Stories in Motion

Film fifty-one of the festival and Grisebach's  The Dreamed Adventure  returns to the slow Eastern European Western with a woman at its centre and a genuine discovery in Yana Radeva. The first half is atmospheric and alive. The second half doesn't fully deliver on what the first built. We talk about the film's magnificent faces, what Grisebach does uniquely well, and why the ending lan...

We open day eleven with Maria Martínez Bayona's debut  The End of It , in which Rebecca Hall plays a 250-year-old former provocateur who has decided she wants to die, and her death is her final artwork. The high concept is genuinely fascinating, the birthday party sequence is one of the best scenes at the festival, and Hall is extraordinary throughout. We talk about why the film can't quit...

Film forty-nine of the festival and Lukas Dhont's  Coward  is his most mature and most tender film to date. A queer love story at the WWI Belgian front, two young men finding each other in an environment designed to make that impossible, and a first kiss that is among the most purely romantic gestures the movies have produced in years. We talk about what Dhont gets right this time that Girl an...

Film forty-eight of the festival and Bertrand Mandico's  Roma Elastica  is a kaleidoscope of Fellini riffs, carnival grotesques, feminist cannibal peplums, and one extraordinary scene in which Marion Cotillard turns before a mirror and briefly makes everything feel necessary. We talk about what Mandico does that nobody else does, why it works in flashes and exhausts in bulk, and why Cotillard...

Film forty-seven of the festival and Marine Atlan's  La Gradiva , the Critics' Week winner, is one of the most wholly transporting films we have seen at this Cannes. French teenagers in Naples, a class trip to Pompeii, and a boy named Toni whose entire romantic self is built on a story about his grandparents that turns out to be more complicated than he knew. Colas Quignard is an extraordi...

Film forty-six of the festival and Los Javis'  The Black Ball  is a monument. Three timelines, Lorca's ghost, a Spanish Civil War love story that is simultaneously the horniest and most heartbreaking thing at this Cannes, Penélope Cruz on a tank, and Glenn Close as an American Lorca scholar. The structural achievement alone is almost impossible to fully describe. We talk about why this is...

We open day ten with Zachary Wigon's  Victorian Psycho  and Maika Monroe's complete and total villain era. A Yorkshire governess with dead eyes, a body count, and a voiceover that exists mostly for her own reassurance. The first two thirds are gleefully, dementedly perfect. The ending needed more nerve. We talk about Monroe, the keyhole cinematography, the baby, and why we want a sequel im...

Film forty-four of the festival and Ira Sachs'  The Man I Love  is the finest AIDS film in years precisely because it refuses to be an AIDS film. Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, a ruinous love triangle in 1980s New York, and a dance floor scene shot in midnight blue that is one of the most alive things at this Cannes. We talk about what Sachs does that no one else does, and why this film will stay...

Film forty-three of the festival and Emmanuel Marre's  A Man of His Time  is the most uncomfortable film we've seen at Cannes. His own great-grandfather collaborated with the Nazis. Not out of evil. Out of ambition and cowardice and a need to belong. Swann Arlaud gives the best performance of the festival. The 80s soundtrack is intentional and correct. This film is a warning addressed dire...

Film forty-two of the festival and Andy Garcia's  Diamond  has one of the best setups at Cannes this year: a 1940s gumshoe nearly flattened by a self-driving car in modern LA. It's a perfect image. The next 118 minutes can't match it. We talk about what great noir requires that this film was too fond of its own protagonist to provide, and why this cast deserved a sharper script. 

We open day nine with Clio Barnard's  I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning , an ensemble drama about five working-class friends from Birmingham hitting thirty with no dreams fulfilled. It starts humbly and earns everything it arrives at. Daryl McCormack, Joe Cole and the whole cast all but follow you out of the theater. We talk about friendship, disappointment, and one image of lights on water...

Film forty of the festival and Almodóvar arrives in competition with  Bitter Christmas , a Möbius strip of autofiction about a filmmaker who feeds on the lives of those closest to him. Three writer-directors, one screenplay, no apology. We talk about what makes this ticklingly complex and where it falls short of his greatest work, and why its abrupt ending is the most honest thing in it. 

Film thirty-nine of the festival and Zvyagintsev returns after nine years with  Minotaur , a domestic thriller set in Russia in 2022 as the war in Ukraine begins. A jealous husband, a dead body, a country with no rules left to tether anyone. The greatest living Russian director has not softened. We talk about his return, the Chabrol source material, and what it means to make a film like this from...

We open day eight with Nicolas Winding Refn's  Her Private Hell , a neo-giallo nightmare set in a futuristic city where a diamond-knuckled demon stalks young women in the fog. Half the audience walked out. We stayed. Pino Donaggio's score is extraordinary, the neon is relentless, and the plot is absolutely not the point. We talk about what Refn is and isn't doing here, and whether stay...

Film thirty-seven of the festival and Sandra Wollner's  Everytime  is the one that broke us today. A teenager falls from a rooftop and the film spends two hours in the wreckage of what remains. Birgit Minichmayr gives one of the festival's finest performances. And the final act does something impossible that the film has completely earned. We needed a few minutes outside before we could ta...

Film thirty-six of the festival and Cristian Mungiu's  Fjord  is the Palme d'Or contender we did not see coming. A Romanian family, a Norwegian village, a child abuse case that refuses to resolve into heroes and villains, and Sebastian Stan giving the most deliberately unsympathetic performance of his career. We talk about why this is the film we will still be arguing about when we get hom...

We open day seven with Arthur Harari's  The Unknown , a body-swap thriller about identity, transformation, and the idea that who we are is ultimately a memory we share with ourselves. Léa Seydoux plays a man in her own body. It is stranger and more honest than it sounds. We talk about the trans readings, the Antonioni influence, and why this film's ambiguity feels like a feature rather tha...

We close day six with  Jim Queen , a raunchy French animated feature about a disease that turns gay men straight. It is not deep. It is not trying to be. The audience we watched it with laughed like people being seen for the first time in a long time, and on the last film of a very long day at Cannes, that was exactly enough. Full day six wrap from the Croisette.

Film thirty-three of the festival and Na Hong-jin is finally back.  Hope  is a Korean monster movie with the largest budget in Korean film history, one extraordinary hour of pure brawling joy, and a CGI creature design that looks like it belongs in a different decade. We talk about what the first hour gets absolutely right, where the film falls apart, and whether Michael Fassbender playing a motio...

Film thirty-two of the festival and Yukiko Sode's  All The Lovers In The Night  is the slowest and most interior film we've seen at Cannes this year. A woman who has made a life out of not being known. A physics teacher who explains how light travels. Shot on 16mm in Tokyo and utterly unhurried. We talk about what the film earns and what it occasionally costs, and why Misato Morita might b...

Film thirty-one of the festival and Judith Godrèche's debut feature adapts Annie Ernaux's most intimate novel with the knowledge of someone who lived a version of it. She cast her own daughter in the lead. The film is assured, disturbing, and exactly as personal as it needs to be. We talk about the lightbulb shot, Tess Barthélemy's extraordinary performance, and what this debut says ab...

Film thirty of the festival and Jeanne Herry's  Another Day  is one of the most quietly honest addiction dramas in years. Adèle Exarchopoulos plays a functioning alcoholic over eight years in Paris without a single false note. We talk about what the film gets right, where the ending gets too tidy, and why this performance deserves to be in the awards conversation. 

Film twenty-nine of the festival and László Nemes brings his aesthetic brilliance to the story of French Resistance hero Jean Moulin. The photography is extraordinary, Lellouche is excellent, and the film's central idea about ordinary courage is genuinely original. So why does it flatline so often? We talk about what Moulin gets right, what it leaves on the table, and how it compares to Son of...

Film twenty-eight of the festival and Dupieux's  Full Phil  is his most unexpectedly sincere film yet. Woody Harrelson, Kristen Stewart, a clogged toilet, Tim and Eric as Nobel-winning mad scientists, and somewhere underneath all of it, a real family drama. We talk about what makes Dupieux's absurdist universe so distinct and why this Hollywood cast fits inside it perfectly. 

We open day six with Katharina Rivilis'  I'll Be Gone in June , a German exchange student in New Mexico in the weeks after 9/11. Shot from memory, built on a breakout performance by Naomi Cosma, and one of the most quietly spellbinding debuts at this year's festival. We talk about what it means to watch a national tragedy from the outside, and why this film says things about that momen...