Film Reviews

★★★★★ 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 the Croisette, at the closing ceremony and in the press. In the film, there is a dog named Chaplin. It is the perfect name for the hound who finds a...

★★★★ 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 motion calamity, warnings signs unheeded because well-meaning but clueless parents no longer lay down the law to their kids but treat them as equals to placate at every turn. Set...

★★★ 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 quite pull off his vision for apocalyptic horror, nor does he provide a satisfying ending. Acide centres on Biblical-themed eco-horror very much like his excellent debut, The Swarm (2020). That...

★★ 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 (2023) wants nothing more than to be a crowd-pleaser complete with that mainstream South Korean action cinema staple: the troubled father-daughter relationship and cheesy third act reconciliation. Putting the canine...

★★ 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...