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.
