Cannes

★★★★☆ There are a lot countries which are apparently no longer for old men. However, despite treading some familiar territory, British director David Mackenzie’s new film Hell or High Water proves itself a brilliantly executed, sharply written genre gem. The Texas Midland Bank is about to open when two masked men follow the woman with…

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★★★☆☆ The buzz competition title of this year’s Cannes so far, German director Maren Ade’s third feature Toni Erdmann is a well-made, occasionally hilarious, sometimes touching drama about a career-centric daughter contending with her prankster father. Peter Simonischek plays Winfried Conradi, a piano teacher who enjoys indulging in practical jokes. A set of grotesque false…

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★★★★★ “No ideas but in things” wrote William Carlos Williams, the patron saint of Jim Jarmusch’s sumptuous sonnet to poetry and ordinariness, Paterson. The film presents us with a week in the life of bus driver and lunchtime poet Paterson (Adam Driver). In many way, Paterson’s life is idyllic. He is deeply, almost boyishly in…

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★★★☆☆ Following up his arthouse hit Stranger by the Lake, which played in Un Certain Regard in 2013, agent provocateur Alain Guiraudie returns to Cannes and the main competition with Staying Vertical, an impishly surreal comedy that delights in shocking, prodding and baffling its besieged audience. Leo (Damien Bonnard) is a wandering filmmaker, or at…

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★★★★☆ Following past appearances in the Quinzaine and Un Certain Regard sidebars, Romanian director Cristi Puiu returns to Cannes in competition with Sieranevada, a tragi-comedy that interweaves politics, closely observed family dynamics and a heightening sense of farce. What emerges is as rich, thick and various as the funeral feast that’s prepared but endlessly deferred.…

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★★★☆☆ Maha Haj debuts in Un Certain Regard with Personal Affairs, a gently mocking comedy of familial and personal relationships set in modern day Palestine. In Nazareth, an old couple Nabeela (Sana Shawahdeh) and Saleh (Mahmoud Shawahdeh) potter through their days to the sound of her knitting needles and soap operas and his internet found…

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The Croisette has been tuned and the red carpet swept. The giant poster unfurled above the Theatre Lumiere that fronts the great Palais du Cinema with an image taken from Le Mepris, Jean Luc Godard’s acid-inked love/hate letter to cinema will greet the far breezier delights of Woody Allen’s Café Society, starring Jesse Eisenberg and…

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★★★☆☆ A black dog lopes through an apparently empty camp amidst a lifeless landscape. This eerie intro to Clément Cogitore’s fascinatingly spooky The Wakhan Front (2015) recalls a dustier, low-key version of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Playing in the Cannes Critics’ Week sidebar, The Wakhan Front tells the tale of a platoon of French…

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★★★☆☆ Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu won the Un Certain Regard prize back in 2009 with his black comedy Police, Adjective. This year he entered the competition and picked up the Un Certain Talent prize with The Treasure (2015), a similarly wryly comic fable set in modern day Bucharest. Mild-mannered civil servant Costi (Cuzin Toma) is…

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