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 ...

Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s third feature is a beautifully crafted example of the kind of Latin drama that is slow-burn and sensorial, conveying emotion through gestures and looks rather than dialogue or action. Nothing much seems to be happening, but before you know it you’ve been completed sucked in.  Prompted by the writer/director’s own childhood on an ecological community outside Santiago, it offers a pithy, bitter-sweet reminder that idealism doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness and that children’s needs remain the same wherever they are: parental solidity, love, the freedom Read more ...

Rocketman opens with its hero in flamboyant stage costume stomping into a drab group therapy session. Pulling the sparkling horns off his magnificent head-dress and shuffling his feathered wings into a seat, Elton John demands of his fellow addicts, ‘How long is this going to take?’ The intimidated counsellor replies, ‘That’s really up to you’. But the answer for the audience is more precise – we’re about to watch two hours of misery memoir intercut with great songs. Rocketman is biopic as drama therapy; its star gets to tell us in detail how his late parents never loved him Read more ...

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 ...

Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals (1967), beautifully restored here to 4K, is a tortuous and at times entertaining mash-up of the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler and the murder of a prostitute in Nazi-occupied Warsaw a few years earlier. Producer Sam Spiegel cast Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole as Nazi officers, the same duo that had starred in his earlier success Lawrence of Arabia. The script – workmanlike but without any great surprises – is by the French novelist Joseph Kessel and the seasoned British screenwriter Paul Dehn.The recent representation of Nazis on screen has become very Read more ...

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 ...

Next up in Disney’s parade of live-action revamps is: yes, Aladdin. The other recent re-dos – Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo – just about managed to overcome the remake challenge: be faithful to an original that will remain definitive for audiences, whilst updating the material enough to obtain contemporary relevance. A re-jigged plot with fresh surprises is an added bonus. Aladdin, like the others, just about does the job.And so we return to fictional Agrabah and meet the city’s most wily young street urchin (and his even wilier pet monkey). It’s the archetypal rags-to-riches tale: Read more ...

Film buffs who are also tennis fans (there must be quite a few of us who fit in that particular Venn diagram) will love this quirky and experimental documentary by Julien Faraut, which uses archive footage and narration to examine the idea of a shared passion for cinema and sport, and how they may unite on film.Faraut, as actor Mathieu Amalric explains in the voiceover, was working in the archives of the National Sport Institute in Paris when he discovered a huge pile of film reels by fellow Frenchman and documentarian Gil de Kermadec. They were part of a series of instructional 16mm films Read more ...

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 ...

The Woman in the Window (1944) was the first of the two riveting film noirs in which Fritz Lang directed Edward G Robinson as a timid New York bourgeois, Joan Bennett as the alluring woman ill-met on a street, and Dan Duryea as the dandified sleaze who manipulates her.Scarlet Street (1945) has a higher reputation than its predecessor, perhaps because it is the more sordidly and expressionistically noirish of the pair, as well as the bleakest. Adapted by producer-screenwriter Nunnally Johnson from JH Wallis’s novel Once Off Guard, The Woman in the Window softens its fatalism (and honours Read more ...

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 ...

This is a real passion project; British filmmaker Andy Dunn spent years building up a relationship with the late American photographer Harold Feinstein, filming him at work and interviewing friends, family and colleagues. The result is a loving portrait of a remarkable man. Perhaps it could have done with more judicious editing of the accolades and a little more probing of Feinstein’s darker side, but it is well worth seeking out by anyone with an interest in the history of photography. Feinstein grew up in Brooklyn in a first-generation immigrant Jewish family. He left home in his teens Read more ...