Film

★★★★ 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...

Monique Needham won the competition with a movie concept that challenges ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ stereotypes.

It depicts communities in County Durham and western Germany locked in a David and Goliath battle with coal mining companies.

★★★★★ 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...

★★★★☆ The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive. Those words, uttered by Private Joker, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam war film, Full Metal Jacket, echo in Mark Jenkins’ horror oddity, Enys Men. The Cornish director’s latest work is a committed avant-garde experiment, guided as much by Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At Land (1944) as it is British classic The Wicker Man (1973), John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) or Herk Harvey’s Carnival...