Film of the Week are delighted to be bringing you daily reviews of the very best films in Competition, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Classics, Directors’ Fortnight and the Critics’ Week sections at the 74th Cannes Film Festival.
The Worst Person In The World
“If you’ve been dumped by a Julie, a woman who has chosen to break up with a string of perfectly nice men simply because she wasn’t feeling it, perhaps you’ll find her indefensible — but all the more reason for you to watch this film, which fleshes out the inner world of a character type far too often cast as a villain.”
Compartment No. 6
“The film clearly knows the oddly comforting loneliness of solo travelling, and watching it after a year in which such pleasures have largely been denied us, I fell hard for its restless, curious spirit.”
Prayers For The Stolen
“It’s a coming-of-age story of unique urgency and scope, in which day-to-day survival is presented as a gift, though it hardly cancels out the girls’ burgeoning hormonal unrest.”
Red Rocket
“Baker further provokes with his slamming tonal transitions and overlaps: the film frequently knots stomach-churning tragedy and farcical, high-pitched comedy into the same scene.”
Bergman Island
“Dancing a pas de deux twice over, here comes Mia Hansen-Løve with a film of doubles, doubled.”
Neptune Frost
“Neptune Frost is a poetic odyssey, a genderqueer collection of musical visions and vibrations — to watch it is to both kick back and switch on at the same time: let go of narrative convention, while hanging on tight to a sense of righteous fury, vibrating at a higher pitch”
Zero Fucks Given
“The film is frequently a riot, laugh-out-loud funny as it delivers bleakly existential corporate mantras (“there is no past, there is no future, there is only here and now as a cabin manager”) with deadpan charm.”
Drive My Car
“The triumph of this extraordinary film is that it evokes this limbo half-life without itself feeling like purgatory, instead allowing us to gently observe without judgment and come away enriched.”
The Innocents
“From a certain angle, The Innocents might be seen as a horror film; from another, it’s a lo-fi, unusually intriguing superhero origin story.”
Mariner of the Mountains
“The film muses extensively on the sometimes invisible divide between belonging and not belonging: anyone whose upbringing and identity has been split across countries and continents will relate to his search for some elusive, self-completing element.”
Benedetta
“In another time and place in history you could see Benedetta as an artist — she has a creative streak a mile wide and a liberal erotic imagination by which she is initially terrified, having seemingly fairly successfully repressed that side of herself until about the age of 30.”
After Yang
“This is a world where humans, clones and android beings live in semi-harmony, as sci-fi writers have been imagining for eons. It’s the way they interact and rely on each other here that feels fresh.”
The Souvenir Part II
“This is a particular mode of English filmmaking at its finest, a cinema attuned to the subtlest tremor of a stiff upper lip.”
Ahed’s Knee
“Israeli director Nadav Lapid does not make polite films: they spit and snarl and get way up in your face, brashly and constantly switching tack to disrupt your viewing pleasure, even if that means interrupting their own train of thought.”