An hour into “Misericordia,” there is a scene so shocking that it might leave viewers’ mouths agape in disbelief. Only it is a mere conversation between two people. That exchange of words can be so profoundly disquieting and underscores Alain Guiraudie’s commitment to thrilling audiences the old-fashioned way – with ideas rather than actions. His new thriller film is overladen with mysteries and enigmas, perhaps none so confounding as its absence from the main Competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Continue reading ‘Misericordia’ Review: Alain Guiraudie’s Nerve-Rattling Thriller Is A Dostoevskian Masterwork [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

If cinema is somehow retracting, contracting, or diminishing, don’t tell the organizers of the Cannes Film Festival and all its many sidebars. Thank god for them because when you look at the Cannes 2024 line-up, cinema seems to be in great health and shape. As is always the case, France’s Croisette offers an eclectic and diverse line-up of films from all over the world, from every genre, style, form, and medium. 

READ MORE: Summer Movie Preview: 50 Must-See Films To Watch

The nearly 80-year-old George Miller returns with another “Mad Max” saga, “Furiosa,” Kevin Costner dusts off his directing cowboy hat for his first feature in 21 years (“American Horizon”), and Yórgos Lanthimos premieres his second new feature in less than nine months (“Kinds Of Kindness”).

Continue reading Cannes Film Festival 2024 Preview: 22 Must-See Films To Watch at The Playlist.

Although legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola is still trying to find a distributor for his decades-in-the-making new drama, “Megalopolis,” we finally have our first official look at “The Godfather” director’s brand new epic sci-fi-ish drama via Vanity Fair. It’s Coppola’s first feature-length film in nearly thirteen years, following 2011’s experimental “Twixt.”

Released via Vanity Fair, the first look from the film reveals Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel scanning the horizon atop a building in a futuristic-looking New York City,

READ MORE: Cannes 2024: New Films From Yorgos Lanthimos, Frances Ford Coppola, Sean Baker & Andrea Arnold

Written and produced by Coppola, the “Apocalypse Now” filmmaker first came up with the idea for the ambitious epic back in 1979 before actively developing the project in 1983.

Continue reading ‘Megalopolis’ First Look: Adam Driver & Nathalie Emmanuel Appear In First Image From Francis Ford Coppola’s Long-Awaited Epic at The Playlist.

Let’s catch up on all things Cannes Film Festival. For one, if you haven’t seen it, Cannes recently revealed its 2024 poster, featuring a scene from “Rhapsody in August,” directed by the great Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, 81 at the time (see it below in full). But there’s much more, including today’s announcement of new titles. This morning, the Cannes Festival announced the addition of thirteen titles to the line-up, featuring notable names from filmmakers like Oliver Stone and Lou Ye and French filmmakers like Arnaud Desplechin and Michel Hazanavicius.

Continue reading Cannes 2024 Adds 13 New Titles: Films By Arnaud Desplechin, Michel Hazanavicius & Oliver Stone at The Playlist.

Of King Henry VIII’s six wives, his final marriage to Catherine Parr is perhaps the most ignored. The others are rife with tragedy: there are the two he detested the most that he bent the will of God to legalize divorce; there’s Jane Seymour, who died soon after giving birth to an heir; and most notoriously of all, there are the wives he beheaded. But Catherine Parr has been remembered in the history books as the one who simply survived.

Continue reading ‘Firebrand’ Review: Karim Aïnouz Paints A Dull Version Of History In Handsome Period Drama [Cannes] at The Playlist.

With all the headlines dedicated to the #MeToo movement over the past few years, it can sometimes feel like the industry has made progress — certainly, enough to launch several biopics and television shows about its own misconduct. But this is still a time when “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” actress Adèle Haenel feels compelled to quit the French film industry in protest, and when the director of the Cannes Film Festival feels the need to say, out loud, that Cannes is not a “festival for rapists.”

READ MORE: Cannes Director Says Event Is Not “A Festival For Rapists”

Needless to say, there’s still work to be done, and it’s good that these conversations continue to happen – especially when they involve an icon of the French film industry, Marion Cotillard.

Continue reading Marion Cotillard Says #MeToo Has Taught Young Actresses What’s ‘Not Right’ at The Playlist.

Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” playing in Competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, begins with an interview between a writer and a student interested in her work. It’s a lighthearted, almost flirty discussion where double entendres are part of a seemingly harmless game. It is pleasurable for Sandra (Sandra Hüller), the writer flattered by the attention, but also for us, the audience, as Triet’s writing always is: casual yet precise, revealing of characters’ personalities but always awake to the degree of performance in their behavior — in short, utterly believable and thrillingly human.

Continue reading ‘Anatomy Of A Fall’ Review: Words Shape Reality In Justine Triet’s Gripping Masterpiece [Cannes] at The Playlist.

In 2013, filmmaker Anthony Chen’s first feature, “Ilo Ilo,” won the coveted Caméra d’Or at Cannes. Centered around the inseparable bond between a 10-year-old Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny, Chen’s full-length debut deployed a specific lens — a family weathering the 1997 Asian financial crisis — to tell a universal story exploring the nooks and crannies of our shared humanity. Flash forward to exactly a decade later, Chen makes his triumphant return to Cannes (in the Un Certain Regard section) with “The Breaking Ice,” a moving, humanist snapshot of China’s lost youths told through a ships-in-the-night friendship.

Continue reading ‘The Breaking Ice’ Review: Anthony Chen’s Long-Awaited Return To Cannes Is A Humanist Triumph at The Playlist.

I am still searching for my words; my thoughts first ran dry in the opening minutes of the shattering and evocative “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It begins with the Osage tribal elders mourning the loss of their language and customs as they bury a sacred pipe. The scene breaks, next revealing these Indigenous folks — forcibly moved from Missouri to present-day Oklahoma (thought to be terrible, barren land) — discovering oil as psychedelic music erupts with the splash of the black liquid.

Continue reading ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Review: Lily Gladstone Is Devastating In Martin Scorsese’s Indigenous Epic [Cannes] at The Playlist.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been a Cannes regular since his debut short, “Koza,” in 1995. An assured auteur from the very beginning, Ceylan made a name for Turkey on the festival circuit, and every year he brings a new title to the Croisette, critics and audiences alike already know what they’re in for. A staple for aesthetics, length, and dialogue, his films are verbose and dignified. Protagonists at existential crossroads, revolting against a comfort they’ve been trying to get accustomed to, a majestic and barren landscape.

Continue reading ‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: An Assured, Strong Cannes Comeback for Nuri Bilge Ceylan [Cannes] at The Playlist.

God, what a terrible thing it is to be a teenage girl. A body once free to roam and run and be transformed by the unforgivable rush of hormones, cunning little tricksters pumped through blood in a mad rush to reach the anti-climatic cusp of adulthood. What a beautiful thing it is to be a teenage girl, too. A mind dazzlingly clouded by the overwhelming realm of possibility, skin covered in a web of electricity, every single sliver of emotion felt so deeply it rattles and shakes like a ping-pong ball of excitement through the brain. 

READ MORE: 2023 Cannes Film Festival: 21 Must-See Movies To Watch

Molly Manning Walker’s “How To Have Sex” understands this thorny dichotomy in which female adolescence is embedded.

Continue reading ‘How To Have Sex’ Review: Snapshot of Brits Abroad Proves a Refreshing Take on Female Sexual Coming of Age [Cannes] at The Playlist.

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest gem, “Monster,” begins on an enormous inferno. The facade of a hostess club is engulfed in flames of mysterious origin, attracting everyone from curious neighbors to squealing children chasing down roaring fire engines to witness the chaos. But such a fire can be traced back to its igniting spark, and “Monster” delicately examines how, like a growing flame, seemingly innocuous falsehoods can spiral into total destruction. 

Continue reading ‘Monster’ Review: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Time-Hopping Melodrama Movingly Shows The Power Of Perspective [Cannes] at The Playlist.

At its best moments, the extremely straightforward construction of Cédric Kahn’s “The Goldman Case” allows for fascinating dynamics and images to occur apparently unforced, as if by themselves, for the viewer to seize on their own. The film, which has just opened the Directors’ Fortnight section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is refreshing for this bared-down, almost documentary-like approach — especially because it focuses on an incredibly complex man who needs all the space he can get to show everything that he is, in all his apparent contradictions. 

READ MORE: 2023 Cannes Film Festival: 21 Must-See Movies To Watch

This revelation takes place progressively, over the course of the almost surgically precise and aggressive trial that takes up most of the film’s runtime.

Continue reading ‘The Goldman Case’ Review: A Refreshingly Unfussy Procedural That Could Still Go Deeper [Cannes] at The Playlist.

Ever since Michel Hazanavicius’ Oscar-winning tribute to silent cinema “The Artist,” the French filmmaker has continued to focus his work on the process of filmmaking itself, for better and, mostly, for worse. After “Redoutable,” centered on the relationship between Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky during the filming of “La Chinoise,” he again explored la magie du cinéma in “The Lost Prince,” where Omar Sy (the biggest star on French Netflix and, maybe, in French cinema tout court) saw the rich fantasy film-set world he had created for his daughter begin to crumble as she started to outgrow his fairytales.

Continue reading ‘Final Cut’ Review: Michel Hazanavicius’ Meta Filmmaking Zombie Comedy Remake Is A Depressing Dud [Cannes] at The Playlist.

When Julia Ducournau‘s last film, 2016’s “Raw,” premiered in the International Critics’ Week section of that year’s Cannes Film Festival, it generated massive amounts of buzz. That translated to a bump up to the main competition for her new film, “Titane,” and in the end, taking home the big best picture prize, aka the Palme d’Or.

READ MORE: ‘Titane’ Teaser Trailer: Julia Ducournau Returns With A Creepy Cannes-Bound Thriller 

As grotesque as “Raw” and its irrepressible appetites were, by all accounts, “Titane” is very weirder, more aggressive, bizarre, horrific, and transgressive, but most reviews (like ours) and synopses are vague to hold back the film’s many surprises.

Continue reading ‘Titane’ Red-Band Trailer: Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or Winner Is A Return To Unsettling Horror at The Playlist.

Since it opened the Cannes Film Festival in July, presumably by now you’ve heard all about “Annette,” the avante garde rock opera musical by the great Leos Carax (“Holy Motors“) featuring the music of the avante-pop band Sparks (featured in Edgar Wright‘s recent documentary “The Sparks Brothers“) and featuring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard.

Continue reading Final ‘Annette’ Trailer: Adam Driver & Marion Cotillard Star In A Surreal Musical For Leos Carax Featuring Sparks Music at The Playlist.

Andrea Arnold is aware that cows roaming the countryside is an image cut straight from the cloth of pastoral English iconography, the stuff of Victorian novels and Renaissance paintings. “[For] a lot of our modern lives, our sort of view of nature is a very romantic one,” she says. “It’s a very sort of postural, are we going to have a picnic and a nice bit of nature? We engage with the romance of it as opposed to the reality of it.” 

READ MORE: Best Of Cannes 2021: 15 Must-See Movies From The Festival

The reality of nature, in all its unglamorized truth, is the driving force of Arnold’s new film, “Cow,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

Continue reading Filmmaker Andrea Arnold On ‘Cow’: The Beauty & Brutality Of Nature In All Is Unglamorized Truth [Interview] at The Playlist.

The cinema of filmmaker Gaspar Noé tends to skew toward the younger, stickier parts of life. Since the name-making controversy of his second feature, “Irreversible” (2002), the Argentinian filmmaker has become synonymous with a world of parties, loud music, drug-taking, and sex. For his seventh film, “Vortex,” we find Noé in a more sober and somber mood. Starring Françoise Lebrun and Italian giallo auteur Dario Argento, and shot almost entirely in split-screen, “Vortex” tells the story of a woman in the late throes of dementia, living in a densely cultivated Parisian apartment with her husband, who is a film critic.

Continue reading Gaspar Noé Talks Maturing For ‘Vortex,’ Old Age & Split-Screens [Interview] at The Playlist.

Well, that’s a wrap on the 2021 Cannes Film Festival; 56 reviews and counting (there might be one or two more stragglers to come, but we are basically done). It was a pretty great festival and strong year despite the COVID-19 protocol confusion, those changing rules, and Spike Lee spoiling the Palme d’Or prize early (Spike!!).

READ MORE: Cannes Film Festival 2021 Preview: 25 Films To Watch

2021 was a strong year, and perhaps that’s not a surprise since films like Wes Anderson‘s “The French Dispatch,” Paul Verhoven‘s “Benedetta,” and other movies basically waited an entire year waiting for the global pandemic to subside so they could premiere under optimal conditions.

Continue reading Best Of Cannes 2021: 15 Must-See Movies From The Festival at The Playlist.

Conspiracy theorists have spent more time researching their subjects than you have and have facts ready at their disposable with which to bury you in. Take filmmaker Oliver Stone, for example. Spend three hours with his 1991 epic “JFK,” or two more with his new nonfiction recap of the same material, and you’re bound to come away thinking he Makes Some Points. However, without the captivating veneer of fiction, Stone’s “JFK Revisted: Through The Looking Glass” comes off as a much more rhetorically dishonest work.

Continue reading ‘JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass’: Oliver Stone Attempts A Weak Victory Lap In The Receptive-To-Conspiracy Age [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

“This stuff is junk, what we’re doing,” Bill Murray deadpans in the middle of “New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization.” The live audience onscreen—a strange sight after a year and a half of social distancing and no live performances—laughs. Murray hams it up: “Is it too late to get some moussaka?” Then he smiles knowingly and nods. “Trust me when I say that the worst is over,” he says. 

Continue reading ‘New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization’: Bill Murray-Led Classical Music Special Is An Ode to Live Music [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

Though “Nitram” never depicts the unspoken horrific massacre that its protagonist commits, the entire film queasily pulses in the anxious anticipation of the unspeakable event. It’s not an easy film to watch, knowing what’s coming but remaining completely powerless, not unlike watching a car crash in motion and being unable to stop it. 

READ MORE: Cannes Film Festival 2021 Preview: 25 Films To Watch

All the warning signs are there for Martin Bryant (Caleb Landry Jones, in a truly chameleonic performance that has since taken the Best Actor prize at Cannes), whom the film never names directly.

Continue reading ‘Nitram’: Caleb Landry Jones Is Chilling In Justin Kurzel’s Portrait Of An Infamous Australian Mass Shooter [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

In 2019, “Parasite” took the Palme d’Or in a celebration that saw audience members and media jumping from their seats in joy. Many thought it was a career achievement for Bong Joon Ho. But Oscar prospects? Well, sure, maybe it could be the first South Korean film to earn an International Film nomination, but more than that? Many dismissed its chances much too quickly. Some of us, however, saw a universal tale that was a clear Oscar contender.

Continue reading Did The 2022 Oscar Season Kickoff In Cannes With ‘Titane’? Well… at The Playlist.

Note to self: do not get old. The alternative, i.e., death, may not be very pleasant but, sedate and dignified and swathed in vaguely biblical white sheets, it doesn’t get anything like the bad press that old age does in Gaspar Noé‘s “Vortex.” Let’s not forget that in “Enter the Void,” this same director made death seem like quite the trip – infinitely preferable to the progressively demeaning ravages of dementia or the Sword of Damocles that is a dodgy ticker.

Continue reading ‘Vortex’: Split-Screened And Somber, Gaspar Noé’s Latest Old Age Drama Is A Whole New Form Of Gruelling [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

The 74th Cannes Film Festival came to an end on Saturday night. It was a sweaty fest full of tourists more interested in the beach than the world premieres and lots of spitting in testing vials for non-Europeans, but it proved that a major festival could return at full capacity during the age of COVID. And, a jury comprised of notable industry players Spike Lee, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Tahar Rahim, among others, selected Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” to win the prestigious Palme d’ Or.

Continue reading Spike Lee Reveals ‘Titane’ As 2021 Cannes Palme d’Or Winner A Bit Early [Full Winners List] at The Playlist.