The story is a cornerstone of drama itself: warrior Odysseus (Matt Damon), following his triumphs in the Trojan War, attempts to return home but encounters many obstacles along the way, from a terrifying Cyclops (Bill Irwin) to the literally bewitching Calypso (Charlize Theron). The longer Odysseus stays away, the more difficult it is for his loving wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) to stave off the many suitors who seek to usurp Odysseus’ throne and his place in Penelope’s bed. Young prince Telemachus (Tom Holland) goes out to seek his father, while duplicitous suitor Antinous (Robert Pattinson, complete with villain-bangs) plans to manipulate the situation in his favor.

Nolan’s love for non-chronological narrative can be exhausting — Tenet should have come with its own yarn-board — but he manages to jump around the saga of Odysseus in fascinating ways by moving from narrator to narrator, each providing a different flashback to bring us to Odysseus’ current state. They include Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), brother of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), and Odysseus’ devoted swineherd and fight trainer Eumaeus (John Leguizamo).

If it sounds like Nolan is spinning an impossible amount of plates here, he is, but even by his standards the cross-cutting and moments of circling back make for an impressive feat of storytelling. (He’s helped greatly by the wig team behind Damon’s beard — its length and color constantly lets us know where we are on the timeline.) The auteur’s script is matched by the film’s visual and aural pleasures: Nolan regular Hoyte van Hoytema makes great use of the IMAX screen, never providing a wide tracking shot when he can provide a very wide tracking shot, the kind of camera movement you can feel in your chest.

The film wisely acknowledges both the dramatic satisfaction of battlefield glory and the genuine pain and sorrow of war and its capacity to destroy loved ones, communities, civilizations. Ludwig Göransson’s score matches the story’s many tones, from thrilling bombast to mournful horns that call to mind Pedro Almodóvar’s High Heels and its use of Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain. That blend of majesty and tragedy is best encapsulated in the film’s Trojan horse, an object of beauty that’s also a trick and a trap, designed to backfire upon an unwitting enemy.

Damon is called upon to convey all of these conflicting notions, not only about warfare but also about the gods (he believes in Zeus’ version of the golden rule, yet he’s not above willfully offending Poseidon in the middle of an ocean voyage) and familial responsibility. As he did in Oppenheimer, Damon takes a role that could have been a stone-faced pillar of masculinity and instead finds notes of doubt, vulnerability, and even humor. The ensemble (which also includes Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, Elliot Page, and Corey Hawkins) is excellent throughout, taking some of literature’s greatest larger-than-life characters and finding the beating heart within.

Peak Nolan involves a mix of popcorn delights and intellectual contemplation, and he has rarely brought those two notions together as skillfully as he as in The Odyssey. It’s an epic saga of an epic saga, worthy of its source.

Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenwriter: Christopher Nolan, based on Homer’s Odyssey.
Cast: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, John Leguizamo, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Hamish Patel, Bill Irwin, Elliot Page, Benny Safdie, Corey Hawkins, Mia Goth
Executive producer: Thomas Hayslip
Producers: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan
Director of photography: Hoyte van Hoytema
Production design: Ruth De Jong
Editing: Jennifer Lame
Music: Ludwig Göransson
Sound design: David V. Butler, supervising dialogue & ADR editor
Production companies: Universal Pictures, Syncopy
In English
180 minutes

The tension between tradition and the economic and educational possibilities that can be sought elsewhere in a globalised world has almost become a cliche theme of doc coming-of-age portraits, but Edoyan transcends reductive dichotomies, reaching something more ineffable and existential in her sensitive reflections on the bone-deep need for home and dreams. As the friends choose whether to stay or go, she presents their divergent perspectives without judgment, and conveys the intense anxiety caused by geopolitical instability in the Caucasus, where small nations vulnerable to outside aggression try to maintain ancestral roots while pushed to orient themselves toward either Russia or the European Union, and war in Ukraine rages on village televisions. The question of how to live in one’s homeland is a recurrent one for Montreal-based Edoyan, who explored it in Figure of Armen (2012), also about Armenia, and The Sea Between Us (2019), on Lebanon, where she grew up.

Edoyan is a second–generation Armenian, and a tenderness for place and lives on the land, as well as the lyrical possibilities of documentary to capture its contours and essence, is palpable in every frame. The camera tracks across the snow-coated landscape, almost caressing it, before dissolving into the sleek hide of a cow’s back. A quiet, monumental dignity is conferred on faces, which appear painterly and timeless in candlelit close-ups in church, or dining against inky shadow as rain beats down, through Etienne Roussy’s gorgeous cinematography.

The rhythms of outdoor labour, from raking hay in fields to washing carpets in the river and moving flocks of sheep, are unhurriedly portrayed. But it’s the conversations between the longtime friends Hakob, Karlen and Henrikh that provide both the political context and loose narrative drama. These exchanges are neatly explanatory enough to feel at times prompted or scripted, but they are welcome guides to a lesser-known transcontinental corner of the globe on the Armenian border that can confound in its historical complexities.

As most of his peers leave, Hakob, who works at a cheese factory, plans to remain. His mother was a kidnapped bride, but the balance of power is more ambiguous in his long-distance relationship with Monika, a dance teacher in Tbilisi he met online. Many youths have turned their attention to the European Union for migrant work, but Karlen, facing tough economic prospects as a shepherd on his family’s farm, prefers the prospect of labour in Russia. Henrikh, in contrast, is dead set on the promise of Europe. When protests ring out through the night sky in Tbilisi against the law on foreign influence introduced by the ruling Georgian Dream party that hampers Georgia’s chances of joining the European Union in an abrupt authoritarian turn, he is with them. He went to the capital to study international relations, and perceiving that kind of future at risk, he launches into political activism, and a path of risky resistance that has a multi-generational legacy.

The abandoned ruins of what was, in the Soviet era, a large milk factory but is now returning to nature, with cows roaming inside its walls, is the dramatic setting for discussions of the past between the young men, who disagree on whether nostalgia for the employment offered under socialism, or residual anger for the Soviet repression of Christian beliefs, is more salient. But it’s a poem by Vahan Terian (the village, despite its size, has a whole museum dedicated to him), that provides the film’s title, and its spirit. Shepherds who light fires on the mountain are free, but those who roam are prisoners wherever they go, it suggests. Edoyan’s film for a new era adds the tentative, fragile hope that there is formless but real possibility in blazes away from home — both the hearths of temporary respite, and the flames of continued resistance in exile.

Director: Marlene Edoyan
Producers: Dominique Dussault, Marlene Edoyan
Cinematographer: Etienne Roussy
Editor: Omar Elhamy
Sound: Alex Lane, Marie-Pierre Grenier, Irakli Ivanishivili, Lynne Trepanier
Music: Mathieu Charbonneau, Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux
Production companies: Nemesis Films (Canada)
Sales: Filmotor
Venue: Yerevan (Regional Competition)
In Armenian, Georgian
94 minutes

Sahakyan’s high-profile, well-received 2022 animated documentary Aurora’s Sunrise recounted the life of Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide who became a writer and Hollywood actress. Her latest doc is on the surface a more low-key, observational film, but it gradually becomes clear that it has sprung from a similar, heartfelt impulse of bringing visibility and dignity to survivors and exiles of an Armenian history cyclically beset by wars and crises; and this it achieves admirably.

Garnik Seyranyan, the 66-year-old theatre director and playwright who helms this art therapy project, has written a play, Shakespeare’s Sins, in which the English bard’s characters — from Romeo and Juliet, to Hamlet, King Lear and Richard the Third — call him to account for their tragic fates. The director casts the play in the lunchroom and other communal spaces, and holds regular rehearsals of his troupe in the home’s red-coloured theatre. The colourful residents dive into candid conversations about love, loss and exile; the resonant, existential themes that have shaped their own lives and left impressions undimmed by time. As the title hints at, reaching old age in a tragedy-strewn life can bring its own kind of loneliness and melancholy. But even those over eighty are far from done with the drama of living: romances bloom and heartbreaks come, as some cast and crew get together, and others separate.

The cavernous, Soviet-era structure, with its rickety elevator, faded murals, and roaming cats, has seen better days but is full of character. As its residents gather to smoke and tease each other in its herringbone-floored hallways, we get a sense of the remnants of a Soviet idea of collective care that never quite came to pass, in a building now underfunded and understaffed. Even the jerky care robot seems less a high-tech innovation than a dated idea out of the past of what the future might be like.

There is not much to do to pass the time here, beyond watching old cartoons, peaches to shake from the trees outside, snooker or the occasional drinking session to reminisce about livelier days. Often shot through windows or from behind doorframes, with a loose and unhurried pace that suits the rather unstructured days, the doc captures many quieter moments of reverie and contemplation. Evocative, old photographs of the residents are shared, but no deep backstory.

Time drifts on like an eternal present, but mortality hangs over health troubles. And this is not a home cut off from the world. Television brings regular news bulletins on the war in Artsakh, the hardships and shortages of the blockade, and the displacement of Armenian families from settlements occupied by Azerbaijan. Gayane, who at 50 is younger than many of the other residents, has been evacuated to Armenia. She returns to Artsakh, but must flee again, and comes back to this stopgap shelter, in a society ill-equipped to tailor support to the displaced.

We share rehearsals with the cast in the lead-up to the performance, but after they are made-up and costumed, the film cuts at the stage cry of “Lights.” The process of creatively engaging and working through life that the project enables matters more than the result, after all. The ability of creative work done in community to affirm dignity and humanity has a moving, accumulative power here, even as the film admirably avoids sentimentality. There is no huge magic of transformation in evidence, nor does there have to be, as the theatre simply allows its sometimes stubborn, intractable cast a place to be visible, to be together, and to feel alive.

Directors: Inna Sahakyan, Ruben Ghazaryan
Screenwriters: Inna Sahakyan, Lilit Movsisyan
Producer: Vardan Hovhannisyan
Cinematographer: Bagrat Saroyan
Editor: Artur Sahakyan
Sound design: Lennert Hunfeld
Production companies: Bars Media (Armenia), BIND (Netherlands)
Sales: Bars Media
Venue: Yerevan (International Competition)
In Armenian, Russian
94 minutes

An initially transactional relationship based on survival between two women of different backgrounds and generations grows into a deep bond, as they try to rebuild their lives in a hostile environment of economic precarity and predatory exploitation in Cyprus. The title comes from the expression “a lion behind you and the sea in front of you;” in other words, where myriad dangers are all around, and courage is the only option.

Mishiali’s sophomore feature after 2018’s Pause, which also turned on an oppressed woman seeking escape, The Lion at My Back rests on the strong performances of its two leads. Elena Kallinikou is the prickly, guarded Stella, a forty-something drug addict in recovery on the precipice of spiralling back downwards. Sokhna Diallo is Mariama, an eighteen-year-old asylum seeker from Senegal, who doggedly holds onto optimism. Their raw intensity and flashes of vulnerability provide a solid, moving emotional core that propels the drama — even when  the plotting, which favours vivid, symbolic moments over nuanced naturalism, stretches plausibility. There are enough surprising moments of real connection to make the film stand out among the many recent dramas about migration, ensuring it a wide festival run to come.

Both women have lost their families in adverse circumstances and are deep in financial straits and solitude, when they meet at a shelter where Stella is working. Now that she’s reached eighteen and official adulthood, Mariama must make her own way, but the obstacles to renting a room mean she starts sleeping rough, while looking for undocumented work. A roof, and under-the-table shift work at a butcher’s, come her way through Stella, who is also in need of a favour, in the form of help cheating on mandatory drug tests before an upcoming custody trial.

As Stella’s abrasive reactivity gradually thaws in Mariama’s company, she reconnects with a part of herself she blocked off when she lost care of her young daughter, Zoe, who she can now only see for brief moments with the clandestine help of a nanny. But the abyss closes in, as an abusive former partner, working for a crime ring out of a cavernous, dimly lit warehouse complex, endeavours to draw her back into the criminal underworld with the lure of earnings for sex work at fetish parties. Stella, who wrongly assumes Mariama is naive in the ways of a wolfish world, comes to realise that they share experiences of trauma at the hands of men.

Close-ups in cramped rooms in the high heat of summer lend to the sense of panicked pressure and hemmed-in options, offset by impressive coastal landscapes and desert-like shores, effectively framed by D.O.P. Manu Tilinski to dramatise moments of togetherness in solitude.

The toll of survival in a hostile, predatory environment for those on the margins of society, the difficulty of regaining a foothold in legal means of subsistence, and the systemic way in which traffickers and other corrupt, cynical predators exploit the most vulnerable for labour are themes threaded through various story threads. Suspense is created from whether the risk of trust will pay off (Mariama’s budding romance at work, for instance, plays out like it may go either way, toward comfort or a derailing betrayal.)

Broad psychological truth is prioritised over plot cohesion, in a drama that leans a little too much into coincidence, and spectacular allegory. The weakest scene occurs in the fetish dungeon of a pink-lit, maze-like sex club, where the BDSM scene is rather lazily equated with non-consensual dehumanisation. A clandestine van journey to intercept migrants in a border buffer zone that Mariama tags along on also stretches credibility. But, in this lawless jungle of few protections and a thin line between opportunity and entrapment, hope and resilience are allowed to take on a powerful, restorative form. Playing in water becomes a refrain of cleansing and joy, as dignity and agency are returned to two women relearning how to be present in simple shared moments.

Director: Tonia Mishiali
Screenwriters: Tonia Mishiali, Dianne Jones, Simona Nobile
Cast: Sokhna Diallo, Elena Kallinikou, Prokopis Agathocleous, Herodotos Miltiadous
Producers: Tonia Mishiali, Katarzyna Ozga, Nicolas Steil, Marinos Charalambous, Vladimir Subotic, Antoine Simkine
Cinematographer: Manu Tilinski
Editor: Emilios Avraam
Sound design: Kevin Feildel, Loïc Collignon
Music: Fredrika Stahl
Production companies: Bark Like A Cat Films, Iris Productions, Avaton Films
Sales: The Yellow Affair
Venue: Yerevan (International Competition)
In Greek, English
106 minutes

The festival’s annual awards are replicas of Parajanov’s Thalers — the miniature artworks that Georgian-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov carved while a political prisoner in the Soviet era — a fitting nod that emphasises the value the festival places on identity in resistance. Golden Apricot’s Artistic Director, Karen Avetisyan, talked with The Film Verdict ahead of this edition.

The Film Veridct:  Golden Apricot has always been a strong showcase for films from Armenia and filmmakers of Armenian descent, and for films from the wider region. What are some highlights we can look forward to this year?

Karen Avetisyan: We open the festival with In the Land of Arto by Tamara Stepanyan, a meaningful choice for us as it is a film about return, memory, identity and the emotional geography of Armenia. After opening the Piazza Grande programme in Locarno, its Yerevan premiere becomes something more intimate as the film comes back to the landscape, language and history from which it was born. Outliving Shakespeare by Inna Sahakyan and Ruben Ghazaryan continues an emerging Armenian documentary tradition, this time using theatre, aging and memory to speak about dignity and time. Marlene Edoyan’s A Fire There, set in an Armenian community in southern Georgia is another beautiful example of cinema crossing borders geographically, historically and emotionally.

From Georgia, two very different works – George Ovashvili’s The Moon is a Father of Mine, and Alexander Koberidze’s Dry Leaf – show the remarkable diversity of contemporary Georgian filmmaking from classical storytelling to a more experimental, poetic cinema of pure wandering, observation and atmosphere.

The regional conversation extends further south and west this year, toward Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the broader Arab world. This is important for us, because Golden Apricot has never understood “region” only as geography. We are interested in cultural proximity, historical memory, shared wounds and the ways cinema travels between places marked by displacement, political violence and the struggle to preserve identity. Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza is one of the most powerful examples. Built from rediscovered footage shot in Gaza in 2001, the film has become an almost unbearable archive of a world that has since been profoundly changed. It connects very naturally with the festival’s larger interest in cinema as an act of memory – cinema not only as representation but as preservation.

This year’s films connect Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and other regional countries not through a single political or geopolitical statement but through a shared cinematic language of memory, loss, resistance and renewal. For us, placing them side by side is essential. It allows the audience to see not only individual films but a wider emotional and historical landscape, one in which cinema becomes a way of remembering what is fragile, questioning what is official, and protecting what might otherwise disappear.

TFV:  War over Artsakh has meant very challenging times in recent years. What has been the role of the festival in wartime, and in processing the experience?

K.A.:  The recent years have been extremely painful for Armenia and for our society. The war, the loss, displacement and uncertainty that followed, affected not only politics or public life but also the emotional structure of the country. In such moments, a film festival cannot pretend to exist outside reality. At the same time, it should not become a place of slogans. For us, the role of cinema has been to create a space where pain can be seen, shared and gradually understood. During times of war and crisis, cinema becomes a form of witness. It preserves faces, voices, landscapes, gestures and silences that may otherwise disappear. It allows personal stories to resist abstraction. When public discourse becomes overwhelmed by numbers, statements and political language, cinema can return us to the human dimension of experience.

For Golden Apricot, this has meant remaining a space of cultural continuity. To continue holding a festival in such a context is not an act of escapism but a way of insisting that life, memory and imagination must continue. We have tried to offer Armenian audiences films that help them think about loss, exile, identity, violence, dignity and survival not only through Armenian stories but through the experiences of other societies that have lived through war, displacement and historical trauma.

Now, as we move from immediate shock toward a more difficult process of reflection, cinema becomes even more important. It gives time to experiences that society often cannot process quickly. It allows trauma to be approached indirectly, poetically, sometimes through silence rather than explanation. This is especially important for younger filmmakers, many of whom are beginning to search for a language to speak about what has happened without reducing it to reportage.

I believe the role of a festival today is to protect that complexity. We must support films that remember, but also films that question, films that mourn, but also films that imagine the possibility of renewal. In this sense, Golden Apricot is not only a showcase of cinema. It is also a place where a wounded society can meet images from its own experience and from the experiences of others and perhaps begin, slowly, to transform memory into understanding.

TFV:  Golden Apricot enters the FIAPF network this year. What does this landmark mean for you?

K.A.:  For us, entering the FIAPF network is both an institutional milestone and a symbolic recognition of the path the festival has taken over more than two decades. It places GAIFF within a global professional framework that defines standards for international film festivals, strengthens trust among producers, sales agents, filmmakers, distributors and reconfirms Yerevan’s position as a serious meeting point on the international festival map. But beyond accreditation, this moment is also about responsibility. For a festival located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and the wider region, FIAPF recognition gives us a stronger platform to represent voices, cinemas and cultural realities that are often underrepresented in the global industry. It allows us to build deeper relationships with the international film community while remaining faithful to what has always made Golden Apricot distinctive – its artistic curiosity, its regional sensitivity and its belief in cinema as a space for dialogue.

Beyond its stylistic innovations, Knock puts the masses on its side with a story that is at once about justice being done, and the complex and self-contradicting ways in which journalists try their best (and sometimes plunge to their ethical worst) in chronicling sordid reality. By winning BIFAN’s Audience award, Jeong has all but guaranteed a bright future for this low-budget feature and his burgeoning career as an indie filmmaker. The new film builds on the success of The Berefts, the 2023 film Jeong co-directed with Hur Jang about a couple going through a sham marriage to receive a state-sponsored apartment for newly-weds.

Knock begins in a “youth center” located deep in the Korean countryside, and all seems well. When the girls appear on screen for the first time, they laugh and make faces at the camera as they rehearse a musical number about a girl awakening from her self-pitying past. Director Lee (Lee Sang-hoon), the shelter’s founder, is a man of few words, but his dedication to the well-being of his charges is palpable, as he does his best in addressing the teenagers’ needs and balks at people’s description of the girls as delinquents.

That’s actually the view as held by Do-jin (Lee Do-jin), a documentary director assigned to cover the shelter. The jaded journalist is peeved at being sent to the boondocks while his colleagues are covering political demonstrations in Seoul, and the rural reality is too saccharine for his liking. Then his cinematographer Ye-rin (Kim Tae-un) shows him some footage of a scuffle between two girls in the shelter’s cafeteria. Having overheard Director Lee’s off-mic conversation with his wife about their perilous financial situation, Do-jin demands a reluctant Ye-rin unearth more sleaze: “Shoot everything .”

He soon finds someone who really piques his interest. In-ah (Yoon In-a) is a former resident who returns regularly to the shelter laden with food and gifts. Supposedly this allows he to “return the love” shown her by Director Lee and his wife, she tells Do-jin. Intrigued by In-ah’s evasive answers to his questions and how she always seems to visit her mentors when a teenager is scheduled to leave the shelter, Do-jin does some digging and soon discovers the woman’s involvement in multiple misdemeanours, some of them deadly.

Up until this point, Knock intrigues because it restricts the viewer’s understanding of the story through Do-jin’s perspective of the case. He wades through recorded interviews, cellphone videos and surveillance footage in his attempt to tease out a sensational story from a mass of banality. Bolstered by D.P. Kim Jin-pyo’s eerily unfettered imagery, the film looks enigmatic enough – until Jeong shifts his focus and allows the viewer to know and witness things from an omniscient narrator.

While this change of tack lets Yoon showcase her acting ability in channelling In-a’s amoral personality – a powerful performance which earned her the Best Actor prize at BIFAN – the film becomes more of a conventional crime thriller, with the culprit and the crime revealed too soon. Another perspective on Knock, however, is as a bifurcated narrative, with Do-jin’s lack of empathy for his subjects (“shoot first, think in post-production” is his journalistic creed) mirroring In-ah’s scant regard for others. Knock might contain more punch if seen in this light.

Director, screenwriter, production design: Jeong Beom
Producer: Kim Hyo-jun
Cast: Lee Do-jin, Yoon In-a, Lee Sang-hoon, Kim Tae-eun
Cinematography: Kim Jin-pyo
Editing: Jeong Beom, Lee Sang-hoon
Music: Go Young-il, Lee Sang-hoon
Sound: Go Young-il
Production companies: Casual Films
Venue: Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (Bucheon Choice Korean competition)
In Korean
103 minutes

A surprising second feature from a filmmaker who made his directorial debut (and won awards aplenty) with a children’s animation film in 2024, Pacific is perhaps best seen as Gutierrez’s showcase of his versatility and his ability to helm a big-budget VFX-laden blockbuster. And, alongside the Netflix series The Eternaut, it shows that Argentine directors are ready to stand toe to toe with their Hollywood counterparts in sci-fi land. Gutierrez and his multinational producers can expect approval from monster geeks and more bookings on the fantasy festival circuit.

In terms of its story and its worldview, Pacific is old-school to a tee. En route to their splendid summer holiday on a beach somewhere on the Colombian coast, six young people are kicked off their transport because of their unruly behaviour. They end up in some strange seaside village run by a hostile Black shaman who, in the film’s prologue, is seen making a human sacrifice to some unseen entity. Seeking a “party to dive into”, the travellers get themselves mixed up in a voodoo procession before being chased into the sea, as they seek safety in a mysterious island seen as a haven for axolotls.

True to form, the vacationers soon find themselves picked off one by one, as the monster begins to lurk ever closer and be more visible to the protagonists and the viewer. Given the number of people having an input on the screenplay – Natacha Caravia and Luis Langlemey are credited with two more collaborating writers who expanded an original idea by Andrés Gelós – Pacific still comes across as surprisingly slight in the story department. Most of the characters are left as generic ciphers, while hints of an extraterrestrial presence remain strangely unexplained and unconnected with the nature of the flesh-and-blood monster.

As a simple creature feature, however, Pacific delivers. Despite its jarring narrative gaps, Gutierrez’s film looks the part of being the most expensive and ambitious SF actioner to emerge out of South America. Harnessing the striking power of coastal Colombia’s majestic, mesmerising landscapes – either through the characters’ wanderings around the postcard-perfect forests and caverns which will mark their demise, or as inspiration for green-screen work in post-production – the director and his DP Matias Nicolás and art director Mauro Do Porto inject quantum horror through the sights of bizarre outer-space architecture, gory altar rooms and, of course, the very real view of the dexterous beast.

Director: Gonzalo Gutierrez
Screenwriters: Natacha Caravia, Luis Langlemey
Producers: Guido Rud, Mauricio Brunetti
Executive producers: María Florencia Lemoine, Deisy Marroquín, Caii Michelle
Cast: Manolo Cardona, Christopher von Uckermann, Maria Gabriela De Faria
Cinematography: Matias Nicolás
Editing: Martin Blousson, Guillermo Gatti
Art direction: Mauro Do Porto
Music: Pablo Fuu
Sound: Jose Luis Diaz
Production company: Film Sharks
Venue: Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (B Extreme)
In Spanish
91 minutes

These philosophical questions come up with each new remake, and the best that can be said for Moana 2026 is that, for a movie that doesn’t particularly need to exist in the first place, it at least succeeds as entertainment. The instant-classic songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda help, aided by Dwayne Johnson and Jemaine Clement reprising their roles from the original in a manner suited to their non-cartoon surroundings.

The real reason to see Moana, outside of familiarity, is for newcomer Catherine Laga’aia in the title role and for veteran Maori actor Rena Owen (Once Were Warriors, Sirens) as the heroine’s wise and loving Gramma Tala. (Full disclosure: I’ve had the privilege of knowing Owen for decades.) The ingenue and the screen legend create the film’s most moving moments, and Laga’aia sells the rest of it, from her “Where I’ll Go” dreams to acting as straight-man to Johnson’s hammy, egotistical demigod.

You know the story: Moana is next in line to be chief of her idyllic South Pacific village, but when the coconuts rot and the fish disappear, Gramma Tala tells her she must resume her people’s abandoned seafaring ways and go on a quest. If Moana can find shape-shifting trickster Maui (Johnson) and return the heart of Te Fiti, the mother of all islands, then balance will be restored.

Director Thomas Kail comes to the project with unassailable musical bona fides, having directed Miranda’s Hamilton and In the Heights onstage, as well as the video capture of Hamilton (along with episodes of Fosse/Verdon). But a live-action movie that involves a gesticulating ocean, a comedy-relief rooster, and a jewel-obsessed giant crab demands more VFX than this relative novice can apparently handle. The effects are a supremely mixed bag — Heihei, the afore-mentioned fowl, doesn’t have to look realistic, so his cartoonishness doesn’t assault the eye. But the character design on Tamatoa the crab (Clement) is a jarringly ugly miscalculation, and when Maui assumes bird form, it appears that the animators got stuck in an uncanny valley between a real animal and one that’s supposed to let viewers know that it’s really Dwayne Johnson behind that beak.

To its credit, this Moana is less than 10 minutes longer than the original, so it’s not plagued with the padding of the disastrous Snow White. The performers sell the heartfelt emotion and witty wordplay of the songs, although Miranda’s new composition, “Along the Way,” gets dumped into the closing credits, and deservedly so. Editor Melanie Oliver (Matilda: The Musical, Cats) keeps the forward momentum as bright as the lushly tropical cinematography from Oscar Faura (Young Woman and the Sea). Mark Mancina once again provides the score, and its use of Pacific Island–inflected choral vocals gives the finale its necessary intensity.

As the meme (and your mom) would say, you already have Moana at home. This version, for whatever it’s worth, at least ranks among the best of this crop — even if, like me, you wish Disney would stop harvesting it.

Director: Thomas Kail
Screenwriter: Jared Bush & Dana Ledoux Miller, based on the original screenplay by Jared Bush
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Rena Owen, John Tui, Frankie Adams, Jemaine Clement, Catherine Laga?aia
Executive producers: Scott Sheldon, Charles Newirth, Thomas Kail, Auli?i Cravalho
Producers: Dwayne Johnson, Beau Flynn, Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia, Lin-Manuel Miranda
Director of photography: Oscar Faura
Production design: John Myhre
Editing: Melanie Ann Oliver
Music: Mark Mancina
Sound design: Tim Nielsen, re-recording mixer/sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Walt Disney Pictures
In English
115 minutes

Much has been said about the influence of Hong Kong action movies – or, specifically, John Woo’s literally double-barrelled A Better Tomorrow – on Korean cinema. For Baek Seung-kee, however, inspiration lies with Stephen Chow and his brand of “mo-lei-tau” (nonsensical) comedy – or, specifically, Shaolin Soccer and its story about the triumphant second coming of a motley crew of retired football players. Nodding to the narrative of Chow’s 2001 film and bolstering his own screenplay with a few homages to that blockbuster’s key visual gags, Baek has created a story that is just as fun to watch and offers even more substantial insights into its characters’ struggle to relive their dream.

Baek’s previous film, Jango: Uncharged, reworks Django Unchained into a story about a man who sells himself as a slave to realise his sister’s filmstar dreams and ends up battling an evil producer called Leonard BitCaprio (really). A film that is at once a goofy spoof – with dialogue delivered in broken English, with matching subtitles – and a self-styled critique of real-life problems in the Korean entertainment industry,  Jango: Uncharged ended up an incoherent mess. Longtake Onetake Mistake feels like Baek’s reflection on the errors of his ways, as he embarks on a simpler and more sincere way of getting his points across.

The film begins with aspiring actor Lee-yong (played by Baek’s longtime leading man Son Lee-yong) failing his 1,000^th audition. Having had enough of a soul-sapping (and Seoul-strapped) life revolving around humiliating screen tests and a lonely existence in a small, spartan bedsit, he packs his bags and gets ready to leave for his hometown. That is when he runs into Chang-kyung (Oh Chang-kyung), the indie director who gave him his first (and seemingly only) on-screen part. But that was a long, long time ago; Chang-kyung now spends his days begging for loose change on the street and living in a flat with the power and water cut off.

Chatting their way through the night in the shivering cold, the pair eggs each other on to have a final crack at making a film. Unearthing a buried camera in a most dramatic and impossible way – just one of many fantastical scenes which mirror Stephen Chow’s absurdist, OTT slapstick during his heyday in the 1990s – Lee-yong and Chang-kyung rally themselves with the motto: “You don’t change the script to fit the conditions – you change the conditions to fit the script.”

Their delusions of grandeur are slowly chipped away both by others and themselves, as they travel around town to meet their former comrades. Along the way, they are chastened by the pain of the other actors. They are either brought to their knees working in vertical short-form videos or back-breaking stunt work, or having their passion for performance extinguished by the social and financial demands around them. These exchanges are brought to life by Baek’s irreverent sense of humour – and all thanks to the cast’s bravura in even the most ridiculous of scenes. But the conversations are also soaked in melancholy and seething with furious reflections on the future for filmmaking.

Inevitably, AI makes an appearance here, but in the strangest of ways. First it crops up in a conversation about the threat posed by technology, and then as an example of how it could help cash-strapped creatives (like Baek and his on-screen proxy Chang-kyung) in bringing their vision to reality. In the end, it doesn’t even matter if the gang will finally get to do what they want to do – it’s the journey that matters.

Director, screenplay, editing, production design: Baek Seung-kee
Producer: Kim Sung-tai
Cast: Son Lee-yong, Oh Chang-kyung
Cinematography: Yoon Jun-seo, Baek Seung-kee
Music: Jeon Joo-hee
Production company: Curuk2 Studio
Venue: Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (Fanta-scape)
In Korean
111 minutes

Bowing in the Korean competition at the latest edition of the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, The Fertilizer Home is set in a small village dominated by a manufacturing plant where dried surplus tobacco is processed to become compost. The plant is now headed by Mi-jo (Kim Seung-hwa), who has taken up the operations of the family-run business from her now wheelchair-bound founder-father (Jeong Dong-hwan). Always dressed in a black blazer and a matching shirt, she appears perennially aloof from the humdrum around her: a defence mechanism, perhaps, against the sometime wayward behaviour of long-time workers who have known her since she was a toddler.

Mi-jo’s cold, authoritative veneer begins to unravel when the village is hit by a string of brutal murders committed by the unlikeliest of people around: a gentle matriarch is found stabbing her grandson to death, followed by a happy-go-lucky worker’s assault on her loved ones. Even Mi-jo’s family is hit by this “epidemic”, with her twin sister Eun-jo (Park Ah-in) nearly getting bludgeoned to death by her erstwhile mousey mixed-race boyfriend.

While the workers blame all this homicidal violence on a curse on the village – a thinly-veiled critique of Mi-jo’s competence – the chieftain from a neighbouring hamlet comes calling to complain about the impact of the factory’s toxic fumes on his people. Criticised by her father for using new techniques at the plant and doubting her own abilities in running things at home and at work, Mi-jo’s power is slowly usurped by Eun-jo, who slowly shakes off her idler persona to bring the village under her shamanic sway.

With a title card that proclaims the story as being “inspired by real environmental disasters”, The Fertilizer Home appears first and foremost as a j’accuse of sorts about the impact of haphazard industries on bucolic backwaters – a point Jeong and her DP Lee Do-hyun bring to the fore with recurrent visual contrasts of pastoral beauty (wide shots of forests, or close-ups of cabbages) and pitiless modernity (images of infernal shopfloors and streams of manufactured manure). The intrigue slowly builds as the mystery brings forth ever more jarring juxtapositions, such as the whirl of the factory and the ringing of Eun-jo’s aggressive rituals.

But The Fertilizer Home is not just a message film about pollution and the like. Just as much as it talks about humans put through the grind of smalltown capitalistic fervour, the film is also a story about the schisms between sisters as they seek recognition and redemption from their papa. Jeong’s strong screenplay manages to illustrate the two women’s very difficult personalities and the fluctuating dynamics between the pair. While Park Ah-in injects Eun-jo with mystery and menace, Kim Seung-hwa matches her co-star’s more extrovert turn with an impressive performance of internalised anxiety and doubts which eventually turn deadly. Jeong’s film depicts alienation in action with beauty and danger.

Director, screenwriter, editor: Jeong Hyo-jung
Producers: Kim Han-ul
Cast: Kim Seung-hwa, Park Ah-in, Jung Dong-hwan
Cinematography: Lee Do-hyun
Production design: Gang Myeong-hee
Music: Hong Cho-sun
Sound: Kim Eu-gene
Production company: Korean Academy of Film Arts
World sales: Finecut
Venue: Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (Bucheon Choice
In Korean
98 minutes

Rather than focusing on how its cocky characters meet their sorry fate – and it’s hardly a spoiler to say they will – The Mouths offers a sound and sure-footed account of their demise through their competing and sometimes contradictory testimonies. Through their recollections, all is slowly revealed about what led them to challenge each other to a game of dare (and death) at a graveyard, how they look on aghast as their plans go awry, and actually how their grudges left them with a warped understanding of their relationships with each other or who their friends and lovers actually are in the first place.

Opening in Japan on July 3 before hitting the fantastic film festival circuit at BIFAN and then the Fantasia Fest at Montréal, The Mouths is the first of three Shimizu vehicles lined up for release this year. Bolstered by a screenplay by the versatile scribe Masahiro Yamaura – whose credits range from schmaltzy romantic dramas and hitmen actioners to the Japanese version of 24 – and with Shimizu flexing his storytelling and scare-spawning muscles through his deft handling of pace and atmosphere, The Mouths should serve as an effective warm-up for horror aficionados as they prepare for the arrival of what should be the director’s blockbuster for the year, the Sony-distributed Village of the Eight Gravestones.

The Mouths is based on a novella by Sesuji, a young Japanese writer whose specialty lies in shaping in “found footage” fiction: his breakthrough novel, About A Place In the Kinki Region, charts the investigations of the disappearance of an anthropologist through a collection of texts of various formats – a magazine article, e-mails, video transcripts and so on. A Questionnaire Regarding Mouths runs along similar if shorter and simpler lines: running to just around 60 pages, the book comprises what seem to be the dispositions of five university students about what they did at an abandoned cemetery one night.

Adapting the book to the screen, Yamaura has deconstructed the original by rearranging the novel’s episodic approach into something more conventional and comprehensible. In the film, the characters take turns to speak – first facing the camera as if recording a deposition, and then later through voiceovers. First, Shota (Rihito Itagaki) sets the scene as he describes the drive out of town, where he and his friends are to play dare: each of them will walk through an eerie graveyard, touch a towering tree oozing a strange liquid and covered with cicada shells, and then trudge back to the car on the other side of the lot.

While Shota and his buddy Tatsuya (Keito Tsuna) make it out intact, the latter’s girlfriend Ann (Ai Yoshikawa) vanishes. Through Shota’s voiceover, and then that of Tatsuya and Shota’s girlfriend Mirei (Momona Kasahara), we hear of how a disoriented Ann eventually reemerged from the dark but soon kills herself after a brief spell in a psychiatric ward. The young woman will then appear in the testimonies of two other students who also happened to have gone up to the tree for a lark after the first group: through Blair Witch-like self-filmed footage, the school-jock Hotto (Shoot Mori) is shown dragging the mousy Kawase (Tomoki Nishiyama) to the tree, only for them to run into Ann in the shape of a crawling zombie.

Veering away from the structure of the source material, The Mouths is anchored by a framing device in the shape of Detective Kusakabe (Shido Nakamura), who is assigned to crack the mystery behind these recorded testimonies which he listens to on his portable MP4 player. With his back story as a gambling addict only briefly mentioned, the hard-boiled cop doesn’t get to solve anything. Rather, he serves as the on-screen proxy for the off-screen viewer, his intrigue reflecting ours as we march slowly towards a finale bearing all the visual and narrative trademarks of Shimizu during his The Grudge-inspired prime.

Director: Takashi Shimizu
Screenwriter: Masahiro Yamaura, based on the novel “Kuchi ni Kansuru Anketo” by Sesuji
Producers: Ikumi Taguchi, Takaki Sato, Yuna Shiraishi, Motoki Ishida
Cast: Rihito Itagaki, Keito Tsuna, Ai Yoshikawa, Momona Kasahara, Shoot Mori, Tomoki Nishiyama
Cinematography: Tai Ohuchi
Editing: Osamu Suzuki
Production design: Yasushi Hashimoto
Music: Takashi Ohmama
Sound: Shimpei Harakawa
Production company: 2026 THE MOUTHS Film Partners
World sales: Shochiku
Venue: Bucheon International Fantasy Film Festival (Signatures)
In Japanese
99 minutes

The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN) celebrates its 30^th anniversary this year. Widely regarded as one of South Korea’s three major film festivals and the leading festival dedicated to genre cinema, BIFAN has long enjoyed the enthusiastic support of devoted audiences. Although it was sometimes misunderstood as a niche event for hardcore horror fans, it has steadily broadened its appeal through eclectic curation and a willingness to embrace new ideas.

BIFAN’s programmer for Korean cinema, Kim Hyung-seok, who joined the festival last year after a long career as a film journalist and programmer for other festivals, reflects on the festival’s past, present, and future, as well as the evolving landscape of South Korean genre filmmaking.

THE FILM VERDICT: As a long-time festival-goer, film journalist, and now programmer, what do you think the impact has been of BIFAN’s launch on the Korean film industry and the festival scene?

KIM HYUNG-SEOK: Around 30 years ago in 1996, the Busan International Film Festival was born, and it remains the biggest international film festival in South Korea. The following year, BIFAN launched, focusing on genre films, creating a space for films unlikely to be screened at Busan. In 2000, the Jeonju International Film Festival came along to support digitally-driven films with a more experimental focus. These three festivals together were able to cover most of the important works on the Korean film scene, which was crucial for the industry’s growth now that there were platforms for new films to reach industry professionals and keen audiences.

The rise of online ‘maniac culture’ for non-mainstream titles and B-movies in the 1990s provided the right context for BIFAN. At the same time, the Korean film industry was witnessing technical advances in genre filmmaking [The Soul Guardians (1998), Whispering Corridors (1998), Shiri (1999)] despite a national financial crisis. As a result, confidence in genre filmmaking surged, and the industry grew bigger. With this cultural and industrial shift, BIFAN brought a new audience into film festivals and cinemas and was able to inspire a generation of filmmakers like director Kim Jee-woon, who has said he first watched Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999) at BIFAN.

TFV: What would you consider some of the most crucial moments in BIFAN’s 30-year history that have shaped the festival into what it is today?

KHS: There are many milestones but if I had to choose one, it would be the launch of the Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF) in 2008, which was the world’s first industry program dedicated to genre projects. Over the past 18 years, NAFF has evolved, trying various initiatives and programs, such as Goedam Campus, to support and incubate exciting projects, and collaborating with other festivals like Cannes (Fantastic 7) and Sitges (FanPitch). More than 110 films have been completed, screened at major festivals, and even received wide release. I believe this track record of bringing together and supporting genre filmmakers is what has made BIFAN a major platform.

TFV: What are your thoughts on the relationship that genre films, as an art form, have with the film industry?

KHS: Personally, I think genre films ‘are’ the industry. Until the early 1990s, the majority of mainstream movies were dramas or melodramas. Coinciding with BIFAN’s beginning, however, a wave of new genre films was made and took over the industry. Now it is very common to analyze the industry’s success in relation to genre trends at any given moment.

As for the artistic aspect, I believe that when filmmakers who work in a certain genre consistently create great works, they eventually come to be regarded as auteurs. During the so-called Korean Cinema Renaissance, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Kim Jee-woon, and Ryoo Seung-wan all started out with genre filmmaking. Each developed a distinctive artistic voice while working within or across genre traditions and forged careers as auteurs. I think these master filmmakers show us that the divide between art films and genre films is ultimately artificial.

TFV: The 30th anniversary edition’s slogan is “NEW ERA, NEW SKIN.” What does BIFAN mean by it and what kind of new era does it envision?

KHS: We are at the turning point of a generation. But we don’t know what the new era of cinema will look like, hence the skin-shifting chameleon on the poster. It’s open. Right now, new forces in the industry, such as streaming platforms, short-form content, and AI, are challenging cinema as a medium and demanding change. BIFAN is actively exploring what changes are to be made.

This year, we are screening short-form series on the big screen. Two are presented in their original vertical format, and the other two have been re-edited into a horizontal format for theatrical exhibition. We think it is an interesting approach, reflecting how filmmakers, even established ones such as Lee Joon-ik, are experimenting with the new form of storytelling. This is part of our effort to figure out the ways to expand the boundaries of cinema, rather than simply defending the existing ones.

TFV: What do you think BIFAN needs to be in the coming 30 years?

KHS: I believe that a festival is not sustainable if it fails to breathe together with its audiences. That is the fundamental principle I always keep in mind. Sometimes I introduce audiences to things they haven’t encountered before, and at other times, I learn from them.

For BIFAN, what the audience wants is very clear: something a little weird or strange, something that goes hard. Because the city of Bucheon is not a major tourist destination, people come primarily for the festival itself. That’s why the programming of films and events is especially important. It should reward those who make time for the trip with tremendous enthusiasm. I hope we can continue to foster that spirit by creating an inviting and exciting community for genre film lovers.

The screenplay by Coffin and Brian Lynch opens with a tour guide (voiced by Allison Janney) leading a group through an exhibition on the history of movies, one that includes the robot from Metropolis, an E.T. figurine, and actual George Lucas (voiced by George Lucas) in a glass case. But when none of the museum visitors recognize the minions James and Henry, she stops to tell them the story of two of cinema’s most important figures. It’s a tale that involves the minions’ historical search for a villainous “big boss” to serve, a quest that eventually brings them to Hollywood in the 1920s, where they stumble upon the filming of a Western in the hopes of becoming sidekicks to a bank robber.

They ruin the shoot, but their screen presence makes them immediate stars in a series of films. As for so many non–English-speaking movie stars, unfortunately, the arrival of talkies spells the end of their careers. James and Henry and their pal Edgar stick around Hollywood, hoping to make their epic movie Minions & Monsters, while their comrades glom onto Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), who may be an alien bent on conquering Earth, but who might also be an out-of-work actor with a robot costume and a crappy apartment. It could really go either way.

It’s a big, bright, colorful romp through the 1920s, with everything from suffragettes to a booming stock market, and the gags fly fast and furious. (Parents who are introducing their kids to the works of Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Orson Welles will appreciate the shout-outs they all get here.) The minions get to inflict their brand of chaos on the dawn of Hollywood, and Minions & Monsters becomes a celebration of the practical magic of moviemaking — who needs AI when you can summon actual monsters from an old book of spells? — and the collective experience of seeing movies together in the theater.

Coffin’s goofy voicing of all the Minions remains hilarious, what with its nutty mix of French, Spanish, Italian, English, and unrecognizable mouth sounds. Meanwhile, the movie stars have come to play, particularly Eisenberg, whose hilariously deadpan take on Dort plays a big role in maintaining the mystery of who or what Dort even is. (Along the way, Dort has a sweet courtship with a proto-feminist voiced by Zoey Deutch.) Jeff Bridges clearly had a blast playing two movie-mogul brothers, and Christoph Waltz brings real sweetness to his performance as a director who encourages the minions’ big-screen dreams.

Families looking for summertime air-conditioned entertainment for all ages will find it at Minions & Monsters, a colorful extravaganza that gives us yellow lunatics, an adorable green lil’ Cthulu, and an orange destroyer of worlds that sloshes about like an Aperol granita with a million eyes floating in it. And that’s cinema.

Director: Pierre Coffin
Co-director: Patrick DeLage
Screenwriters: Brian Lynch, Pierre Coffin
Cast: Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, Phil LaMarr
Executive producers: Brian Lynch, Chris Renaud
Producers: Chris Meledandri, Bill Ryan
Music: John Powell
Sound design: Jeremy Bowker, supervising sound editor, sound designer
Production companies: Universal Pictures, Illumination
In English
90 minutes

To his credit, director and co-writer Jon Erwin (Jesus Revolution) has emerged as a faith-based filmmaker who understands the basic nuts and bolts of filmmaking. Details like where to put a camera and how to light a shot inform his competent brand of cinema, which is not insignificant, as his predecessors in the field seemed to dismiss these skills as extraneously secular. Even if the casting of Kelsey Grammer and For King & Country musician Joel David Smallbone serves as a dog-whistle that lets its target Christian demographic know that this movie exists to put American history in the hands of Evangelicals, Young Washington otherwise goes light on spiritual messaging, apart from one egregious scene that suggests that our hero survived the French-Indian War because he was shielded from above.

We meet George Washington as a young boy (Will Joseph), upset at the death of his father and further crushed to learn that he will have to forfeit schooling to help his mother (Mary-Louise Parker) tend to the family farm. George’s much-older half-brother Lawrence (John Foss) takes it upon himself to educate the boy, and Lawrence’s status, thanks to his marriage and his military rank, give the child life goals focused upon climbing the social ladder.

When George (played as an adult by William Franklyn-Miller) comes of age, he strategically crashes a party so that he can flirt with Sally Cary (Mia Rodgers) and, more importantly, impress her father Lord Fairfax (Kelsey Grammer). Washington tells the nobleman that he will put a team together to survey his land in the Ohio valley, and to keep an eye out for French troops who are encroaching on territory that the British have claimed for their own. (Never mind, of course, that indigenous populations already possess the contested area.) All of this leads to Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie (Ben Kingsley) commissioning Washington for the state’s militia; the young soldier’s arrogance leads to disaster in the Battle of Fort Necessity before a chastened Washington redeems himself at the Battle of Fort Duquesne.

While the A-listers (Kingsley, Parker, Andy Serkis) make the most of their relatively brief appearances — and Smallbone steals his scene as a hissable, arrogant aristocrat — the supporting characters wind up being far more interesting and multi-dimensional than our hero. Young Washington treats Washington more as a concept than as a person, and that idea is underscored by Franklyn-Miller, who has the angular features of a runway model but also the blankness of one. Washington suffers tragedy and shame and redemption, and very few of those moments register on the actor’s face.

Erwin’s most impressive achievements here are the battle sequences; they won’t make anyone forget Barry Lyndon or even Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, but between Kristopher Kimlin’s photography and David de Vos’ editing, they capture both the chaos of war and the specific fighting styles of the era. (The British believe in lining up their riflemen, while the French surround them and ambush them from their hiding places in the woods.)

Then there are the closing credits, which stop in their tracks for a plea from Grammer to “pay it forward,” which like many an Evangelical pitch, sounds better on paper than in practice. The idea is for audience members to purchase tickets for those who can’t afford them; in reality, it’s a way for distributor Angel to artificially inflate its box-office numbers even as the film screens to “sold out” empty houses. It’s a bait-and-switch not unlike the tactics that an older Washington would use against the army of a king whose favor he once sought.

Director: Jon Erwin
Screenwriters: Jon Erwin, Tom Provost, Diederik Hoogstraten
Cast: William Franklyn-Miller, Andy Serkis, Ben Kingsley, Mary-Louise Parker, Kelsey Grammer, Joel David Smallbone, Leo Hanna
Executive producers: Parker Adams, Benton Crane, Donna Eperon, Ted Field, David E. Fischer, Robert Girard, Jon Gunn, Kelly Merryman Hoogstraten, Ben Howard, Macdara Kelleher, Edmund Sampson, Mike Strong
Producers: Chip Diggins, Jon Erwin, Adam Abel, Kristy Choo, Kristopher Kimlin, Tyler Zacharia
Director of photography: Kristopher Kimlin
Production design: Chad Krowchuk
Editing: David de Vos
Sound design: James Fonnyadt, supervising sound editor, sound supervisor
Production companies: Angel, Wonder Project, 10 Ton Productions, 2521 Entertainment
In English
125 minutes

We open with Kara teetering on the verge of her 23^rd birthday, getting hammered across a series of red-sun planets — Kryptonians need the yellow sun to become Super — in an attempt to drink away her trauma. The current version of the DC Cinematic Universe, starting with 2025’s Superman, gives us a Man of Steel who has no memories of his parents or of Krypton; Kara, on the other hand, vividly remembers watching that world crumble around her, first as the planet imploded and then later as the domed city of Argo eventually gave Kryptonite poisoning to all its other residents, including her parents Zor-El (David Krumholz) and Alura (Emily Beecham).

It’s in one of the film’s many interstellar dive bars that Kara meets young Ruthye (Eve Ridley), seeking revenge after her family was murdered by a brigand named Krem (Matthias Schoenaearts, saddled with face piercings that scream “Party City Pinhead costume”). Kara wants no part of this quest, but when Krem poisons Kara’s dog Krypto and then leaves with the only antidote, she’s forced to help out her young charge.

So it’s True Grit, with Kara serving as the boozy authority figure and Eve as the girl who forcibly drags her older counterpart toward reconnecting with other people (and aliens). Successful superhero movies have certainly been built upon less, but Supergirl fails to deliver on multiple levels. Outside of its heroine, there’s not a single interesting or vibrant character; not Ruthye, not Krem, and certainly not immortal space-biker Lobo (Jason Momoa), a cigar-chomping fan favorite from the comics who is completely tacked on to what’s happening here.

The fight scenes are dark and over-edited, generally taking place in either dingy space dungeons or in a series of watering holes that all feel like bland reproductions of Star Wars’ legendary Mos Eisley cantina. (At least the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special gave us a Bea Arthur number when they dragged us back into that hive of scum and villainy.) Claudia Sarne’s score never comes to life, and the needle-drops (which, shockingly, don’t include XTC’s “That’s Really Super, Supergirl”) bring very little zing to the action.

At a brisk-by-superhero-standards 107 minutes, Supergirl offers no B-story to cut away to, and without a “meanwhile,” the only plot left to hold our attention is whether or not Krypto will get his antidote in time — and does anyone really expect a summer tentpole to wind up on the wrong side of DoesTheDogDie.com?

Supergirl offers sporadic pleasures, from a comedic interlude–turned–fight sequence on a crowded space bus, to the heroine’s Hangover Chic look, which incorporates Dyan Cannon’s sunglasses from The Love Machine and Jane Fonda’s post-orgasmic Barbarella hair, but overall, it plays like a missed opportunity. Alcock deserves a do-over, but given the current state of the superhero cinematic economy, she’ll probably have to settle for scene-stealing appearances in the next wave of Superman movies.

Director: Craig Gillespie
Screenwriter: Ana Nogueira, based on characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
Cast: Milly Alcock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley, David Krumholz, Emily Beecham, David Corenswet, Jason Momoa
Executive producers: Nigel Gostelow, Chantal Nong Vo, Lars P. Winther
Producers: Peter Safran, James Gunn
Director of photography: Rob Hardy
Production design: Neil Lamont
Editing: Tatiana S. Riegel, Fred Raskin
Music: Claudia Sarne
Sound design: Chris Munro, production sound mixer
Production companies: DC Studios, Domain Entertainment, Troll Court Entertainment, The Safran Company
In English
107 minutes

With that level of measured expectations, Toy Story 5 is a perfectly fine continuation of the now three-decades-plus–old series, and this latest installment offers both new places for its characters to go as well as an acknowledgment of changing habits and technologies. In 2026, it’s hard out here for a toy — whether you’re an action figure or a dinosaur or a horse or even a plastic fork — what with all the screens sucking all the attention out of kids. And it’s that real-world dilemma that Toy Story 5 tackles with both wit and wisdom. (If you thought this movie was going to demonize screens completely, I have a Disney Emoji Blitz app on my smartphone that would argue otherwise.)

Young Bonnie (voiced by Scarlett Spears) still engages with her toys, led by Jessie (Joan Cusack), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and all the other characters we’ve gotten to know in previous movies, but she’s very shy about making new friends. Jessie sneaks across the street to check out the new kids in the neighborhood, only to be told by their neglected toys in the yard that “the era of the toy is over,” what with the children (and their parents) constantly glued to their devices. Jessie thinks that Bonnie would never neglect her and her fellow playthings, until the day that Bonnie’s parents bring home Lilypad (Greta Lee), a hypnotic tablet that lets Bonnie chat with girls in her dance class while they all play games online.

The quest to find Bonnie a real friend — in particular, Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), a young equestrian — rather than a bunch of chat-room Mean Girls drives the plot here. Jessie returns to the site of her Toy Story 2 trauma (the tire swing is still there) and encounters a bunch of Blaze’s neglected battery-powered devices that, it turns out, need love too: a toilet-training game (Conan O’Brien), a camera (Shelby Rabara), and a hippo-shaped GPS (Craig Robinson) join Jessie in her quest to bring the two girls together, with the hopes of also being rescued from the junk drawer.

Screenwriters Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris (also credited as director and co-director, respectively) spin an impressive number of plates, giving us multiple characters — yes, Woody (Tom Hanks) and Bo Peep (Annie Potts) return from their “lost toy” exile — and locations while keeping the narrative both cohesive and suspenseful. The verbal and visual gags land, and the performances are terrific, both from the vets (Cusack’s Jessie gets a moving moment of closure with her past) and the newcomers (O’Brien is hilarious, while Lee brings a wonderfully nefarious tone to the seemingly omnipotent Lilypad).

The original Toy Story back in 1995 set the tone for CGI animation for decades to come, and while the work here isn’t as groundbreaking as it once was, it’s still occasionally breathtaking, from moments of photorealism to the sight of a squadron of Buzz Lightyear drones (long story) flying in formation.

Toy Story 5 makes the case that screens can play a role in kid’s lives (with parental supervision) so long as those screens occasionally get turned off for interaction with toys, nature, and fellow kids. I’d argue that another element that develops children’s curiosity, imagination, and inner life is boredom, so here’s hoping Toy Story 6 takes the slow-cinema route, giving us Bonnie on a five-hour car trip with no toys and no reading material, forced to entertain herself with anything her own mind can conjure.

Director: Andrew Stanton
Co-director: Kenna Harris
Screenwriters: Andrew Stanton & Kenna Harris
Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Conan O’Brien, Scarlett Spears, Greta Lee, Shelby Rabara, Mykal-Michelle Harris, Craig Robinson, Lori Alan, Jay Hernandez, Bonnie Hunt, Kristen Schaal, Tony Hale, John Hopkins, Wallace Shawn, Ernie Hudson, Krys Marshall, Jeff Bergman, Blake Clark, Anna Vocino, Bad Bunny, Jerome Ranft, Annie Potts, Matty Matheson, John Ratzenberger, Keanu Reeves, Melissa Villaseñor, Alan Cumming
Executive producers: Pete Docter, Jonas Rivera
Producer: Lindsey Collins
Music: Randy Newman
Sound design: Coya Elliott, supervising sound editor; Stephen Urata, re-recording mixer
Production companies: Disney, Pixar
In English
102 minutes

But Disclosure Day has none of these — this embarrassing moment features Colin Firth and Josh O’Connor performing dialogue by David Koepp under the guidance of Steven Spielberg. Which only proves that even the GOATs can whiff it sometimes.

That sensation of déjà vu with diminishing returns permeates the whole of Disclosure Day, which feels like a tour of tropes that Spielberg has tackled with greater skill and sensitivity earlier in his illustrious career. Over the course of a lumbering 145 minutes, the director revisits authorities-eluding car chases (The Sugarland Express), alien encounters (E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), paranoid thrills (Minority Report), and even earth-shattering exposé journalism (The Post). This time around, however, he’s excavating those ideas in ways that fail to engage emotionally and that misunderstand the culture’s current relationship with the news media. (Anyone who thinks video evidence would be immediately incontrovertible and convincing to a global audience has clearly never gone on Reddit.)

Spielberg (who also gets story credit) and Koepp plunge us into a world on the brink, with North and South Korean forces and their allies preparing for conflict. But mathematician Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has other problems; he’s on the run from his former boss Noah (Colin Firth),who runs a shadowy corporation that’s been in cahoots with the U.S. government to keep secret the existence of aliens. Now, however, Daniel and several of his fellow employees, including Hugo (Colman Domingo), have gone rogue with plans to tell the world the truth.

Meanwhile, TV meteorologist Margaret (Emily Blunt) finds herself suddenly able to speak multiple languages and to read the thoughts of others, providing them with the advice they need to overcome their problems. She tries to ignore these odd new abilities, but when she speaks in an alien tongue during a live news segment, she becomes a target for Noah, even as she realizes that she must connect with Daniel for reasons she doesn’t quite understand.

Koepp is a mainstream genre master — last year’s Black Bag was one of the sexiest, sharpest spy sagas in ages — but his work here doesn’t reflect his usual skill. To tackle the idea of how the existence of aliens would either affirm or undercut one’s belief in God, for instance, Koepp gives us a former nun (played by Eve Hewson) who talks about this very subject in two scenes. The question is raised, the question is resolved, and that’s it. It’s the sort of A-is-A prose one might expect in a God’s Not Dead movie, but a writer of this caliber usually weaves such a potentially deep concept into his work with more delicacy.

But that’s hardly the script’s only problem; Disclosure Day takes a ridiculously long time to get Margaret and Daniel in the same place, and after all that buildup, the payoff never satisfies. Despite the contributions of Spielberg’s usual top-flight crew of artists — cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and composer John Williams, among others — the film never really takes off, even if it does offer some blockbuster moments (particularly a nail-biter involving a car and a train) along the way.

Spielberg’s West Side Story demonstrated that the old master still has exciting work in him when he chooses to tackle a genre that’s new to him. But like Ready Player One and The Fabelmans before it, Disclosure Day reveals an artist spinning his wheels when he digs back into his own past triumphs.

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenwriter: David Koepp; story by Steven Spielberg
Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo
Executive producers: Adam Somner, Chris Brigham
Producers: Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg
Director of photography: Janusz Kaminski
Production design: Adam Stockhausen
Editing: Sarah Broshar
Music: John Williams
Sound design: Gary Rydstrom, re-recording mixer/sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment
In English
145 minutes

After the requisite opening sequence involving a famous person — and the famous person in question carries it off with such wit and style that expectations for the rest of the movie are unfairly raised — we cut to Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif, styled to look like the lead in Wednesday — get it?) getting stabbed by Ghostface, prompting the return of her pill-popping sister Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan, Gotham Knights) and Sara’s definitely-a-suspect boyfriend Jack (Cameron Scott Robert, Chicago Fire). Sara left town after the Ghostface killings decades earlier turned her mother Cindy (Anna Faris) into an obsessive recluse who booby-trapped her home in case the masked murderer should ever return.

So in the first five minutes, we’re already hitting the recent Scream and Halloween reboots while wedging in Scary Movie legacy characters, like stoner Shorty (Marlon Wayans) and deeply-closeted Ray (Shawn Wayans). No longer talking out loud in movie theaters, Brenda (Regina Hall) returns as a very Ma figure; in case you didn’t catch the reference, someone mentions Octavia Spencer. It’s that kind of spoof, where another movie becomes the subject of parody, and then someone in Scary Movie will say the title of that other film as a kind of floating footnote, which more often than not kills the joke in the first place.

Scary Movie gets its biggest laughs when it strays away from the formula based on spotting references and finds humor from other sources, particularly the fourth-wall breaks in which someone mentions a non-hit movie and explains that they didn’t recreate it because not enough people would get the joke. (It’s also a pleasant surprise when the parodies stray outside of the world of horror, including an animated musical sequence that’s partly in Korean.) Otherwise, it’s a laundry list of recreations of notable recent genre movies, including The Substance, Terrifier 3, Longlegs, Get Out, Smile, and more.

The film’s attempts to address contemporary identity issues wind up being a very mixed bag: a trans character, for example, doesn’t become the butt of jokes, although Ghostface is further villainized for misgendering him, but a later scene in which a stabbing victim insists on being referred to by the correct pronouns feels clunky and reactionary.

Cinematographer Terry Stacey (Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard) and production designer Nicole Elespuru (Merv) are asked to recreate recognizable cinematic geography — from Scream’s murder house to The Substance’s white-tile bathroom — and their accuracy in doing so enhances the comedy, or at least the familiarity. But director Michael Tiddes (an old hand with the Wayans family, having directed 50 Shades of Black and the two A Haunted House movies) and editor Jonathan Schwartz (I Want You Back) make this a bumpy ride, as it lurches from set-up to set-up and gag to gag without any kind of narrative, thematic, or even tonal throughline from start to finish.

The young players are game enough, but the film really belongs to Faris, Hall, Marlon Wayans, and Shawn Wayans. All four of these performers (plus sister Kim Wayans, who has a memorable cameo as an oblivious nurse) have proven their mettle with more challenging material; one hopes their Scary Movie paycheck gives them the freedom to take on a project where they can play actual characters rather than just cosplay other films amid a barrage of bongs, buttplugs, and shout outs to “Hey, I’ve seen that!”

Director: Michael Tiddes
Screenwriters: Marlon Wayans & Shawn Wayans & Keenen Ivory Wayans & Craig Wayans & Rick Alvarez; based on characters created by Shawn Wayans & Marlon Wayans & Buddy Johnson & Phil Beauman and Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer
Cast: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Kenan Thompson, Dave Sheridan, Lochlyn Munro, Kim Wayans, Cheri Oteri, Chris Elliott, Damon Wayans Jr., Heidi Gardner, Olivia Rose Keegan, Cameron Scott Roberts, Savannah Lee Nassif, Sydney Park, Gregg Wayans, Benny Zielke, Ruby Snowber
Executive producers: Jonathan Glickman, Thom Zadra, Alexandra Loewy, Marc Weinstock, Marsha L. Swinton, Neal H. Moritz
Producers: Rick Alvarez, Craig Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans
Director of photography: Terry Stacey
Production design: Nicole Elespuru
Editing: Jonathan Schwartz
Music: Haim Mazar
Sound design: Marcello Dubaz, re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Paramount Pictures, Miramax, Wayans Brothers
In English
96 minutes

Granted, even the film’s “real” world of 1990 is off-putting enough, particularly since one of the main settings is a cut-rate furniture store that seems to specialize in the cheapest, tackiest, and most hideous living-room sets imaginable. Working there is enough to send Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) into a tailspin, although he’s got other problems; his rage and his drinking drove his wife to kick him out of his house, and his sessions with therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) don’t seem to be helping all that much.

One night, Clark sees light coming through what seems like a seam in an otherwise solid wall in the store’s basement, and he discovers that he can walk through the wall into an alternate dimension, one designed with nauseatingly yellow accents and architecture that grows more and more illogical. (“Imagine describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog,” he tells Mary, “and then asking them to draw you one.”)

Is this dimension real or imagined? Is Clark its creator or its victim? Can Mary save Clark from this dimension, or from himself? And what does scientist Mark Duplass, lurking at the edges, have to do with any of this?

The less viewers know going into Backrooms, the better, and director Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik (Ash vs. Evil Dead) nail one of the toughest assignments of the horror film by providing just the right amount of exposition. (Telling audiences too little can leave us baffled, while overexplaining takes away the nightmare logic and chilly mystery.) Matching their storytelling craft is the extraordinary design work of Danny Vermette, a frequent collaborator of Osgood Perkins (one of this film’s producers). If you never thought you’d be frightened by furniture placement or the slope of a ceiling, Backrooms may well change your mind.

Ejiofor manages to make Clark both relatable and frustrating, and while Reinsve plays Mary as something of a blank herself at first, we come to understand her background, her own troubles, and the reasons why she might not necessarily be a role model in the world of mental health. The actors feel at home in their 1990 costuming, and they respond to the bizarre confines of this mirror dimension with fully human empathy, sorrow, and fear.

With connective tissue linking it to both Skinamarink and Synecdoche, New York, Backrooms is a chillingly ambitious debut that finds the terror in enclosed spaces and echoing silences. It’s a screen nightmare that could easily work its way into viewers’ real ones.

Director: Kane Parsons
Screenwriter: Will Soodik
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
Executive producers: Alayna Glasthal, Jesse Savath, Judson Scott, Chris White
Producers: James Wan, Michael Clear, Roberto Patino, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine, Osgood Perkins, Chris Ferguson, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Kori Adelson
Director of photography: Jeremy Cox
Production design: Danny Vermette
Editing: Greg Ng
Music: Edo Van Breemen
Sound design: Eugenio Battaglia, re-recording mixer/sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: A24, Chernin Entertainment
In English
110 minutes

But even if the war in Iran was in a momentary lull, it left a void, not just of Iranian films (the only one of note in the program was Asghar Farhadi’s very French Parallel Tales starring a wickedly amusing Isabelle Huppert), but of the many Iranian journalists, sales companies and movie people who were almost entirely absent – just as some Israeli regulars missed the festival for the first time in decades. Yet there were also attempts to react positively in the face of the Mideast conflict, notably the efforts made by the Egyptian film industry to attract attention, for the second year, to the Egyptian pavilion with a rich program of guests, panels and events, including promotion of the Cairo Film Festival and the El Gouna Film Festival coming up in the fall. And for the 10th year running, the Arab Cinema Center hosted its International Critics’ Awards on the beach, a glamorous but serious event that focused a needed spotlight on the MENA region. Winner of the Best Feature Film was the Palestinian dramedy Once Upon a Time in Gaza directed by brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser.

THE FRENCH PROTESTS

Meanwhile at Cannes, nine years after the Netflix controversy that led to a change in festival rules (specifically, films that don’t commit to a regular theatrical release in France won’t be eligible for Competition slots), streamers were once again booed when their logos appeared in the opening credits of French films. Perhaps the people protesting were not aware that, by law, streaming services operating in France must invest in local productions. It was in marked contrast to the audiences’ habit of indiscriminately applauding all other logos, which has gotten so out of hand that one journalist actually yelled, “Production companies are not your friends!” at the start of a press screening in the Debussy theater.

This situation escalated further due to an ongoing protest involving Canal+ and its majority shareholder Vincent Bolloré, whose growing influence in the film industry is viewed with concern in some progressive quarters. An open letter objecting to this, with signatures both French and international (Javier Bardem and Ken Loach among them), led to Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada declaring the company would never work with any of those people again. As a result, the Canal+ logo (present in most French films shown at the festival) was met with derision and disapproval for the entire second week of the event.

THE FILMS

The festival competition itself was surprisingly diversified in themes and approaches, packing in unabashed genre films never seen before in Cannes’ main section and a lot of WW2 history redux, along with highbrow art films running way over two hours that tested the patience. Yet the film that captured the critics’ hearts and remained for many the most engrossingly conceived, shot and acted was the 82-minute Fatherland, Pawel Pawlikowski’s wrenching snapshot of history when, in 1949, Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann traveled through a newly divided Germany with his adult daughter Erika. Actors Sandra Huller and Hanns Zischler perform a pungent, illuminating dance around the big issues of the time in an extremely resonant work.

Another memorable film that tied a personal story of jealousy and murder into a historical moment was Minotaur, set in 2022 when military reservists were being drafted in Russia to fight and quite possibly die in Ukraine. Andrei Zviaguintsev’s thought-provoking tale of unpunished crime invokes Putin’s lawless regime and the immoral acquiescence of the middle class at every turn. The jury recognized it with the Grand Prix.

Nailing the Palme d’Or for the second time after his abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days wore the crown in 2007, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu decries the official abuse of power and religious intolerance, only here it is progressive, secular, humanist Norwegian culture that destroys a half-Romanian Evangelical family with five children in the name of protecting the kids. There is nothing strikingly insightful but the high-stakes drama keeps you watching, which should be a green light for release (perhaps along with an unrecognizable Sebastian Stan playing the father.)

Building on past Cannes breakout sensations like Parasite, Titane and The Substance, this was a strong year for genre cinema on the Croisette. Elevated horror, sci-fi and fantasy thriller tropes were well represented across all festival sections. Indeed, perhaps the most incongruous film ever to gatecrash the prestigious art-house zone of the main competition was Na Hong-jin’s Hope, a shallow but hugely enjoyable gonzo action comedy epic about alien monsters invading a small town, and reportedly the most expensive production in South Korean history. Also competing for the Palme d’Or was Arthur Harari’s haunting drama The Unknown (L’Inconnue), starring Lea Seydoux, which uses its cryptic body-swap horror premise as a lens to explore identity and alienation, and The Birthday Party (Histoires de la Nuit) by Léa Mysius, a tense home invasion thriller co-starring Monica Belucci, which clothes its pulpy plot in glossy, stylish trimmings.

A disappointing note in this year’s main competition was sub-par work by veteran auteurs with a previously strong Cannes track record. Both Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales (Histoires Paralleles) and Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad) were meta-textual chamber dramas about creative ethics and the tensions between fiction and reality, each reliably polished and well acted but ultimately low on spark. Even reliable Japanese director Koreeda Hirokazu’s reflection on an AI future, Sheep in the Box, that explores the possibility of giving the parents of dead children android replicants to replace them seemed on the slight side for such heavy subject matter. James Gray, one of the few American heavyweights in Cannes, also returned to very familiar ground with Paper Tiger, yet another ponderous rumination on fraternal tensions and organised crime in 1980s New York. Starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johanssen and Miles Teller, this obstinately drab saga felt like it was scripted by an AI program trained entirely on earlier, better James Gray movies.

It was a year when LGBTQ stories were very prominent in the program, especially outside the main competition. Opening the Un Certain Regard section to generally warm reviews — and winning the Queer Palme — was Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun, an ambitiously weird candy-coloured queer fantasia which uses vintage slasher-movie conventions to unlock its underlying theme of sexual self-awakening. But the main UCR prize ultimately went to Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, a family psychodrama about grief and loss which skips into a Twilight Zone of time loops and ghostly echoes in its poignant final act. The Midnight section also threw up a few superior genre gems including French writer-director Marion Le Corroller’s debut feature Species (Sanguine), a savagely dark comedy thriller that turns workplace exploitation into a blood-soaked body-horror nightmare.

Animation had a strong presence across most sections of the festival, with nine feature films spread between the Critics’ Week, Directors Fortnight, Un Certain Regard, Special Screenings and Midnight Screenings. The latter hosted the world premiere of Jim Queen, a gloriously queer comedy where a mysterious virus causes gay men to become straight. Above all, it was a triumph for hand-drawn worlds, be it the stylized take on a celebrated opera (Carmen by Sébastien Laudenbach) or the classically elegant French-language adaptation of a British book (Lucy Lost by Olivier Clert). And while the short film competition was marked by the triumph of the Mexican-Chilean live-action work For the Opponents, the warmest reaction from the crowd was for the Swedish stop-motion dark comedy The End, the latest sterling example of Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s knack for getting great results out of funny-looking anthropomorphic animals.

Another major theme was France dealing with its past, specifically World War II, revisited in three films: Moulin focused on Resistance leader Jean Moulin and his tension-filled interactions with Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie; A Man of His Time explored the other end of the spectrum, with director Emmanuel Marre taking inspiration from his great-grandfather to delve into the inner workings of the Vichy regime; and then, as the main Out of Competition event of this edition (and the de facto French blockbuster of the year once it releases in cinemas next month), De Gaulle: Tilting Iron (the first half of a two-film epic) brought the house down as viewers were reminded of the passion Charles De Gaulle brought to the effort of liberating France.

A BOLD DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

If We Are Aliens left Cannes empty-handed, it was not for its want of quality or lack of audience appreciation. The animation, which explores the impact of an unravelling childhood friendship on two young men, received rapturous applause at each of its screenings (including on the final day, with a markedly younger audience due to special passes for under-25’s).

Directors’ Fortnight was perhaps one of the most audacious and diverse in recent years. On the one hand, it featured the return of many festival veterans who have a long history with the independent programme. Alain Cavalier, 93, sent in what would most probably his final (and very, very funny) testimony about cinema with the diary-essay documentary Thanks For Coming. After years away over at the other end of the Croisette racing for the Palme d’Or, Bruno Dumont showed up at the Fortnight with Red Rocks, a summertime drama about romance and rivalry starring children; he also delivered a masterclass full of insights about the very different creative decisions needed to accommodate his very young cast.

With devastatingly moving performances from her twenty-something actors, Clio Barnard’s third Fortnight entry I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning – about the diverging fortunes of five longtime friends from the same defunct housing estate in Birmingham – was the winner of the Fortnight’s People’s Choice Awards. Camaraderie also yields chemistry in French filmmaker Lila Pinell’s Shana, about a young woman counting on the support and protection of her circle of girlfriends as she confronts the return of a newly paroled, abusive ex.

Another pleasant surprise at the Fortnight this year was Sarah Arnold’s taboo-busting, genre-shifting Too Many Beasts. Revolving around an emotionally scarred Corsican cop’s professional and personal alliance with a no-nonsense police psychiatrist as they investigate “eco-terrorist” attacks in a small farm town, the film offered a wild reworking of the tropes worn so increasingly thin in recent years in rural-set, social realist French dramas. With its surreal narrative and a no-holds-barred satire about backward provincialism and patriarchy, the Paris-based Italian-Swiss Arnold offered hopes for French comedy after the catastrophically staid festival-opener The Electric Kiss.

JAPAN TAKES CENTER STAGE

By choosing Japan as its country of honor this year, the Cannes Film Market made a rare alignment with the film festival itself. After France, Japan was probably the most omnipresent country on the Croisette this year, with a wide range of its filmmakers – from long-dead auteurs to first-time directors – casting a very large shadow over the festival.

 Apart from securing a whopping three nominations in the main competition (and an ex-aequo award to Hamaguchi’s actresses Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto in All of a Sudden), Japan also boasted a film in Un Certain Regard (Yukiko Sode’s All the Lovers in the Night, starring Tadanobu Asano of Thor fame). Cult cineaste Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s period suspense thriller The Samurai and the Prisoners screened in the Cannes Première programme; Kohei Kadowaki’s completely un-Ghibli animation drama We Are Aliens in Directors’ Fortnight; and a restoration of the late Akira Kurosawa’s 1943 debut Sanshiro Sugata appeared in Cannes Classics.

Japan was also fertile ground for two young non-Japanese filmmakers. Chinese student director Wong Chau-hong’s short film Will It Rain Again Today was produced by Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo and competed for La Cinef. In Un Certain Regard, Greek director Konstantina Kotzamani presented her first feature Titanic Ocean, a film set in a fictional Japanese institution where young women train to become professional mermaid performers.