Film of the Week are delighted to once more 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 75th Cannes Film Festival.
Showing Up
“Reichardt’s cinema is characterised by a specific running interest in the ways we care for each other, both out of love and obligation, and the transactions we make to feel supported in life.”
Leila’s Brothers
“Leila is something of an Elizabeth Bennett figure to the rest of her clueless family, perpetually surrounded as she is by clueless relatives that she must attempt to save from themselves.”
Stars At Noon
“Chemistry is tricksier and slipperier — it lives in the body as well as the mind, and exists largely in the subjective eye of the beholder. Chemistry will creep up and have its way with you”
R.M.N
“I’m not sure if I’ve ever begun a review with a shout out to a film’s casting director before. That’s probably very remiss of me. But what a film with which to correct that lapse! Catalin Dordea, regular casting director for the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, is doing sterling work here in his latest.”
Crimes of the Future
“The tone of the film is tightly controlled. I’m not sure that fully covers it, actually. The tone of this film is not just tightly controlled, it has been gagged, chloroformed, bound and stuffed into the trunk of a car; it will not be getting away from Cronenberg any time soon.”
Decision to Leave
“Ornately and ingeniously plotted as it is, Decision to Leave is a wary, wounded love story first and a procedural puzzle second, powered by what seems a sincerely soulful attraction between two people who know nothing — but somehow see everything — of each other.”
Armageddon Time
“A piercing examination of privilege, dense with political nuance and questioning — yet it never feels like a screed, since its portrayal of family life is so honest and inhabited.”
Triangle of Sadness
“I didn’t think I was going to be coming out of the festival this year recommending a new favourite on the basis that it’s Parasite meets Ghost Ship (and that’s a good thing), but here we are. Triangle of Sadness is a total delight.”
One Fine Morning
“That the time allotted to said tragedy must still compete with other pressures in the busy, ongoing tapestry of life as it lived gives the film some semblance of the gentle brutality of reality, rather than the sometimes artificial feel of fiction dealing with this kind of subject matter.”
The Eight Mountains
“Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeesch’s slowly heart-crushing film tracks a friendship with a perceptive patience that defies many a screenwriting manual and holds us rapt anyway, across a hilly hike of a running time.”
Top Gun: Maverick
“The fantasy that Top Gun: Maverick serves is perhaps the most seductive of them all: don’t think, just do it.”