Cannes Film Festival 2019: Day 9
Now showing...
by Alexa DalbyCAUTION: Here be spoilers
What the critics say…
Wounds
[rating=3]
Will is a bartender in New Orleans. He has a great job, great friends, and a girlfriend, Carrie, who loves him. He skates across life’s surface, ignoring complications and concentrating on enjoying the moment. One night at the bar, a violent brawl breaks out, which injures one of his regular customers and causes some college kids to leave behind a cell phone in their haste. Will begins receiving disturbing texts and calls from the stranger’s phone. While Will hopes to not get involved, Carrie gets lost down a rabbit hole investigating this strange malevolence. They’ve discovered something unspeakable, and it’s crawling slowly into the light.
The quirky, wacky humour that the film appeared to promise at the beginning… vanishes when the big scares arrive. – Guardian
Babak Anvari’s follow-up to Under the Shadow is a spooky, silly body-horror flick that’s thrilled to torture Armie Hammer. – Variety
Matthias et Maxime
[rating=4]
In the latest from Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan, two childhood buddies are forced to confront their feelings for each other after they kiss for a friend’s short film. There’s nothing glaringly wrong with the new movie… What’s missing is the blazing urgency — the purpose and passion that made movies like Laurence Anyways, Heartbeats, Tom at the Farm and Mommy, for all their excesses and errors of taste, play like the work of an artist putting his wildly, thrillingly, at times grotesquely beating heart right up on the screen – Hollywood Reporter
Xavier Dolan’s bittersweet study of male friendship (and maybe more) finds him on restrained, charming form… This is not an especially subversive story, beginning as it does with a plot gambit… albeit distinguished by the tender queer gaze that Dolan brings to his characters’ hesitant fraternal intimacy… Dolan has an eye and ear for the ambiguous desires and jealousies powering any male relationship… Dolan remains an unabashed sensualist,… flooding his screen with feeling in the tangible form of sound and color. – Variety
Oh Mercy
[rating=3]
Roschdy Zem is an annoyingly wise police captain in northern France, as Arnauld Desplechin’s lofty pretensions fatally split the tone of his new crime film. – Guardian
Arnaud Desplechin’s police procedural feels oddly like the pilot for a series, bigger on atmosphere and potential character development than the murder meant to be the film’s focus. – Variety
Wounds, Matthias et Maxime and Oh Mercy premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2019.
