Cannes
Pamela Jahn
It doesn't take much to get lost in a film by Miguel Gomes. In fact, it's required. Multiple layers, timelines, and perspectives unfold in his cinema is mysterious ways, allowing the Portuguese director to tackle the themes that interest him: great love, colonialism, chance, destiny, death, and a dreary Portuguese world that is by no means willing to let anyone take away its history – or its stories.From the African romance-cum-colonial critique Tabu (2012) to the folk fable allegory of Portugal's financial crisis in his Arabian Nights trilogy (2015), Gomes frequently challenges the Read more ...
Owen Richards
Belgian filmmaking duo the Dardenne Brothers have long been darlings of Cannes Film Festival, winning awards for hardhitting dramas like La Promesse, Le Silence de Lorna and The Kid with the Bike. Their latest offering Young Ahmed is no different, a domestic terrorist tale which won them Best Director at 2019’s festival. Surely by beating Bong Joon-Ho, Celine Sciamma and Ken Loach, the film would stand up to scrutiny?The titular Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi, pictured above right) is an introspective teenager, thoroughly devoted to his imam’s strict interpretation of the Qu’ran. Both his Muslim Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
The second half of Mark Cousins’ documentary on films by women filmmakers starts with religion; it ends with song and dance. This is a second seven-hour journey through cinema. It reconfirms Women Make Film as a remarkable feat of excavation and curation, as its twenty chapters showcase overlooked, excellent work by far-flung filmmakers. Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and Wang Ping, socialist China’s first female director, are featured alongside film-school favourites like Denis and Akerman.The actresses Thandie Newton (pictured below) and Debra Winger are lead narrators now. Their Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The final sequence of Levan Akin’s coming-of-age drama And Then We Danced is as gloriously defiant a piece of dance action as anything you’ll remember falling for in Billy Elliot.Merab, the film’s youthful dancer protagonist (played by Levan Gelbakhiani, pictured below, in his first screen role) has been through a lot by then – the trials of first love, exacerbated by the realisation that he’s gay – and those closing minutes see him asserting his right to be who he is at an audition that pits him against his highly conservative surroundings.It’s a clash of values in every sense. The Georgian Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It has been ten years since Canadian auteur Xavier Dolan first debuted I Killed My Mother at the Cannes Film Festival. A decade on he returns in competition with a title that shows an evolution of his filmmaking that leaves behind many of the problems of his previous work.Matthias & Maxime is certainly more accessible, and will appeal to mainstream sensibilities as a tenderly rendered examination of male friendship. Thankfully, this feature allows Dolan to step away from the enfant terrible image that has been thrust upon him. It’s altogether more meditative – calmer, even – and all the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like Snowpiercer before it, Bong Joon-ho’s rage-fuelled satire Parasite puts class inequality squarely in its sights. This time however, the story is grounded in the real world and concerns a family of hustlers who will do anything to get by. There are other similarities with his twisted 2013 sci-fi. Joon-Ho’s use of contained spaces once again allows the director to navigate his subject matter very effectively.The film opens in a basement flat, where a young man in his early twenties, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), lives with his sister (Park So-dam), mother (Chang Hyae-jin) and father (Song Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Moments before Quentin Tarantino’s blistering, outrageous work screened at Cannes, a message was delivered on behalf of the director, asking reviewers to avoid spoilers. It’s easy to see why. There’s a lot of pleasure in the film’s initial shock value, So yes, let’s avoid spoilers. But the surprises aren’t what make this film so good. Tarantino has form when it comes to handling ensemble pieces, but not since Pulp Fiction has it been so richly rendered. Yes, there are elements of Inglourious Basterds, and tonally reminiscent of Jackie Brown, but this film is Tarantino at his finest.The film Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Director Asif Kapadia's documentary on the controversial 1980s sporting legend Diego Maradona premiered at Cannes this week, and there's something unsatisfying about the fact it doesn't have a one-word title. It would have created a neat synchronicity with his previous two films (Amy and Senna), but we soon learn why this is the case.Kapadia's central thrust is the dichotomy of the public and private lives of a superstar, whose legend even the uninitiated are familiar with. The private figure is Diego – a sweet (self-described) mummy's boy from the slums of Argentina who rose through the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
This year, Cannes has been adamantly defending traditional cinema, with more than a few jibes at Netflix (who remain persona non grata at the festival), but that hasn’t stopped them screening two episodes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Amazon TV series, Too Old To Die Young. Refn has gone on record stating that his latest project is still cinema — a 13-hour film that shows all the verve and ambition you’d expect from the Danish auteur. If these two episodes are anything to go by, his argument is more than believable.Episodes four and five might seem an odd choice to screen at the world- Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Every year the Cannes Film Festival is a swirl of chaos, excitement, and controversy. Last year, the festival had a markedly different feel. Gone were the big starry names. Replacing them were less glitzy films that were given a chance to shine.There were delights like the monochrome wonder that was Cold War from Paweł Pawlikowski, and the magical-realist fable Happy as Lazarro from Alice Rohrwacher. Both directors are back again this year, sitting on the competition jury headed up by The Revenant director Alejandro González Iñárritu, alongside Elle Fanning, Yorgos Lanthimos, Enki Bilal, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Who would have thought that Ken Loach could make a film more heart-wrenching than I, Daniel Blake? His new feature, co-written with his long-standing collaborator Paul Laverty, is a raw, angry and utterly uncompromising drama, showing that, for all the appeal of the gig-economy, the reality is much grimmer.Loach insightfully captures British working-class life with his own brand of politically charged righteousness, waking us up to the suffering and exploitation of an invisible workforce. As has been the case with many of his latter-day features, Loach crafts rounded characters, making them Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“The world is perfect. Appreciate the details” says a WU-PS driver played by RZA, in Jim Jarmusch’s gleefully meta zombie-comedy that has just opened the Cannes Film Festival. It’s good advice. Jarmusch’s latest work is a finely tuned, deadpan comedy that pulls no punches in sending up the clichés of the horror genre.At the centre of the story are three bespectacled small-town cops, played by Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny. Their dull daily routine of managing minor local disputes is interrupted by news that the earth has shifted on its axis (due to polar fracking). A local wild Read more ...