Cannes review: Happy End (2017)
★★★★☆
Michael Haneke’s Happy End deconstructs a wealthy bourgeois family living a life oblivious to the human beings around them with chilling results.
festivals
Cannes review: Loveless (2017)
★★★★☆
Shown through a couple’s reactions to the disappearance of their son, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (Nelyubov) is a crushing comment on a loveless society and its people.
Cannes review: The Beguiled (2017)
★★★★☆
Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is compelling Southern Gothic, richly textured and deeply feminine.
Cannes review: How to talk to girls at parties (2017)
★★★★☆
John Cameron Mitchell’s How To Talk To Girls At Parties is a weird mixture of punk and aliens in the British suburbs – and it works.
Cannes review: The Square (2017)
★★★★☆
Ruben Östlund’s The Square is a chilly satire on the pretensions of art and Sweden’s comfortable society.
Cannes review: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
★★★★☆
In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Yorgos Lanthimos creates a disturbingly strange and brutal dilemma.
Cannes review: The Meyerowitz Stories (new and selected) (2017)
★★★★☆
Noah Baumbach’s verbose comedy-drama The Meyerowitz Stories for Netflix is solid mainstream entertainment with a wry taste.
Cannes review: 120 BPM (120 beats per minute) (2017)
★★★★★☆
In BPM director Robin Campillo turns his naturalistic documentary-style technique from The Class on a group of AIDS activists in the epidemic of the 1990s in a sober, moving, tender and compassionate film.
Cannes review: Okja (2017)
★★★★☆
Netflix’s Okja is Bong Joon-ho’s and Jon Ronson’s satire-cum-expose of the genetically modified food industry through the adventures of a delightful Korean girl and an outsize giant pig.
Cannes review: Jupiter’s Moon (2017)
★★★★☆
In Jupiter’s Moon Kornél Mundruczó takes an intriguing and timely magical realist premise but leaves its resolution in mid air.
Cannes review: Wonderstruck (2017)
★★★★☆
In Wonderstruck Todd Haynes opens a cabinet of cinematic wonders as two deaf children’s stories interlink 50 years apart in the magic of New York.
Cannes review: Ismaël’s Ghosts (2017)
★★★★☆
Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismaël’s Ghosts is an abstract, at times melodramatic interweaving of nightmare, filmmaking, fiction and reality.
Spaceship (2016)
★★★★☆
Spaceship is a dreamlike, semi-psychedelic, free-flowing story of teenage cyber goths and alien abductions.
Frantz (2016)
★★★★☆
François Ozon’s Frantz takes you on a haunting journey into the unexpected ramifications of grief, forgiveness and identity in the European aftermath of World War I.