John Bleasdale

★★★★☆ Finding your way in the postmodern world isn’t always easy. The answers might be different but the questions are perennial. Do I settle down or play the field? Am I looking for a soulmate or adventure? What do I do with my life? These are the themes tackled in Joachim Trier’s latest.

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★★★★☆ Sean Baker is quickly establishing himself as one of the finest filmmakers in America today. With Starlet, Tangerine and The Florida Project, he has already displayed a precise and empathetic eye for those living the hardscrabble life at the skuzzy end of the American Dream.

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★★★★★ Perhaps the biggest difference between The Souvenir and Part II is its shift towards comedy. Whereas the first film charted a doomed love affair, this second outing takes the aftermath of grief and the process of recovery, charting a surprisingly comic path.

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★★☆☆☆ Returning to Cannes after the thrashing his last film, 2016’s The Last Face, received, Sean Penn is either a masochist or a recidivist and the kindest thing to say straight off the bat is that Flag Day is something of an improvement on his previous effort.

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★★★★☆ Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been a stalwart of the arthouse circuit since his Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d’Or back in 2010. The Thai independent filmmaker has returned with Memoria, a beguiling and hypnotic and occasionally boring piece of work.

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★★★★☆ No good deed goes unpunished, and such is the case for Rahim (Amir Jadidi), the protagonist of Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. Imprisoned for debt, he is on two-day leave when he meets up with his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) who might just have the answer to his problems.

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★★★★☆ The French Dispatch of Wes Anderson’s latest film’s title is a fictional magazine, set up by proprietor and editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), a European supplement for a Kansas newspaper owned by his father.

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★★★★★ “Counterintuitive, baby,” Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard sing to each other early on in Leos Carax’s latest Annette – and indeed it is. As with every good musical, there’s a grasp of the magnificent ridiculousness of the whole conceit. A full joyful embrace of the freedom and the rigours of the form, “We’re scoffing…

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★★★★☆ There’s only one thing sadder than the fate of a failed writer and that’s the fate of a successful writer. That’s the lesson this reviewer took home from Pietro Marcello’s bold interpretation of Jack London’s Martin Eden. The film transfers London’s semi-autobiographical hero from Oregon to Naples in a period that seems to span…

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