Film Reviews

★★ 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 for the Palme d’Or for reasons unknown (no amount of explaining from the programmers could justify its presence in the most elite film competition on the planet), Black Flies (2023)...

★★★★★ 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 dark portrait of power and desire. Gracie (Julianne Moore) is famous for all the wrong reasons. As a 36-year-old married woman, she seduced a 13-year-old boy. She went to prison,...

★★★★★ 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 Zone of Interest (2023) is a masterclass in transforming the commonplace and everyday activities into the grotesque and the inhuman by virtue of the uniquely unpleasant setting in which they...

★★★★ The great Indiana Jones returns for one last adventure in this fifth instalment directed by James Mangold, that Hollywood journeyman of preeminent ‘dad cinema’, taking over bullhorn duties from Steven Spielberg. Mangold does not drop the ball (and him doing so was never the cards). In fact, he has successfully put his own craftsman stamp on the franchise, making a film less expectedly elegiac, more outright - and unexpectedly - touching and melancholic. In his 70s, on the cusp...

★★★★ After unexpectedly venturing into sci-fi monster territory with 2016’s The Untamed, Mexican director Amat Escalante is back on more familiar ground with his latest, Lost in the Night (2023), showing in the Cannes Premiere strand of the festival. Emiliano’s mother has gone missing. A local activist fighting off a mining business causing environmental damage in the area, she is run off the road one evening on the way home from an event, is then beaten and abducted by corrupt...

★★ Johnny Depp makes a return to the big screen in Maïwenn’s 76th Festival de Cannes-opener Jeanne du Barry (2023), performing in the French language and delivering a low-key performance a million miles away from the drunken shtick of Jack Sparrow and eccentric characters for Tim Burton. It is a curious project for Depp. After we all got a glimpse behind the celebrity curtain during his trials for domestic abuse, he selected a film about a famous example of love...

★★★★★ There are some places God is not wanted. That's how it feels in Hlynur Pálmason’s astonishing late 19th century odyssey, in which a naïve Danish priest and amateur photography enthusiast sets off for Iceland, at the time a dependency of Denmark, to build a church in the relatively unknown south eastern part of the land. Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), the soldier for Christ, is a bit of an odd duck. Instead of travelling directly by boat to the south...

★★★★★ Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink (2023) is a terrifying horror odyssey exploring childhood anxieties and primal fears. It is unlike anything else around at the moment, and will certainly serve as a calling card for the Canadian director making his feature debut. Its chief artistic triumph resides in the murky low-res imagery and heavy digital grain, which produces extraordinary febrile tensions and dread-filled atmospherics. Skinamarink equally orchestrates a spine-chilling ambience via its eerie use of silence. Add to this a...

★★★★★ Have you ever seen a film and been caught completely off guard, by surprise, left wondering what the hell it is you’ve just seen? Well, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (2022) is such a film. Works like this are made for festivals such as Cannes, where you’re left initially perplexed and bewildered, but once you let its effect take grip, you’re very glad you saw it. Bold, frightening, intense, experimental, mysterious and dazzling, the Polish filmmaker’s movie about the life and...