John Bleasdale

★★☆☆☆ Maïwenn’s French period drama Jeanne du Barry is the perfect opening salvo for the 76th Cannes Film Festival. It is as glitzy and gaudy as the festival itself, with its vacuous politics drowned out by the thunderous sound of it slapping its own back.

★★★★☆ Following Agnieszka Holland’s land-bound refugee tale Green Border earlier this week, Matteo Garrone’s new film Io Capitano departs geographically further south and takes its characters on an epic journey which involves land and sea. But its direction and terrain are not the only difference here.

★★★★★ Greek weird wave director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite) hits his stride with his strangest yet most deeply satisfying comedy fable yet, Poor Things. This exhilarating mix of Fanny Hill and Frankenstein is adapted by Tony McNamara from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name.

★★★★☆ Following Baz Luhrmann’s deliriously over-the-top 2022 film Elvis comes Sofia Coppola’s decidedly more understated Priscilla. In fact, it’s the polar opposite of Elvis both aesthetically and emotionally. If Luhrmann captures the whole lotta shakin’, Coppola is more concerned with the end of lonely street for The King’s beleaguered wife.

★★★★☆ Bradley Cooper is back in the director’s chair for another musically-oriented film, a biopic of the composer Leonard Bernstein entitled Maestro. And yet, this isn’t really a conventional biopic at all. Rather, it’s the portrait of a marriage between Bernstein (Cooper) and Felicia (a luminous Carey Mulligan who takes the headline credit). His career is more in the background, yet occasionally comes to the fore with exhilarating force.

★★★☆☆ Celebrated British director Joanna Hogg is back on the Venice Lido with The Eternal Daughter, a film shot in secret in lockdown and starring The Souvenir’s Tilda Swinton in dual roles as a mother and daughter heading to a hotel in the countryside for a much-needed birthday vacation.

★★★☆☆ American director Todd Haynes (Safe, Carol) returns to UK cinemas with May December, a Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore two-hander that asks the question: what if Brian De Palma remade Persona but as a comedy?