★★ Arthur Harrison (Josh O’Connor) has a special gift. With a dowsing rod in hand, he can detect buried treasure. Living in Italy, though it’s never explained why, he and a band of grave-robbers dig up Etruscan artefacts and sell them on the black market to the highest bidder. Arthur...
★★★★★ Those expecting Catherine Breillat to scandalise the Croisette this year will find her new film, Last Summer (2023), perhaps disappointing. Given its salacious storyline – a middle-aged lawyer who specialises in child protection cases having an affair with her 17-year-old step-son – one might expect something confrontationally outrageous. But...
★★★★★ Aki Kaurismäki takes the bare bones of a romance plot and weaves utter movie magic. Fallen Leaves (2023) deserves something from this year’s jury, but which prize exactly? That’s up to them, but if it doesn’t pick up anything at all, expect to hear cries of ‘robbed!’ bellowing from...
★★★★ Jessica Hausner’s dark comedy, Club Zero (2023), is provocative stuff; the kind of talking-point movie one always hopes to see at Cannes. It explores themes of power and control within an educational environment, but also lack of those same things in the home, the story unfolds as a slow...
★★★ First, the good news. Just Philippot’s Acide (2023) has arguably the strongest horror concept since David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). All feature such a palpably nightmarish sense of the inescapable. And the bad news? Phillipot doesn’t have the budget at hand to...
★★ The superior elements to one of this year’s South Korean midnight screenings (the country's genre titles are a regular feature at Cannes), are to be found in Tae Gon Kim’s stylish execution of the material. Because the script is pure silliness with a side order of ridiculous. Project Silence...
★★ The road to hell they say is paved with good intentions. Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s homage to those fighting the good fight, here it’s first responders in New York, whose days and nights are spent surrounded by human misery and death, aims high and falls on its face. Screening in contention...
★★★★★ Todd Haynes’ May December (2023) continues the director’s fascination with performance and self-deception. Set in Savannah, Georgia, the location lending the film a tinge of deep-fried sleaze, featuring a trio of exceptional performances, the Far from Heaven and Carol filmmaker has presented to the Croisette a restrained yet uncomfortably...
★★★★★ A bucolic idyll. A summer's day spent by the river with family. A walk home through verdant woodland serenely lit by golden sunlight filtering through the canopy. Nature's cathedral. The sound of a woodpecker drumming a tree trunk somewhere in the distance. Or it machinegun fire? Jonathan Glazer’s The...