Film Reviews

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★★ 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 is also a rather sad guy. Pining for a lost love we presume has died at some point in the recent past, he walks around in dirty clothes, unkempt beard...

★★★★★ 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 Breillat has instead made a delicate and wholly captivating film instead about, not just abuse of power, but middle-aged sexuality and decades spent being miserable dominated by bourgeois repression. Late...

★★★★★ 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...