Cannes

★★★★☆ Following the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, which recorded Edward Snowden blowing the loudest of whistles, Laura Poitras arrives in Cannes’ Quinzaine sidebar with Risk, a superb character study of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The divisive and controversial figure is a hero of free speech to some, a reckless egomaniac with predatory sexual practices to others,…

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★★★☆☆ Going to see a Brillante Mendoza film at the Cannes is an awkward experience. He’s been granted fairly regular festival berths both here and in Venice while exhibiting to the world a series of films that foreground the poor, the powerless and the oppressed. To exit the grime and grimness of his latest, Ma’…

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★★☆☆☆ 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 female co-screenwriters in the form of Polly Stenham and Mary Laws, perhaps the most misogynistic…

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★★★★☆ One of the leading lights of the Romanian New Wave, director Cristian Mungiu returns to Cannes with Graduation, a contemporary morality tale about how, in attempting to free his daughter from the confines of a corrupt country, a previously honest man himself becomes corrupt. Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) is a good doctor with…

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★★☆☆☆ 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 detective story, an investigation. These genre identifications are telling in that it feels as if…

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★★★☆☆ 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 who in reality might be working for the actress. After playing personal assistant to Juliette…

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★★★☆☆ 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 ‘efficient’, ‘workman-like’ and possibly the dreaded ‘average’. It’s as if Will Self suddenly wrote a…

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★★☆☆☆ 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 rises suddenly: a severed human foot. So begins Bogdan Mirică’s debut thriller Dogs (Caini), competing…

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★★★☆☆ 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 protagonists. Viggo Mortensen plays Ben, a man who has taken his family into the wilds…

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★★★★☆ 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 filmmaker of great tact and intelligence. Richard Loving (an immense Joel Edgerton) is a hardworking…

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