COMPETITION

The audacious latest from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the Oscar-winning director of Drive My Car, is set primarily in a Paris elder-care facility run by a woman (Virginie Efira) whose progressive treatment approach clashes with the realities of chronic understaffing and bottom-line-driven management. Audiences with the patience to get through a leisurely paced and very talky first hour will be richly rewarded by a moving and at times transcendently beautiful affirmation of the basic human rights of respect and dignity. — DAVID ROONEY

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s debut feature, the first from a Rwandan director to screen in Cannes’ official selection, is a searing and intimate portrait of a nation’s reckoning. At the center of a cast of mostly non-pro actors, Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi plays a woman confronting the man accused of murdering her siblings and other relatives — though it’s through the character’s complex, often tense relationships with her daughter, sister and mother that this simultaneously emblematic and achingly specific story comes to life. — SHERI LINDEN

COMPETITION

A triptych gay epic that spans decades and tangles with a particularly grim time in modern Spanish history, this film from Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo delivers the heady satisfaction of seeing something ambitious land its nervy attempt. With three thematically converging plotlines — and tiny but juicy roles for Glenn Close and Penélope Cruz — the movie earns its high drama by fully immersing us in its world and its ideas, grabbing us with its paean to those who have lived fully in even the most dire war-torn circumstances. — RICHARD LAWSON

DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

Arie and Chuko Esiri’s sharp, stirring film transposes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway from 1920s London to present-day Lagos. The titular protagonist is played with terrific restraint by Sophie Okonedo, while Fortune Nwafor is a revelation as the haunted soldier Septimus. Just as the novel sought to reveal how Britain abandoned veterans, this dreamy and compelling interpretation gestures at the collateral damage of Nigeria’s military. Ayo Edebiri and David Oyelowo are among the fine supporting cast. — LOVIA GYARKYE

UN CERTAIN REGARD

This winsome and clever debut feature from the divisive Jordan Firstman trades the queer provocation of his past work for a cozy fable about a drug-happy New York party promoter (played by Firstman) who learns he has a 10-year-old son. Though the movie contains some Hollywood airbrushing and convenient exculpatory psychology, it’s a confident, exciting directorial bow — stylish in an unobtrusive way, agreeably paced, with a disarming ensemble orbiting around Firstman’s charming lead turn. — R.L.

DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

Prolific Romanian auteur Radu Jude’s first French-language feature is a caustic modern-day take on the turn-of-the-19th century book by Octave Mirbeau. Transforming the tale of an exploited maid into one of a Romanian immigrant working as a nanny for two passive-aggressive French intellectuals, Jude lambasts the current social order, making room for digressions on communism, Maoism and Nicolae Ceausescu. But he also fills his film with a sense of longing — of being far from loved ones in a country that’s not always welcoming. — JORDAN MINTZER

COMPETITION

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (the stellar Sandra Hüller) go on an unsentimental journey in 1949 through West and East Germany in Pawel Pawlikowski’s damn-near perfect period road movie. Exactingly restrained yet exquisitely layered, it forms a loose triptych with Pawlikowski’s last two features, Ida and Cold War, both set at least partly behind the Iron Curtain. This is a masterful exploration of family, history and angst. — LESLIE FELPERIN

COMPETITION

Romanian New Waver Cristian Mungiu (winner of the 2007 Palme d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) brings his needling focus and unvarnished realism to a knotty drama in which a suspicion of child abuse in a Norwegian village escalates into a full inquisition. Starring Renate Reinsve and an unrecognizable Sebastian Stan as the couple at the center of the storm, the film is a nuanced reflection on otherness and how anyone failing to conform to the values of a community invites distrust. — D.R.

COMPETITION

Korean action maestro Na Hong-jin’s rip-roaring sci-fi creature feature — about rural villagers fending off a violent invasion — is a superbly sustained pedal-to-the-metal experience that’s almost dizzying in its bravura. It’s a long sit at two hours and 40 minutes, but one that never allows your attention to wander, pausing for breathing space only intermittently and lacing those brief spells of downtime with invigorating shots of off-kilter humor. Even with messy CG touches, this is a crazy good time. — D.R.

CRITICS’ WEEK

Phuong Mai Nguyen’s animated adaptation of a graphic novel by AJ Dungo is distinguished by elegant hand-drawn simplicity and a strong emotional throughline. The love story — spirited and wrenching — begins with the meet-cute in a Los Angeles high school of introverted skateboarder AJ and gutsy surfer Kristen. They’re brought to life by the superb voice turns of Will Sharpe and Stephanie Hsu in a chronicle of two young people weathering some of life’s harshest storms. — S.L.

UN CERTAIN REGARD

The first feature from Louis Clichy, who worked on Pixar hits Wall-E and Up, is a graceful and moving coming-of-age cartoon that follows an 11-year-old boy whose life in rural France gets tougher when he has to wear a back brace. Contrasting hard-knock rustic realism with poetic flights of fancy, Clichy captures the anxieties of a working-class household, but also those eureka moments you have as a kid when your world is suddenly opened up by beauty. — J.M.

CRITICS’ WEEK

For her stunning feature debut, cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan tackles the coming-of-age genre in the most French way possible, delivering a rich, sprawling chronicle of teenage angst that starts off as a laid-back class trip to Italy and gradually turns into a devastating tale of loss. Featuring an impressive cast of unknowns and a fluid style that captures them with both lyricism and verisimilitude, this winner of the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize announces the arrival of a formidable new talent. — J.M.

COMPETITION

Rami Malek does career-best work as an unapologetically narcissistic performance artist with AIDS in Ira Sachs’ achingly observed portrait of art, love, desire and mortality in 1980s New York City. Following Passages and last year’s Peter Hujar’s Day, it’s the filmmaker’s third consecutive feature digging into the complex inner life of gay men, reaffirming his position among the preeminent movie chroniclers of queer experience. Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and newcomer Luther Ford co-star in this elegy defiantly tethered to life. — D.R.

COMPETITION

This rivetingly hard-to-categorize French epic is about a Nazi collaborator — an author and engineer working for the fascist Vichy regime, played by Anatomy of a Fall‘s Swann Arlaud — who happens to be the great-grandfather of the film’s writer-director, Emmanuel Marre. Fresh and off-the-cuff, it’s a period piece that feels utterly contemporary, as if someone traveled back to 1940 with an iPhone and hit record. Chronicles of far-right obedience and moral decadence don’t get much more scathing than this. — J.M.

COMPETITION

Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Loveless) returns with his first film made entirely outside of Russia, a loose remake of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife. This rigorously well-made, grippy-as-a-live-squid, anguish-steeped work is both a masterful crime thriller and the filmmaker’s most openly critical commentary on the motherland’s current political, spiritual and moral malaise — a denunciation never said in so many words but expressed with intricate layers of irony. — L.F.

COMPETITION

James Gray follows Armageddon Time with a semi-fictionalized return to his family life during mid-1980s Queens, New York, this time recounting a terrifying brush with the Russian mob. It’s a riveting crime thriller, a domestic drama of almost overwhelming power, and a piercing account of the American dream in tatters, with Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller in blazing form. While obvious antecedents might be Coppola or Lumet or Scorsese or Mann, I kept thinking while watching of the early crime films of Akira Kurosawa. — D.R.

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Iranian actress turned director Pegah Ahangarani uses archive footage and home movies to craft a powerful autobiographical account of the political turmoil that has wracked her homeland from 1979 until now. It’s a gripping first-person cautionary tale about speaking up in a place where rebellion can cost you your life, and a despairing portrait of a family that lost several loved ones to a regime they initially supported only to find their affinities betrayed by despotism. — J.M.

UN CERTAIN REGARD

A droll, peppery Hannah Einbinder stars as an up-and-coming filmmaker on a blood-spattered journey of self-discovery involving a mostly forgotten actress (Gillian Anderson, having a lark) in the latest from Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow). Employing a fictional slasher movie of yesteryear as the portal into a conversation about self and desire, this is heady, strange stuff, frustrating at times but captivating in both its confusion and its honesty. — R.L.

DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

Set in the lush forests and fields of northeastern France, this excitingly offbeat first feature from Sarah Arnold depicts a gory factional war between hunters and farmers, haves and have-nots, with one depressed fish-out-of-water gendarme caught in the middle. Finding clever new ways to tell a familiar story of crooked cops and small-town corruption, the movie calls to mind both the deadpan thrillers of the Coen brothers and the downbeat ’70s crime flicks of French helmer Alain Corneau. — J.M.

COMPETITION

A spellbinding body-swap puzzler led by a typically fearless performance from Léa Seydoux, this third feature from Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall co-writer Arthur Harari fuses existential horror with naturalistic drama. There’s a surface kinship here with films like It Follows and especially Under the Skin, in which post-coital afterglow sours fast. But this is a sui generis freakout, as mesmerizingly unsettling as it is elusive. I can’t wait to see it again and keep sifting through its mysteries. — D.R.

A version of this story appeared in the May 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

You don’t have to have seen the 2018 French film on which it’s based to predict exactly where Ladies First is going every step of the way. This comic tale of an arrogant, sexist male executive who gets his comeuppance when he hits his head and wakes up to find himself in a world dominated by women hits every satirical note you’d expect but provides more knowing chuckles than genuine laughs. An almost ridiculously overqualified cast of notable British thespians does their best to elevate the material of this Netflix comedy directed by Thea Sharrock (Wicked Little Letters, Me Before You), but it’s heavy lifting.

Sacha Baron Cohen, unusually not relying on changing his vocal and physical attributes for comic effect, plays Damien, an advertising company executive who revels in his misogynistic attitudes and playboy lifestyle. He’s looking forward to an upcoming promotion at the hands of his boss (Charles Dance), swaggering through the office to the strains of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” (one of far too many on-the-nose soundtrack selections).

Most egregiously, he treats fellow executive Alex (Rosamund Pike) horribly condescendingly during company meetings strategizing over an ad campaign for their latest client, Guinness. He treats her so badly, in fact, that she quits. But during their subsequent angry encounter out on the street, Damien runs smack into a pole and knocks himself out.

It’s not hard to guess what happens next, as he wakes up in a topsy-turvy world where the agency’s receptionist (Fiona Shaw) is now the CEO and the cleaning woman (Kathryn Hunter) a top executive. Alex is very much in charge, and the men at the agency, including Damien and his former boss, are treated derisively, the sexism very much in reverse.

Things are equally akilter in his family’s home, with his mother now sitting on the couch watching TV while his father slaves away in the kitchen. And his accomplished dentist sister (Emily Mortimer) amuses herself greatly with fart jokes.

Damien attempts to get things back to normal by slamming his head again, to no avail. So now, fueled by advice from an eccentric street person (Richard E. Grant) who has multiple pigeons perched on his head, he attempts to rise up the corporate ranks again using masculine wiles. It’s not easy, since when he attempts to make suggestions at a corporate strategy mission, he’s told such things as “You need to relax” and “Don’t get too emotional.” 

Screenwriters Natalie Krinsky, Cinco Paul and Katie Silberman clearly seem to have enjoyed reversing every sexist stereotype they could think of with such gags as female construction workers ogling Damien on the street; his attempting to become “fuckable” for career advancement through such things as a “testicle bra” and body waxing (cue The 40-Year-Old Virgin-style screams of pain); and, of course, ordering a plain salad for dinner instead of steak.

And when Damien and Alex do wind up in bed together even though she’s now his boss, they engage in a wrestling match over which one of them will be on top.

It’s mildly amusing but all so obvious, including the sexual reversals evident on such book titles as “Harriet Potter” and “Donna Quixote” and retail outlets like “Burger Queen” and “Victor’s Secret.” Not to mention the female Pope Beatrice.

The film moves swiftly enough, with the gags coming at such a consistent pace, that inevitably some of them land. And the performers certainly know how to sell the material, with Cohen amusingly leaning into his character’s humiliations, Pike appealingly reveling in her character’s dominance, and the top-notch supporting cast going through their paces like the pros they are.

But long before Alex inverts the stereotypical male/female dynamic by showing no interest in a relationship after she and Damien have their one-night stand, you realize that despite its high concept, Ladies First is hopelessly old-fashioned in its satirical conceit. No points for guessing that Damien will have seen the past error of his ways by the film’s conclusion.

Featuring powerfully atmospheric music and sound design, and a sense of tropical place so moistly palpable one might feel concerned about developing crotch rot after viewing, Venezuelan writer-director Jorge Thielen Armand’s third feature, Death Has No Master, is well dressed up but doesn’t really go anywhere.

Mind you, his previous full-length works, La Soledad and La Fortaleza (Fortitude), were similarly light on action but strikingly moody. However, somehow their arthouse idiosyncrasies felt more audacious. Given that this is his first outing with a relatively well-known star — Asia Argento, playing a woman returning from Europe to Venezuela to sell off her late father’s cacao estate — expectations may have perhaps irrationally piqued that he’d up his game somehow. But the final product doesn’t come to a boil, despite the promising simmering of the first act.

After an ominous maybe-dream/maybe-flashback sequence, never entirely explained, which finds Argento’s protagonist Caro in a ravine where one masked man covered in blood (Roberto Conde) encourages her to kill another (David Tiburcio), the action cuts abruptly to Caro, newly landed in the country. After being stopped by cops looking for a quick bribe, her driver reassures her that Venezuela is much safer now that they’ve killed all the criminals.

Not entirely reassured, but at least in possession of the deeds to her father’s house where she grew up after meeting her lawyer Roque (Jorge Thielen Hedderich, the director’s father and star of La Fortaleza), Caro arrives at the decrepit mansion. A stone construction decorated with bas-relief Corinthian column motifs with an interior that’s all chipped parquet flooring and shabby chic Victorian furniture, the house is by this point barely separate from the encroaching tropical forest that surrounds it. No wonder Roque has warned her that the house and the land surrounding it are not worth the million dollars she expects; she’ll be lucky if it fetches half that.

But home improvement is the least of Caro’s worries. There are various people living at the house, seemingly at the dispensation of Sonia (Dogreika Tovar, a non-professional with an incredible screen presence). Sonia remembers Caro from the old days when she worked for Caro’s father, and has been at the house for years, living there now with her son Maiko (Yermain Sequera, another find), a kid old enough to be in elementary school if only he were enrolled in one. A tenant (José Aponte) rents a room from Sonia and may sometimes share her bed, while old retainer Yoni (Arturo Rodríguez) also has the run of the estate, especially the plantation. Luckily, his loyalties lie more with Caro, which is lucky as things swiftly turn sour between Caro and Sonia when the former tells the latter she’s going to have to leave so Caro can sell the estate.

Not that we see her getting in the real-estate agents or even doing much about the dead leaves everywhere. After spending a lot of time in bed and looking at mysterious books of illustrations her father left lying about among his Chekhovian rifle and machete, Caro moves to the town for a while to stay in a hotel and plot with Roque about how to get rid of Sonia. The police are clearly not going to help, claiming that Sonia has a right to stay put having lived there more than five years, and anyway, she has other legal claims on the place.

Presumably, this was all filmed well before U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, not that the abduction has had much effect on the country’s regime. But it’s clear from the attitude of the locals that no one likes a pushy, arrogant gringa like Caro around these parts, least of all one who struts about in leather boots and a gaucho hat like she owns the place. Well, yes, she does own it technically, but it’s not a good look here, where the sufferings of colonial rule are well remembered. As one policewoman points out, all she’s lacking is a whip. (Don’t worry, there’s also a whip back at the house, which will play a significant role in the story.)

Argento has enough instinctive ferality about her to make her blend well with the less experienced actors, but this is not one of her better performances and the character is very underwritten. The sound and music tracks by Sylvain Bellemare and Vittorio Giampietro, respectively, have to work extra hard to make it feel like something is going to happen, eventually, and it won’t be pretty. Mission accomplished, but that doesn’t quite make for an entirely satisfying viewing experience.