The 72nd edition of the Festival de Cannes climaxed with South Korean filmmaker, Bong Joon-Ho, receiving the Palme d’Or for Parasite. He is the first South Korean director to win the most coveted prize in world cinema. As President of the Jury, Alejandro González Iñárritu, said in the post-ceremony press...
★★★★☆ Taiwanese director Midi Z’s Nina Wu tackles the theme of predatory male behaviour and exploitation of female bodies in the film industry. The screenplay, co-written with lead actress Ke-Xi Wu, does not pull any punches. Going soft on the audience would hinder the uncompromising message at the heart of...
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Xavier Dolan is known as a child of Cannes. He is feted at the world’s leading film festival like few directors have ever known. 2014’s Mommy earned him the Jury Prize (which he shared with Jean-Luc Godard) and It’s Only the End of the World...
★★★★☆ Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) is long-term unemployed and festering at home. He makes a bit of money folding pizza boxes for a local restaurant, helped by his two teenaged kids and wife, but their living conditions are dire and the future looks decidedly bleak. Rough and uncouth this family might...
★★★★★ Two young women – sisters – are walking in a woodland. One loses track of the other. She calls out, hoping to find her. Karim Aïnouz’s Brazilian melodrama begins with a mood of ill-ease beautifully complemented by high-contrast, soft focus, 16mm cinematography, lending the opening scene a dreamlike sense...
★★★★☆ Kantemir Balagov returns to Festival de Cannes’ Un Certain Regard programme for a second time with Beanpole (2019), a haunting post-WW2 drama where two former soldiers who served on the front in a female combat unit are reunited. The young cineaste portrays, with deft skill, themes of submission and...
★★★★☆ Gaspar Noé surprised us all, when the Cannes Film Festival announced the world premiere of a new work from the controversial auteur of Irreversible (2002), Enter the Void (2009) and last year’s acclaimed horror movie, Climax. A medium-length film clocking in at 50 minutes, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beatrice...
★★☆☆☆ Albert Serra’s Liberté (2019) is set in the years leading up to the French Revolution. Banished from the court of King Louis XVI, a band of errant aristocrats flee to Germany, hoping they will find there a haven to safely practice their libertine philosophies. Across the border, the group...
★★★★☆ Presenting his second feature in the Cannes parallel programme, Semaine de la critique, Colombian director Franco Lolli focuses once more on the lives of the country’s bourgeoisie. Litigante (2019), as with his debut Gente de bien (2014), is a portrait of a family, though here it is entirely from...