 1977 and Ben (Oakley Fegley), a young child who has recently lost his mother, lives…

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The red carpet is being vacuumed, the Croisette prepped – new anti- terrorist bollards a grim reminder of the times – and a young Claudia Cardinale dances exuberantly above the Palais du Cinéma. Everything is almost ready for the celebration of the 70th Cannes Film Festival.The lineup is rich and deep, indicative of a generational…

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The full competition lineup for this year’s 70th Cannes Film Festival (17-28 May) was announced in Paris earlier this morning. Kicking off the proceedings will be Ismael’s Ghosts, the new film from respected French director Arnaud Desplechin.Meanwhile, highlights of this year’s Palme d’Or race include new films from international heavyweights Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Bong…

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The 69th Cannes Film Festival was a strange menagerie of beasts. Front-loaded with perhaps too many of Thierry Frémaux’s usual suspects – Woody Allen, Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers, Pedro Almodóvar – their contributions were often simply whelming: not over, not under, just there. Even some of the younger directors in competition are now becoming…

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★★★★☆ Asghar Farhadi is a film director of such consistent quality and control that the prospect of one of his new films is like buying the latest big fat novel by a favourite author. It sits on the shelf with all the complexity of the human universe lying in wait within. Competing for the Palme…

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★★☆☆☆ Usually when we say a movie is reminiscent of the seventies, we mean it has a certain high quality to it redolent of that glorious era, but Paul Verhoeven’s new film hit the Croisette, Elle – his first feature since Black Book – is seventies in its sexual attitudes and particularly its take on…

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