Jon Favreau created the Disney+ version, which played like a star-hopping take on The Fugitive or Route 66, with our Mandalorian hero Din Djarin (Pablo Pascal) getting into and out of a sticky situation over the course of each episode accompanied by Grogu (unofficially also known as “Baby Yoda”), the powerful infant alien to whom the Mandalorian grew closer and more fatherly with each passing adventure. Their stories take place in a universe still reeling from the overthrow of the Empire, well before the rise of the New Order. (aka, after Return of the Jedi and before The Force Awakens.)

For the movie, Favreau seems to be taking his cues from the 007 franchise: the Mandalorian and Grogu are searching the galaxy for former Empire higher-ups pushing back against the New Republic, taking assignments from Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver), who’s equal parts M and Q, tut-tutting the Mandalorian’s results as “messy, messy” when he invariably kills his prey rather than capture them for questioning. (Weaver’s signature tone of honey-dipped disappointment fits perfectly into her franchise debut.)

One of those assignments, involving Rotta the Hutt (voiced by Jeremy Allan White) — son of Jabba — becomes significantly more complicated and dangerous than it first appears, which cues the chasing and the fighting and deadly aliens and the thrill-ride portions of this intended summer blockbuster. (To say more than that would be to incur the wrath of spoiler-hating fans and Disney publicists.)

There’s certainly some television structure at play in the screenplay (by Favreau and fellow series vets Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor); one could argue that the movie plays like a two-episode arc writ large. (Part I focuses on the Mandalorian; Part II on Grogu.) But since The Mandalorian was a TV show with the shape and scope of feature films, it’s a natural progression for the property. There’s no shortage of Star Wars–level wow factor, from the slimy beasts to the outer-space dogfights to Ludwig Göransson’s score, which retains the majestic badassery of the TV theme but permutates into a dizzyingly eclectic collection of tones and variations over the course of the feature.

Pascal generates enough charisma that he makes the Mandalorian captivating even through what is mostly a vocal performance. (The character, like others of his clan, nearly always wears the face-occluding helmet; it’s a thing.) As for Grogu, who gets to expand beyond his sidekick role here, he’s an onscreen creation second only to Paddington Bear in his ability to zero in on the sentimental parts of the human brain. He’s utterly adorable, and it’s to Favreau’s credit that the movie doesn’t lean too hard on Grogu’s cuteness to get by.

There are Easter eggs aplenty for fans of the Star Wars saga, and The Mandalorian and Grogu plants a few possibilities for sequels and spinoff characters without being too obvious about it. For Favreau, philosophy and world-building is obviously the stuff of the TV show; now that it’s a movie, it’s time for fun and thrills.

Director: Jon Favreau
Screenwriters: Jon Favreau & Dave Filoni & Noah Kloor
Cast: Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White
Executive producers: Karen Gilchrist, John Bartnicki, Carrie Beck
Producers: Kathleen Kennedy, Ian Bryce, Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni
Director of photography: David Klein
Production design: Andrew L. Jones, Doug Chiang
Editing: Rachel Goodlett Katz, Dylan Firshein
Music: Ludwig Göransson
Sound design: David Acord, sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Lucasfilm
In English
132 minutes

Switching bodies is a daring premise for a film about sexual identity, rich as it is in references to modern concepts of gender fluidity, but the film is also intent on exploring a raw and quite frightening primal fear of the opposite sex. Director Arthur Harari, who authored the multi-awarded screenplay Anatomy of a Fall with Justine Triet, here works with co-screenwriters Lucas Harari and Vincent Poymiro to flesh out a kinky can’t-look-away story, without lowering it to the exploitative level of so many horror films. On the contrary, the story vaunts its own sort of poetry as the characters yearn for each other’s bodies, which once were theirs. For this reason it may have less grip on wide genre audiences than on the festival crowd; but in any case, Cannes competition is an auspicious start.

Though the POV keeps shifting, the main consciousness of the story is David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider), a melancholy photographer who is obsessed with the past. He finds the exact location of old French postcards and then photographs the modern eyesore industrial and high-rise architecture that has taken its place. A true recluse, he has to be dragged by his sister Alice and friends to a stunningly colorful masked ball, where a raving crowd demolishes a giant Trump head. Overflowing with masked guests, the party introduces a psychedelic atmosphere that is underlined when David is handed a pill by a stranger.

He takes it. Soon he is following a mysterious woman in a trench coat. Without speaking a word, Eva (Léa Seydoux) leads him into a dark basement and initiates a wild coupling that could be described as animal-like or demonic – the jury is still out on what is going on. David loses consciousness after a howling climax and when he comes to, he is horrified to find himself in Eva’s body.

The apparent senselessness of the changeover leads to all sorts of theories that will keep fantasy audiences entertained while the characters frantically look for a way to turn back into their original selves. As in Kafka’s story (or David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, a horror film with some notable resemblances), at first everybody presumes the body change is a temporary inconvenience, possibly caused by an evil entity transmitting itself during intercourse. David, now in Eva’s body (the viewer needs to keep close track of who’s who), has some embarrassing encounters with family and friends before he realizes his only chance to change things back is to find Eva, now in his body.

So starts a non-stop chase through a series of French locations. As the situation becomes increasingly complex, panic sets in. A third body change happens, adding another young woman named Malia (Lilith Grasmug, Foreign Language) to the hunt, along with her excitable dad played vividly by director Radu Jude. Eva and David team up to more-or-less work together, they discover another possible victim who hints she has been re-embodied for years. That’s depressing.

Though this part of the film is structured and paced like a thriller, the protags are anything but action heroes. More in the tradition of experimental SF characters, Eva and David are alienated singles living in their own closed worlds. They are unable to communicate with anyone they love and care about, and unable to love each other because of an irremovable physical barrier. Perhaps that is the source of the film’s aura of bittersweet melancholy, a yearning for things just beyond one’s grasp.

There are undoubtedly loose ends in the story, perhaps red herrings to which one looks for meaning where there is none, like David’s Jewishness, the Bob Dylan song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” over the end credits, the unseen evil entity… But despite some annoying trickery, the film reaches a miraculous, wordless conclusion of self-acceptance that feels just right.  

Director: Arthur Harari
Screenwriters: Arthur Harari, Lucas Harari, Vincent Poymiro
Producer: Nicolas Anthomé, Lionel Guedj
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Niels Schneider, Valérie Dreville, Radu Jude, Shanti Masud, Jonathan Turnbull, Victoire Du Bois
Cinematography: Tom Harari
Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay
Editing: Laurent Sénéchal
Music: Andrea Poggio
Sound: Julien Tan Ham Sicart, Olivier Goinard, Fanny Martin, Jeanne Delplancq
Production companies: Bathysphere (France), To Be Continued (France)
World sales: Pathé Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In French
139 minutes

Na has a solid commercial track record in Korea, plus prize-winning form in Cannes. Following The Chaser (2008), The Yellow Sea (2011) and The Wailing (2016), his latest feature marks his fourth visit to the French festival, and his first time in the main competition. Reportedly the most expensive film in South Korean history, Hope is also Na’s most full-throated crowd-pleaser to date, packed with breathless extended action sequences, high-calibre stunt work, world-class production design and rowdy slapstick humour.

That said, Hope is also disappointingly light on plot or character psychology, lacking the deeper socio-political bite that international audiences have come to expect from festival-friendly genre films in the wake of Get Out (2017), Parasite (2019), The Substance (2024) and others. Never mind subtext, there is barely even text here. Some of the CGI monster effects also look oddly cheap and clunky, while the relentless wham-bang action become a little exhausting over the film’s unwieldy 160-minute span. Hope is not pitched at art-house connoisseurs but, judging by its generally warm reception in Cannes so far, it has premiered just in time to give jaded critics some much-needed escapist thrills after a week of mostly po-faced misery dramas. Box office prospects should be healthy, with Neon and MUBI already signed up to cover most European, North American and English-speaking markets.

Hope takes place in a small South Korean harbour town of the same name, close to the Demilitarized Zone and the border with North Korea. Cynical, foul-mouthed police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and his trusted cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-Sung) are summoned to a grisly rural crime scene, the bloody carcass of a cow that has been slashed to death. A team of hunters blame a tiger rumoured to haunt the nearby mountains, but it soon becomes clear the town is under assault from something bigger, weirder and far more dangerous.

When Bum-soek investigates the town of Hope itself, he finds an apocalyptic war zone of smashed buildings, wrecked vehicles and mangled human corpses. Na teasingly keeps the cause of all this carnage off screen for almost 45 minutes, but eventually reveals it to be a kind of humanoid alien hybrid beast in the middle of a rage-crazed, hugely destructive, Godzilla-sized rampage. The film’s opening hour then becomes virtually one long hyperkinetic battle sequence, with sassy young female officer Sung-ae (Jung) joining Bum-seok for a breakneck monster showdown involving shotguns, bazookas and rubber-burning car chases.

An hour into Hope, with the beast seemingly vanquished and the surviving townsfolk tending their wounds, Sung-ae hubristically declares “this is where it ends.” But of course, in grand action thriller tradition, this is only the beginning. As Sung-ki and his motley team of hunters discover while sweeping the nearby mountains, the killer creature has arrived on Earth aboard a giant silver spaceship, which is teeming with many other fellow flesh-chomping monsters, diverse in look and size, with variable roles and ranks. After a brief breathing space, Na revs up for an even bigger extended set-piece battle featuring forest gunfights, high-speed vehicle stunts and blood-splattered twists. Once again, these action scenes are expertly choreographed, but soon become repetitive.

Hope concludes with a jarring shift of focus, hinting at some vast extra-terrestrial conflict unfolding in the skies above Korea. In this final act, Vikander and Fassbender make their extended digital cameos as CGI aliens with Avatar overtones. This poorly explained, belated piece of fantasy world-building is obviously intended as a sequel teaser, but it belongs in an entirely different cinematic universe to the two-hours-plus orgy of gleefully gory cartoon carnage that has gone before.

In its favour, Hope is never less than entertaining, boasting high-gloss production values and virtuoso slapstick stunts worthy of Buster Keaton in his prime. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, a Na regular who also shot Parasite, gives the action a lush widescreen look, subtly blending majestic landscape shots filmed in both Korea and Romania. Brimming with salty language and cheerfully crude toilet jokes, the screenplay also contains some pleasingly meta, self-aware commentary on its own plot conventions. A chest-thumping score by frequent Jordan Peele collaborator Michael Abels invokes some of the old-school orchestral swagger of classic Hollywood.

Director, screenwriter: Na Hong-jin
Cast: wang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender
Cinematographer: Hong Kyung-pyo
Editing: Kim Sunmin
Music: Michael Abels
Producers: Na Hong-jin, Saemin Kim, Saerom Kim
Production company: Forged Films (South Korea)
World sales: Plus M, Seoul
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Korean
160 minutes

América Latina atesora el melodrama pero La perra de Dominga Sotomayor hace de la sobriedad su mejor herramienta en esta película sobresaliente.

La perra está basada en la novela homónima de Pilar Quintana. La película mueve la narración 5000 al sur del mismo oceáno; de una comunidad de afrodescendientes en el pacífico colombiano a una isla en la región del Bio Bio en Chile. La adaptación, más bien reescritura de la directora y la guionista Ines Bortegaray, pule el retrato de la simbiosis de la protagonista con su entorno.

Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún), una mujer adusta al final de la treintena vive con su pareja Mario (David Gaete) en una casa modesta alejada del muelle y el caserío. Silvia es casi ermitaña con un deber especial:  es la guardiana de una monumental estructura de concreto vacía con la excepción de una recámara que ella limpia con asiduidad y devoción. Ellos y toda la isla viven de recoger algas marinas comestibles y pescar. La vida cotidiana -dura pero tranquila y con buenos ratos- cambia cuando Silvia adopta a una cachorrita que los pescadores recogieron en el mar. Cuando elige su nombre Yuri, ya son inseparables.

A pesar de algunos pequeños tropiezos – anticipar la tragedia, el más claro- Sotomayor resuelve con seguridad uno de los temas más difíciles del cine: el abandono. ¿Cómo retratar la ausencia?, ¿cualquier ausencia es abandono?, ¿tiene culpa el que abandona?, o ¿tal vez el abandonado?  La perra hace estas preguntas, sin palabras,  varias veces y deja que espectador que las conteste, o no, según le parezca. Hay material para varias teorías.

Silvia vive del mar, lo conoce íntimamente;  su fisonomía adusta refleja la naturaleza agreste de la isla. La impecable fotografía  de Simone D’Arcangelo  y la calculada edición  de Federico Rotstein nos dan la belleza del lugar sin convertirlo en un promocional turístico.

La actuación de  Manuela Oyarzún como protagonista es parca pero refleja el arco narrativo. Sus rasgos se suavizan cuando está con Yuri mucho más que con Mario. Cuando sus recuerdos -la explicación para la audiencia- se intercalan con el presente, vamos desde la apatía de Silvia joven (Rafaella Grimberg) por la ausencia de su madre – hasta la desesperación  y la rabia por otras desapariciones. Cuando Silvia  decide ser la que abandona, Oyarzún  es la cara de la venganza por todos los que han dejado la isla.

Las dos primeras películas de Sotomayor —De jueves a domingo y Demasiado tarde para morir joven— le dieron suficiente prestigio para asegurar que La perra tenga una muy buena temporada en festivales. La pequeña pero encantadora participación del famoso actor brasileño Selton Mello, junto con una buena acogida en Cannes, aumentaría sus posibilidades de una distribución internacional.

Director: Dominga Sotomayor
Guion: Inés Bortagaray, basada en la novela homónima de Pilar Quintana
Productores: Rodrigo Teixeira, Fernando Bascuñán, Berta Marchiori
Productores ejecutivos: Nicolás San Martín, Selton Mello, Fernando Fuentes
Elenco: Manuela Oyarzún, David Gaete, Selton Mello, Paula Luchsinger, Paula Dinamarca, Rafaella Grimberg
Fotografía: Simone D’Arcangelo
Edición: Federico Rotstein
Diseño de producción: Natalia Geisse
Diseño de vestuario: Francisca Tuca
Música: Clint Mansell
Sonido: Javier Umpierrez
Compañías productoras: RT Features (Brasil) , Planta (Chile), Fondo de Fomento Audiovisual Convocatorias 2024 & 2026 of the Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio del Gobierno de Chile..
Ventas internacionales: Lucky Number (Fr
Muestra: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
En español
112 minutos

Latin Americans treasure melodrama, but Dominga Sotomayor’s La Perra makes sobriety her best tool in this outstanding film.

Based on a novel by Pilar Quintana, the film relocates the book’s narrative around 3100 miles to the south, from a community of Afro-descendants in the Colombian Pacific to an island in the Bio Bio region of southern Chile. The adaptation, more of a rewrite by screenwriter Inés Bortegaray, polishes the portrait of the symbiosis between the protagonist and her environment.

Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún) is a harsh woman in her late thirties who lives with her partner
Mario (David Gaete) in a modest house far from the pier and the nearest small town. She is a semi-hermit with one special duty: she is the guardian of a monumental concrete structure, empty
except for a bedroom that she cleans every day with devotion. Like the other inhabitants of the island, the couple make a living harvesting edible seaweed and fishing. Daily life is hard but quiet and with some good times. But all that changes when Silvia adopts a puppy that fishermen rescued at sea. By the time she names her “Yuri”, they are already inseparable.

Despite some small stumbles – the most noticeable is the way the screenplay telegraphs tragedy —  Sotomayor confidently resolves one of cinema´s most difficult issues: visualizing abandonment. How do you portray absence? Is any absence abandonment? Must the abandoner feel guilty? Or perhaps we should blame the one who is abandoned? The film asks these questions repeatedly and lets the viewer decide whether to answer them or not, as they see fit — there is material here for all.

Because Silvia lives off the sea, she knows it intimately; Manuela Oyarzún’s stern face reflects the island’s rugged nature. Simone D’Arcangelo’s impeccable photography and Federico Rotstein´s careful editing give us the beauty of the place without turning it into a travelogue.

Oyarzún’s performance in the leading role is spare, reflecting the lean narrative arc. Her features soften when she is with Yuri much more than with Mario. Her memories – explaining her backstory for the audience’s benefit – alternate with the present time, taking the story from the apathy of young Silvia (Rafaella Grimberg) due to her mother’s absence, to her despair and anger at other disappearances. When she decides to be the one who leaves, Oyarzún embodies revenge for all those who have left the island.

Sotomayor’s first two films, From Thursday to Sunday and Too Late to Die Young, gave her enough prestige to ensure La perra will have a strong festival run. A charming small role by the acclaimed Brazilian actor Selton Mello plus a good reception in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight section should improve its chances internationally.

Director: Dominga Sotomayor
Screenplay: Inés Bortagaray, based in the novel by Pilar Quintana
Producers: Rodrigo Teixeira, Fernando Bascuñán, Berta Marchiori
executive producers: Nicolás San Martín, Selton Mello, Fernando Fuentes
Cast: Manuela Oyarzún, David Gaete, Selton Mello, Paula Luchsinger, Paula Dinamarca, Rafaella Grimberg
Cinematography: Simone D’Arcangelo
Edition: Federico Rotstein
Production Designer: Natalia Geisse
Costume designer: Francisca Tuca
Music: Clint Mansell
Sound: Javier Umpierrez
Production Companies: RT Features (Brazil) , Planta (Chile), Fondo de Fomento Audiovisual of the Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio del Gobierno de Chile.
World Sales: Lucky Number
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In Spanish
112 minutes

A world premiere in the cult-friendly Midnight section in Cannes, Species expands on Le Corroller’s 2020 short, No More God in Doctor, and was partly inspired by her own experiences in a stressful finance job. Though the plotting is sometimes haphazard and the satire very broad, the film’s heady blend of elevated genre elements, superlative visual effects, splatter violence and political subtext should add up to healthy audience appeal. A domestic release is scheduled for October.

Inevitably, Species has been widely compared to other female-directed, feminist-leaning body-horror films that became Cannes sensations: notably Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) and Titane (2021), and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024). Le Corroller has been wary of these parallels in her promotional interviews, citing Ari Aster and Yorgos Lanthimos as more direct inspirations, but the similarities are hard to ignore, and will certainly prove helpful as marketing angles. The stand-out body-mutation sequences here are handled by special make-up effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin, for example, who won an Oscar for The Substance.

Named Sanguine in French – a much better title than its blandly bloodless English alternative – Species sets out its satirical stall early with a lively prologue set in a gaudy fast food restaurant, where an entitled online influencer makes too many diva demands on an already pressurised server, pushing him over the edge from ritual politeness to bludgeoning violence. Just to underscore the Looney Tunes comic tone, the restaurant is called Bloody Burger. This is not a subtle movie.

That said, the central plot is as much psychological character study as genre thriller. It follows Margot (Belgian rising star Mara Taquin), a new recruit to the brutally competitive team of young medical interns staffing a frantically busy hospital emergency room in an unnamed French city. Her boss is Professor Virgile (Karen Viard), a tyrannical ice queen who Margot’s fellow trainee doctors call “the devil”. Indeed, the opening act of Species might have been called The Devil Wears Surgical Scrubs.

But more nightmarish Cronenberg-ian elements soon come to dominate as Margot begins treating patients with unexplained conditions, from grotesque skin lesions to sweating blood. Crucially, this COVID-like pandemic appears to mainly afflict younger people in pressurised, precarious jobs who simply cannot afford to be sick.

The same applies to Margot. When she begins exhibiting similar terrifying symptoms, she initially struggles to conceal them from her co-worker rivals Louis (Sami Outalbali) and Pauline (Kim Higelin), which proves especially difficult as all three share an uneasy, volatile sexual chemistry. Professor Virgile reassures Margot she is merely suffering from hematidrosis, a real condition in which blood floods the sweat glands, typically triggered by extreme stress. But the professor has her own dubious agenda, and her vague diagnosis does not explain the nationwide wave of lethal violence and sudden death that the sickness appears to have unleashed. With her life at risk, Margot becomes a kind of undercover medical detective, frantically seeking answers as her body starts to mutate, transform and disintegrate.

After this suspenseful but slightly incoherent set-up, Species kicks into high gear for the frenzied final act, which features some terrific visual effects and deliciously visceral gore, all climaxing with a bravura high-speed orgy of skin-slashing, blood-pumping guerrilla surgery. Le Corroller’s final satirical punchline, which hints that the sickness could be some kind of evolutionary biological weapon in an inter-generational class war, is an audacious twist but not wholly convincing.

Ultimately, Species never quite hits the same eye-popping, flesh-tearing, pulp-deluxe heights as Titane or The Substance. But this is still an admirably ambitious and mostly satisfying debut driven by a kinetic, all-guns-blazing performance from Taquin. Her compelling depiction of manic meltdown is reinforced by cinematographer Guillame Schiffman’s heavily stylised, reality-bending lenswork and a relentlessly pumping electronic score by French musician Robin Coudert, aka ROB, whose has previously worked with a long list of cult horror directors including Coralie Fargeat.

Director: Marion Le Corroller
Screenwriters: Marion Le Corroller, Thomas Pujol
Cast: Mara Taquin, Karin Viard, Kim Higelin, Sami Outalbali, Stefan Crepon, Sonia Faïdi
Cinematography: Guillame Schiffman
Editing: Jerome Altabet
Production designer: Anne-Sophie Delseries
Music: Rob
Producer: Carole Lambert
Production company: Windy (France)
World sales: WTFilms, Paris
In French
103 minutes

Bowing in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes, the documentary will definitely appeal to global cinephiles like his 2004 piece Le Filmeur did. Even those who don’t know his work can enjoy the documentary, viewing it as the video diary of a tipsy, funny uncle.

The film begins in 2011, when Cavalier is shooting the low-budget Pater – a film in which he shared acting duties and camerawork with his regular collaborator, the actor Vincent Lindon. We then see him filming his deluxe hotel room in Cannes, where the film was selected for competition. Black comedy ensues when he and his life partner, the editor Françoise Widhoff, get off a train heading towards Cannes to return to Paris after being informed they didn’t win anything.

Boasting a very barbed sense of humour that makes her the yang to Cavalier’s yin, Widhoff is just as much a star of the documentary as the director himself. We see her mocking Cavalier for filming footage “which has tons of atmosphere”; we see her wrapping up their deceased cat in a red blanket, her last words to her pet completely heartbreaking. It’s only the first of many deaths in the documentary, as Cavalier marks the passing of friends such as the French writer Emmanuèle Bernheim, the subject of his 2019 doc Living and Knowing You’re Alive, and the death of his own brother.

As Thanks for Coming ushers us through Cavalier’s previous decade, we witness how this genuinely independent filmmaker develops his ideas and tries to follow them through. Somewhere in the documentary, Cavalier describes the objective of his late-stage filmmaking as the search for the “first images of my childhood”. Interestingly, there aren’t any in Thanks for Coming; rather, Cavalier offers footage which can allow us to speculate on his inner being. A close-up of his hands breaking bread and his offscreen voice talking about Jesus and the apostles, for example, could be interpreted as his belief in solidarity among men. His ramshackle enactment of war using a tiny toy robot and toothpicks is juxtaposed with his comments about the Odyssey, probably alluding to his craving for journeys.

Such philosophical meanderings are lined up side by side with images of more banal things, such as the running joke of Cavalier mumbling in voiceover about the quality of the hotel rooms he has to stay in as he travels across France for screenings and masterclasses. At the end of the documentary, Cavalier says he won’t be travelling for these appointments anymore. He didn’t attend the premiere of the film at Cannes – but, well, never say never with such a lively character.

Director, screenplay, cinematography: Alain Cavalier
Producers: Michel Seydoux
Editing: Emmanuel Manzano
Sound: Steve Raccah
Production companies: Camera One
World sales: Camera One
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In French
82 minutes

Set and shot in the city of Calvin, the film revolves around Johanna Schopfer, playing a lightly fictionalized version of herself. She works at the assembly line in a luxury watch factory, but without the visual elegance the sector got in Cyril Schäublin’s period piece Unrest: these scenes are as far removed from stereotypical Helvetic ostentatiousness as they can get, not least because the opulence would run counter to the simplicity directors Céline Carridroit and Aline Suter seek to capture.

Summer is around the corner, and while everyone else goes on vacation, Johanna sticks around, enjoying lakeside activities with her friends. Then, as she contemplates disposing of her VW Beetle, she decides to go in the opposite direction and restore it, reclaiming a part of herself that was rejected after she transitioned. That vehicle is the bridge between her old world and the new one, and much like Johanna herself it sort of exists on its own terms, not quite at the same rhythm as everything else.

Described as an autofiction (the staged structure being a practical necessity to account for Schopfer’s real-life work schedule and availability for filming), Summer Drift was shot over the course of four summers, condensed into one on the screen. Per the directors, the choice to use 16mm film stock was partly sociopolitical, to acknowledge the fact they’re spotlighting a person from the LGBTQ+ community who would most likely not have been present – at least not overtly so – in similar indie projects from decades past.

It is also in keeping with their aim to showcase a different side of Geneva, a more timeless one. Famously high-class and expensive (it’s no coincidence one of the most prominent national TV series shot on location was literally called Quartier des banques), the city undergoes a transformation through the lens adopted by Carridroit and Suter: it’s timeless and almost elemental, with water playing a crucial role. And with that old school flicker, Lake Geneva looks even more beautiful and serene than usual, the ideal escape for those who find themselves oppressed by the everyday grind imposed by capitalism.

And in the middle of all that, Johanna Schopfer shines bright as the star of an existence she gets to reclaim and redefine with wit and charm (including her charismatic regional accent). And while there is no obvious boundary between performing and being observed (her personality, also expressed through self-published comic books, having served as a major inspiration for the hybrid approach in making the film), she has a natural understanding with the camera, effortlessly driving or floating through the hottest period of the year as the director duo immortalizes all that with an energy that matches hers: slightly off-kilter, but quietly engaging over the course of an hour and a half on the shores of the Léman.

Directors, Screenwriters: Céline Carridroit, Aline Suter
Cast: Johanna Schopfer
Producer: Aurélien Marsais, Cécile Lestrade, Elise Hug
Cinematography: Victor Zébo, Aurore Toulon
Sound: Xavier Lavorel, Eliot Ratinaud, Gerald Wang, Sophie Dascal, Timothée Zurbuchen
Production companies: Cavale Films, Alter Ego Production
World sales: MoreThan Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (ACID)
In French
89 minutes

Todo esto no es algo que se pueda integrar fácilmente en una película de menos de dos horas, y además una que está muy anclada en tópicos melodramáticos de las desventuras familiares. Aun así, la habilidad de Martelli para apropiarse y transformar hitos del género fácilmente reconocibles —el hotel invernal en medio de la nada, una niña al tanto de los desafortunados acontecimientos a su alrededor— deberá servir como prueba de su posición como una de las cineastas con mayor rango y socialmente conscientes en el Chile de hoy.

En el helado centro de El deshielo está Inés (una deslumbrante Maya O’Rourke), una niña de nueve años que deambula por el hotel de esquí de su familia mientras sus padres están en el extranjero trabajando en el pabellón de Chile para la expo mundial, la primera en la que participa el país desde la destitución de Augusto Pinochet en 1990. Sentada frente a la televisión con su abuela —que está planeando expandir el resort con inversionistas españoles— Inés ve a su padre promoviendo el regreso de Chile a la normalidad e invitando a la gente para que haga negocios en el país. Y además está la pieza de resistencia en el pabellón: un iceberg de 60 toneladas cortado de las regiones antárticas chilenas y transportado a España para la expo.

Mientras ocurre todo esto, la única fascinación de Inés es Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), una joven esquiadora alemana que entrena y se aloja en el hotel con su equipo. Al presenciar el acoso al que Hanna es sometida y la incómoda relación entre ella y su entrenador (Jakub Gierszal), Inés se hace amiga de la chica y descubre muchos secretos suyos – su amor por el Goth, que fuma y sobre su madre, que “viene de un país que ya no existe” – hasta que desaparece un día después de una noche con Sebastián (Lautaro Cantillana), el primo de Inés.

Hasta este punto, Martelli logra encontrar un interesante equilibrio al narrar la desaparición de Hanna con alusiones esporádicas a las divisiones históricas de Chile, como la sutil revelación de la apropiación ilícita por parte de la familia de las tierras indígenas donde se encuentra el hotel, o la forma en que los personajes blancos (es decir, la familia de Inés) infantilizan  y menosprecian a los mestizos. (Quizá sea revelador que Inés haya elegido desde el principio de qué lado está, ya que constantemente se escapa a dormir con la servidumbre.)

Cuando llega la madre de Hanna (Saskia Rosendahl), la película básicamente se convierte en un melodrama familiar con los giros y discusiones esperados sobre la crianza de los hijos – un rompimiento que distrae de la misteriosa atmósfera de El deshielo, invocada por la paleta de color de Benjamin Echazaretta, los zooms lentos y la edición de Yibrán Asuad.

Director, guion: Manuela Martelli
Productores: Alejandra García, Alex C. Lo, Andrés Wood
Productor ejecutivo: Javier Palma Quaas
Elenco: Maya O’Rourke, Maia Rae Domagala, Saskia Rosendahl, Jakub Gierszal, Paulina Urrutia
Fotografía: Benjamin Echazaretta
Edición: Yibrán Asuad
Diseño de producción: Nohemí González
Diseño de vestuario: Carolina Espina
Música: María Portugal
Sonido: Javier Umpierrez
Compañías productoras: Ronda Cine, Cinema Inutile, Wood Producciones
Ventas internacionales: Films du Losange
Muestra: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
En español, inglés y alemán
108 minutos

On an emotional scale, Sheep in the Box feels like a latter-day twin to Koreeda’s 2013 Like Father, Like Son (Cannes’ Special Jury Prize), which posited the terrifying situation two parents find themselves in when they discover their beloved 7-year-old son got switched for another couple’s offspring in the hospital – and they agree to switch back. All those characters’ confusion over biological parenting, heartbreak and broken trust find their way into the new film, which is based on an equally absurd proposition: replacing a dead child with an identical humanoid robot.

The Komotos, a well-to-do family of architects and wood workers, have lost their little boy Kakeru in an accident two years before the story begins. They are still struggling to come to terms with their grief. While Otone, the wife, clings to mementos like a tree they planted in the courtyard when their son was born, her husband Kensuke buries his pain in the depths of his psyche. When they are selected to promote ReBirth, a company that furnishes lifelike androids in the spitting image of a deceased loved one, Otone jumps at the chance, dragging Kensuke behind her,

With minimal fuss, the little replacement for Kakeru arrives at the doorstep of their futuristic and rather ugly home. He is just the adorable mop-head they desired and comes pre-programed with his predecessor’s knowledge of train timetables and more. And he calls them Mama and Papa. The mother transfers emotionally at once; the father more rationally treats him like a clever machine, on the order of a robotic floor cleaner.

The story bounces between outright comedy, like the fainting fit that overcomes Otone’s unprepared mother when she drops by unexpectedly, to high dramatic tension when Kensuke tests the android’s memory about how Kakeru died by giving him the third degree. Both of the actors playing the parents explode the psychodrama when their suppressed emotions are forced into the open by the presence of their son-substitute. In scenes that belie the sometimes saccharine score and child-POV settings, Ayase Haruka exposes the mother’s deep-seated anxieties, questioning not only her responsibility in Kakaru’s death, but whether she ever really wanted to be a mom. Daigo Yamamoto brings a relatable hard edge to the battered-looking father, but even his self-confidence crumbles before his feelings of guilt.

What’s makes the machine-child concept interesting is the way the conventions of cinema work with Koreeda to blur the line between human and robot, as Rimu Kuwaki appears to play roles both at once. It comes as a shock to see the perfect little boy dismantled when he has to be taken back to the ReBirth labs for an overhaul. His smooth skin is sliced open, revealing a mass of circuitry and chemical fluids.

Kuwaki has a disarming naturalness onscreen. As an android he may not dream of electric sheep, but he certainly communicates human feelings when he is read The Little Prince. Before long, he steers the affectionate robot boy off-course in a mysterious rebellion that involves other kids. It begins when he slips away from mom in the park to talk to a dark stranger in the woods. There has been talk of kidnapped children and it appears he may be in danger. Instead the stranger turns out to have a very different, positive agenda, which leads into a classic children’s fantasy. This part of the story feels notably underdeveloped and many elements are puzzling, such as who the stranger is and what role he plays in the ending. Yet despite its abruptness, the film’s concluding scenes are an emotional fairy tale that lifts the spirits, bringing together androids and unwanted, abused and abandoned human kids in a utopian vision of a better future for all.

Director, screenwriter, editing: Koreeda Hirokazu
Cast: Daigo Yamamoto, Ayase Haruka, Rimu Kuwaki, Nana Seino, Kan’ichiro Sato
Cinematography: Kondo Ryuto
Production design: Takuya Okada
Music: Yuta Bandoh
Sound: Tomita Kazuhiko
Production companies: Gaga Corporation
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Japanese
126 minutes

Soderbergh’s film is built around a lengthy audio interview that Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded in their Dakota Building apartment in Manhattan on January 8, 1980. It was conducted by San Francisco radio station KFRC’s Laurie Kaye, Dave Sholin and Ron Hummel, who all share their memories in contemporary interviews here. A fourth member of the delegation, record label executive Bert Keane, died during this film’s production.

After a long break away from music, chiefly for Lennon to play domestic homebody and bond with his new son Sean, he and Ono granted this rare interview to promote their new album, Double Fantasy. The 40-year-old rocker talks up this comeback in gushing terms, as a full-blooded creative rebirth, with more studio sessions and live dates in the pipeline.

The interview team were warned not to mention the Beatles, but Lennon brings up his former band unprompted, speaking with rare warmth about his close bond and creative chemistry with Paul McCartney. He also raves about the joys of fatherhood, his undimmed love for Elvis Presley and Little Richard, his open-minded enthusiasm for disco and New Wave music, and more. In addition, he and Ono discuss their shy early courtship, their shared love of conceptual art, the highly personal man-woman dialogue that runs through Double Fantasy, their 18-month “failed separation” in 1973-74, which came to be known as Lennon’s “Lost Weekend”, and other topics. They come across as endearingly frank, self-effacing and blissfully contented.

Of course, just hours later, Lennon was murdered outside the Dakota by Mark Chapman. The radio team even shared a few words with the killer as they left the building, which they reflect on here. Soderbergh does not dwell on this tragedy, keeping it to a brief coda, but it inevitably casts a doleful shadow over a wide-ranging interview that otherwise fizzes with so much renewed optimism and lust for life.

Serving as his own cinematographer under his regular alias Peter Andrews, Soderbergh frames a carefully filleted collage of interview clips in a rich visual backdrop featuring thousands of archive photos, mixing familiar publicity images with charmingly informal family snapshots, many of them enhanced with psychedelic colour splashes and sparing bursts of digital animation. The audio track also includes vintage Beatles songs alongside Lennon’s solo work, an impressive mixtape of 64 titles that never feels too cluttered or intrusive.

The Last Interview is fully endorsed by Lennon’s surviving family, although Ono and Sean Lennon only appear in archive clips and photos, not in contemporary footage. It plays like a polished memorial to the late Beatles legend, but inevitably lacks fresh twists or new insights. After all, the original radio interview is already well known to even casual fans, having been widely reproduced in books, articles and documentaries. In addition, the full three-hour version can be heard on social media. Soderbergh’s distilled cinematic remix will doubtless play well with Lennon’s huge global fanbase, but it has no pressing reason to exist beyond adding more cash to the multi-billion-dollar Beatles nostalgia industry.

The most controversial aspect of The Last Interview in the build-up to Cannes has been Soderbergh’s use of Meta’s AI software to generate extra visual material to supplement the audio clips, specifically his detours into “thematic surrealism” for sections in which Lennon and Ono discuss more abstract subjects like love and peace, spirituality and gender politics. Mindful of how divisive this new technology is, the director has downplayed its role, insisting that AI only features in barely 10% of the film’s running time, with no digital simulations of Lennon himself.

Soderbergh’s defensive claims prove accurate, and yet these hallucinatory tableaux still feel jarringly superfluous and gaudy, from super-sized flowers to gleaming sci-fi cityscapes to arm-wrestling cavemen. Arguably, if the Beatles were active today, they might well embrace this new cutting-edge creative technology just as they pushed the envelope of studio experimentation in the 1960s. Even so, these sequences are a distraction at best, an annoying gimmick at worse, and perilously close to kind of deluxe AI slop that floods social media every day. They do not wholly negate the modest charms of The Last Interview, but they do feel like an oddly clumsy inclusion, and a rare misstep from such a style-conscious film-maker.

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cinematographer: Peter Andrews
Editor: Nancy Main
Creative director: Carolyn Carmines
Archival producer: Lindsay Kelliher
Motion graphics and design: BigStar Motion Design
Producer: Nancy Saslow
Supervising producer: Jeremy Powers
Executive producers: Michael Sugar, David Hillman, Nancy Saslow, David Hudson
Production companies, world sales: Mishpookah Entertainment Group (US), Sugar23 (US)
Technology partner: Meta
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Special Screenings)
In English
100 minutes

Much like Schoenbrun’s previous feature, the widely praised queer-awakening fable I Saw the TV Glow (2024), this highbrow love letter to lowbrow movies puts a deeply personal spin on pop culture fandom. The director, who is trans and uses “they/them” pronouns, has pitched both films as allegories for the trans experience, moving through dark periods of dissociation, alienation and imposter syndrome before emerging as a more confident, gender-affirmed self.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma boasts a larger budget and grander canvas than its predecessor, but retains a strong indie auteur voice. The presence of Gillian Anderson as co-star and Brad Pitt as executive producer should help it find a wider audience, buoyed by buzzy reviews from its Cannes world premiere this week, where it opened the Un Certain Regard section. MUBI has already lined up a streaming launch for August.

Schoenbrun’s semi-autobiographical protagonist is Kris (Hacks star Hannah Einbinder), a non-binary, Sundance prize-winning indie film-maker who is being courted by a major studio to reboot a moribund slasher movie franchise launched in the 1980s. The bravura opening credits sequence serves up a fast-cut musical montage which condenses four decades of this fictional horror series into four zippy minutes, from gory underground classic to inferior straight-to-video sequels, gimmicky spin-off toys, crappy fan merchandise and more. All of this alluringly trashy ephemera is framed by increasingly negative reviews and related news stories, plus more elevated critical reassessments of the films as seen through a feminist, queer and gender theory lens. It’s a witty, dense, fun exercise in audio-visual scene-setting.

Teenage Sex and Death... opens with Kris in the remote wilds of the Pacific northwest, en route to a meeting with the reclusive star of the original Camp Miasma film, Billy Presley (Anderson), now a semi-mythical Norma Desmond figure long absent from the screen. While clueless studio bosses might accept Presley for a self-referential fan-service cameo, Kris wants something much far more personal from her: a way to unlock the spellbinding, mysterious, tantalising promise of sexual self-realisation triggered by the first film, which starred the young Billy (Amanda Fix) as the archetypal “Final Girl” in a teen-murder rampage conducted by “Little Death”, a ghostly monster with a cubic metal ventilation shaft for a head. Yes, that does sound weird, and it only gets weirder.

Billy is now living alone in the abandoned summer camp where the original Camp Miasma film was shot, which Schoenbrun frames as a liminal Lynchian neverland of painted backdrops and sound-stage artifice. The mysterious retired star greets Kris in full unhinged gothic diva mode, but she is is playing games with her young visitor, testing her limits. The flirtatious sizzle between them soon becomes physical, and increasingly surreal, with lavishly staged sex scenes accompanied by mountains of chocolate that would make Willy Wonky jealous. The pair’s hot pillow talk mostly involves Film Theory discussion about the male gaze, coded queerness, the kinky cosplay element of horror movies, and studios making cynical “woke” reboots of problematic “zombie IP” franchises. Which is niche, but admittedly quite arousing.

Meanwhile, the line between fact and fiction becomes fuzzy, with Kris and Billy slipping into the Camp Miasma cinematic universe. Little Death is again on a bloodthirsty rampage, skewering innocent teens with his priapic Freudian spear. As one of the secondary characters observes during the film’s funniest scene, a chaotic online pitch meeting between Kris and baffled studio bosses, there is a lot to unpack here. There certainly is, and not all of it makes much narrative sense. But the sheer audacity of Teenage Sex and Death... is ultimately its saving grace, even if some of Schoenbrun’s ideas feel undercooked or thinly explained.

The core of Schoenbrun’s thesis seems to be the latent libidinal power of horror films, which can trigger heightened erotic excitement in queer superfans like Kris, who find themselves identifying with both the male killers and female victims as they fight to the death in ritualised, sexualised murder scenes. This non-binary, dual-gender element clearly has special resonance for trans viewers. The fact that the supernatural serial killer who stalks Camp Miasma is named Little Death, a common term in French literature to describe post-orgasmic delirium, is another not-so-subtle clue.

With its ungainly mash-up of academic theory, occult private folklore and kitschy horror tropes, Teenage Sex and Death… is not quite the delirious feast of transgressive psycho-sexual giallo excess it aims to be. But it is still loaded with delicious ingredients, from Anderson’s high-camp histrionics to superb film-within-film sequences which lovingly recreate the scratchy VHS look and blood-spurting excess of vintage slasher movies.

It is also densely layered with explicit homages to cult cinema classics, from Sunset Boulevard (1950) to The Shining (1980), Psycho (1960) to Videodrome (1983), the Halloween and Friday 13th franchises, and many more. Pulpy oddity Sleepaway Camp (1983) is also a key inspiration with its contentious gender-switch twist, which has since attracted much critical debate over its alleged transphobia. Spotting these quotes and echoes is a fun game for genre fans, marking Schoenbrun out as a kind of Queer Tarantino.

Director, screenwriter: Jane Schoenbrun
Cast: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Amanda Fix, Arthur Conti, Eva Victor, Zach Cherry, Sarah Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Jasmin Savoy Brown
Cinematography Eric K. Yue
Editing: Graham Mason
Music: Alex G
Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner
Executive producers: Efe Cakarel, Jason Ropell, Zane Meyer, Daniel Bekerman, Caddy Vanasirikul, Brad Pitt
Production company: Plan B (US)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In English
112 minutes

It’s not something that can be easily integrated into a film which runs under two hours – and one that is very much anchored by more melodramatic family-drama tropes. Still, Martelli’s ability to appropriate and transform easily recognisable genre landmarks – the wintry hotel in the middle of nowhere, a young girl privy to bad goings-on around her – should serve as proof of her position as one of the most malleable and socially conscious filmmakers in Chile today.

At the chilling center of The Meltdown is Inés (a dazzling Maya O’Rourke), a nine-year-old who is left to roam around her family’s ski hotel while her parents are away working on Chile’s first-ever Expo pavilion after the ousting of Augusto Pinochet in 1990. Seated in front of the TV with her grandmother – who is making plans to expand the resort with Spanish investors – Inés sees her father hyping Chile’s return to normalcy and his invitation for people to do business in the country. And then there’s the pièce de resistance in the pavilion: a 60-tonne iceberg cut off from Chile’s Antarctic regions and transported to Spain for the event.

While all this goes on, Inés’ sole fascination is Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), a young German skier training and staying at the hotel with her team. Witnessing the bullying Hanna is subjected to and the awkward relationship between her and her coach (Jakub Gierszal), Inès befriends the teenage guest and discovers many a secret of hers – her love of goth, her smoking, and her mother who “comes from a country that doesn’t exist anymore” – until she vanishes from view one day after a night out with Inés’ cousin Sebastian (Lautaro Cantillana).

Up until this point, Martelli manages to strike an interesting balance in unfolding Hanna’s disappearance with sporadic allusions to Chile’s historical schisms, such as the subtle revelation of the family’s untoward procurement of indigenous-owned land where the hotel stands, or the way white characters (that is, Inès’s family) patronises and belittles Mestizos. (It’s perhaps telling that Inés has chosen which side she is on from the get-go, as she constantly sneaks off to sleep with the servers.)

And when Hanna’s mother (Saskia Rosendahl) arrives, the film basically flips into family melodrama with the expected twists, turns and arguments about parenting – a meltdown that distracts from The Meltdown’s mysterious ambience, as conjured by Benjamin Echazaretta’s colour template and slow zooms and Yibrán Asuad’s splicing.

Director, screenplay: Manuela Martelli
Producers: Alejandra García, Alex C. Lo, Andrés Wood
Executive producers: Javier Palma Quaas
Cast: Maya O’Rourke, Maia Rae Domagala, Saskia Rosendahl, Jakub Gierszal, Paulina Urrutia
Cinematography: Benjamin Echazaretta
Editing: Yibrán Asuad
Production design: Nohemí González
Costume design: Carolina Espina
Music: Mariá Portugal
Sound: Javier Umpierrez
Production companies: Ronda Cine, Cinema Inutile, Wood Producciones
World sales: Films du Losange
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
In Spanish, English and German
108 minutes

Clocking in at over 3 hours, Hamaguchi’s first French-language film seems to happen (despite its title) in slow motion. The story begins by chronicling the small clashes and upsets in a care facility for the elderly outside Paris, where the establishment’s bright young director Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira, fresh from a leading role in Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales) labors to get the nursing staff on board her ambitious new project. It is called Humanitude and basically aims to treat residents like human beings, while it gets them “vertical”: standing and walking, despite the risks of falls.

And there are other risks involving the balance sheets. She meets with resistance from the home’s board of directors, because a bedridden resident gets more state funding than an active, mobile one. There is also to factor in the cost of training the staff in communications techniques that involve eye contact, touching and talking. The first hour of the film follows Marie-Lou as she fights through a cloud of vexations, which includes professional opposition from the senior nurse Sophie (Marie Bunel).

The narrative hook comes with a chance meeting in the park, where she gets off a tram to assist Tomiko, a severely autistic boy who has run off. This selfless gesture shows a different woman from the professional trying to impose her program on a dubious, underpaid staff. Tomiko’s beeper leads her to his actor-father Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka) and Mari (Tao Okamato), a luminous young woman who is directing Goro in a play. It’s a one-man show based on the work of radical Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, who proposed dismantling all of Italy’s psychiatric hospitals – and they did. The performance Marie-Lou attends is to revolutionize her life and work.

Mari, for her part, has studied philosophy in France, while Marie-Lou studied anthropology in Japan. The two women hit it off at once and pass an entire night together walking by the river and talking about their lives, their work and their future. This meeting of minds on a high level is carefully scripted and one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole film, with its unexpected flight of intellectual fancy.  The fact that two women are exchanging their ideas deserves a cheer.

Then, in a scene really out of left field, Mari grabs a whiteboard and delivers a mini Ted Talk to her new friend on how the modern-day capitalist system works to enslave the masses of “outsiders” by stealing their free time, leading to an overworked, aging population and declining birth rate. It’s a daring thing to insert into a fiction film but it makes sense in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere that has been established. And her argument is very convincing.

Less convincing are some of the crazy coincidences that often interrupt the flow. One of these is the odd discovery that Marie-Lou speaks fluent Japanese. The reason given is that she studied in Japan, but the suspicion is strong that the film’s Japanese co-producers had a determining influence. A related puzzle is why the two women suddenly travel to Kyoto together, at the very moment Mari is very ill. This happens in the blink of an eye, for one wholly unnecessary scene.

In fact, their friendship is threatened by Mari’s illness: an old cancer has returned and metastasized beyond being operable, giving her less than three months to live. Tao Okamato’s utter elegance and self-containment neatly defuse the melodrama, though Hamaguchi has a hard time finding a new idea to close the film’s last hour; everyone simply goes back to business in the nursing home. What one remembers most from All of a Sudden is the uniqueness of the women’s relationship and their shining embrace of human rights — not just emotionally, but with their minds.

 Director: Hamaguchi Ryusuke
Screenwriters: Hamaguchi Ryusuke, Léa Dimna based on a book by Maho Isono, Makiko Miyano
Producers:  David Gauquié, Julien Deris, Kôsuke Oshida, Yûji Sadai, Renan Artukmaç, Jean-Luc Ormières, Hiroko Matsuda
Cast: Virginie Efira, Tao Okamato, Kyozo Nagatsuka, Kodai Kurosaki, Jean-Charles Clichet, Marie Bunel
Cinematography: Alan Guichaoua
Production design: Mila Preli
Editing: Azuza Yamakazi, Minori Akimoto
Music: Samuel Andreyev
Sound: Thomas Gauder, Pierre Mertens, Paul Heymans
Production companies: Cinefrance Studios (France), Office Shirous (Japan), Bitters End (Japan) in association with Arte France, Tarantuòa, Gap Busters, Heimatfilm, Same Player
World sales: Cinefrance International
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In French, Japanese
196 minutes

The trouble with reflexive cinema, the kind that uses its narrative to reflect on the nature of storytelling itself, is that by now it feels like every conceivable variant on the theme has been used and done to death. It also undercuts the emotional hold of the story, as characters are constantly being shown to be what they in fact are: unreal constructions springing from the creative imagination of the filmmakers, and not real people with real problems worthy of the viewer’s empathy.

If the film works at all it is thanks to the exceptional craftsmanship of its camerawork, editing, and acting, under the direction of Asghar Farhadi. One of the most significant Iranian directors of the last decades, Farhadi’s much-imitated social dramas like Fireworks Wednesday and A Separation laid the foundation for many less original films to follow. But since his 2013 film The Past set in France and Everybody Knows (2018) set in Spain, he has mostly worked outside Iran, with mixed results.

Parallel Lives is French in language and locale, though “loosely based” on (one would say heavily indebted to) Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog: Six. The episode (later expanded into the feature film A Short Story about Love) tells the story of a young man who falls for a woman in the facing building and begins to spy on her and generally stalk her, until they unexpectedly develop some kind of relationship. In Farhadi’s version, the screenplay is embellished with the key addition of Sylvie, an eccentric lady writer (a role turned into a memorable career gem by a wonderfully sardonic, misanthropic Isabelle Huppert) who torments her editor (Catherine Deneuve) with the banality of her latest writing.

In fact the only soul who sees some value in her sketchy storytelling is Adam (Adam Bessa), a young ex-hoodlum who learned to love poetry while serving jailtime for theft. Sylvie herself is something of a thief, stealing bits of her neighbors’ lives who she spies on through a telescope. Adam, who thinks he could become a writer, steals his own looks into the office of three sound technicians/foley artists who record soundtracks for film and TV. His growing obsession with a young woman who works there, Nita (Virginie Efira), begins to dovetail into the Kieslowski story. While he is waiting to get acquainted, he imagines she is the mistress of the older man (Vincent Cassel) but having a secret affair with the younger one (Pierre Niney). Though this is initially far from the truth, when the manuscript gets into Nita’s hands, reality begins to shift.

There is much comic material here but apart from Huppert’s scenes it lies mostly dormant. The few times the audience is allowed to laugh, the atmosphere becomes much brighter and more natural. But Farhadi prefers drama and pushes it hard in the final scenes with a near-rape that echoes the central drama in one of his last Iran-set films, The Salesman, where everything had to be suggested, not seen. In this regard he has certainly had a gain in naturalism working in France.

The production design utilizes a lot of glass-walled cafés and Sylvie’s spacious, airy apartment to emphasize the freedom the female characters have to move around the city on their own and conversely, the danger lurking in the cluttered, dark and disorderly sound studio expertly lit with shadows by D.P. Guillaume Deffontaines.

Linking the characters, literary and “real”, and helping them seamlessly transition from paper to flesh and back again is the eminent Iranian editor Haydeh Safiyari, who has worked on all the director’s films. Light musical comment, which is sometimes no more than a few piano notes, is offered instead by Zbigniew Preisner, who was Kieslowski’s regular composer.

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Screenwriters: Asghar Farhadi, Saeed Farhadi
Producers: Alexandre Malle-Guy, Asghar Farhadi, David Levine.
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Catherine Deneuve, India Hair, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa
Cinematography: Guillaume Deffontaines
Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay
Costume design: Khadija Zeggai
Editing: Haydeh Safiyari
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Sound: Thomas Gauder
Foley artist: Pierre Greco
Foley mixer: David Davister
Production companies: Memento Films Production (France)
World sales: Charades
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In French
140 minutes

Eight years after winning the Best Director prize in Cannes for Cold War, Pawlikowski is back at the prestige French festival with that rarest of beasts, a Palme d’Or competition contender whose crisp 82-minute runtime leaves you wanting more. But don’t be fooled by its slender dimensions: Fatherland is a small masterpiece loaded with grand themes and heavy emotions.

Fatherland recreates a real visit that the Nobel Prize-winning German writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) made back to his newly divided homeland in 1949 after more than a decade of US exile. Celebrating the 200th birthday of Goethe, the feted author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice elects to attend ceremonies in both capitalist West Germany and the newly created, Soviet-controlled East Germany, a demonstration of his faith in the power of art to transcend politics and unite people in common humanity. Under increasing pressure to choose, as he put it, “between Stalin and Mickey Mouse”, this gesture of unity will seal his reputation as a closet Communist sympathiser in the US, ultimately forcing him to emigrate back to Europe.

Acting as Mann’s tour manager, minder and travelling companion on this trip is his cool-headed, steel-nerved daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller). Reliably magnetic as usual, Hüller’s poised, precisely calibrated performance is the main emotional engine here: composed and urbane on the surface, nervy and spiky beneath. It’s a masterclass in expressive minimalism, as Erika destroys old flames with a single raised eyebrow, or conveys the chilly devastation of family tragedy in the spare syntax of a one-sided telephone call.

But missing from this rare family reunion is Erika’s brother, and Mann’s estranged son, Klaus (August Diehl). A fellow author, depressive and drug addict, Klaus declines the invitation to join his father and sister, although Pawlikowski teasingly hints that he may have been a ghostly presence in one of their gatherings. The absent son’s actions certainly cast a long shadow over the tour, and expose some harsh truths about the Mann family dynamic.

Visually ravishing, Fatherland leans heavily into Pawlikowki’s signature austere-deluxe aesthetic with its immaculately composed tableaux, exactingly detailed period production design and lustrous, sculptural, monochrome cinematography. Using mostly Polish locations to stand in for the ruins of post-war Germany, the director is working once again with his regular ‘scinematographer, the Oscar-nominated Lukasz Zal, who shot both Ida and Cold War, as well as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) and Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (2025). As with the pair’s previous collaborations, this self-conscious stylistic homage to the mid-century glory days of Polish New Wave cinema could almost work as a stand-alone visual art-work, Take away the audio track and it would still be mesmeric.

As drama, Fatherland is controlled and pared down: essentially a series of gatherings in war-damaged hotel ballrooms, and mournful journeys across a ruined nation still reeling from the cataclysmic horrors of Nazism. Pawlikowski avoids making obvious political points or personal judgments, clearing plenty of space for poetic understatement, with mostly positive effect. That said, sometimes the screenplay feels a little too spare for its own good, briskly dispensing with juicy subplots and contextual snippets that deserve more screen time.

All three of the Mann family protagonists – Erika, Thomas and Klaus – were vocal opponents of Nazism, courageously speaking out against Hitler when others were cautiously silent. All three were also either gay or bisexual. Pawlikowski sketches some of these details in very bald terms, but ignores others, shutting down some potentially juicy sources of dramatic tension.

If there is a serious omission in this otherwise expertly judged film, it is Diehl’s glorified cameo as Klaus, which flattens a fascinating, tortured, complex character into a shadowy spectre. For example, one of the funniest scenes centres on Erika’s fractious encounter with her ex-husband Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), also Klaus’s former lover, who then became the lightly disguised inspiration for his scandalous novel Mephisto (later a feted film by Istvan Szabo) about an actor who makes a Faustian pact with the Nazis in exchange for fame. This delicious back story probably deserves its own stand-alone film. Pawlikowski could certainly have given these stranger-than-fiction side plots a little more room to breathe.

Fatherland contains many small fabrications and one big lie: it was actually Mann’s wife Katia who accompanied him on his 1949 trip to Germany, not Erika, who refused to countenance a return to her morally degraded homeland. But minor quibbles aside, Pawlikowski has delivered a gorgeous poem of a film, a mournful meditation on national identity, private and public tragedy, the dangers of trying to remain apolitical in deeply political times, and the enduring cultural riches that can offer small but crucial solace in apocalyptic times.

Fittingly, the film’s encyclopaedic end credits include a meticulously curated list of visual art and literary works that are woven into the story. Irish author Colm Tobin gets a special thanks, presumably a nod to his semi-biographical 2021 novel about Mann, The Magician. The soundtrack also features a rich musical tapestry including Bach, Mozart, Messiaen and others alongside jaunty period jazz-pop numbers and Soviet army songs. In a pleasingly self referential touch, Pawlikowski regular and Cold War co-star Joanna Kulig plays a small role here as a jazz singer.

Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
Screenwriters: Pawel Pawlikowski, Hendrik Handloegten
Starring: Hanns Zischler, Sandra Hüller, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Anna Madeley
Cinematography: Lukasz Zal
Editing: Piotr Wójcik, Pawel Pawlikowski
Producers: Mario Gianani, Lorenzo Mieli, Ewa Puszczynska, Jeanne Tremsal, Edward Berger, Dimitri Rassam, Lorenzo Gangarossa
Production companies: Our Films (Italy), Extreme Emotions (Poland), Nine Hours (Germany), Chapter2 (France)
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
World sales: The Match Factory
In German, English, Russian
82 minutes

For the first time in 65 editions, the Critics’ Week in Cannes chose an animated film to serve as its opening event. And a very solid choice it was, as Phuong Mai Nguyen’s In Waves, a French production based on AJ Dungo’s graphic novel of the same name, has all the right ingredients to make a splash (pun very much intended) on the international festival circuit (Annecy is already around the corner) and in regular theaters: captivating visuals, clever and emotional writing, and engaging performances from the voice actors.

Dungo (voiced by Rio Vega in French and Will Sharpe in English) conceived of In Waves as a history of surfing, rooted in the activity’s Hawaiian origin, while also integrating his personal experience: his late partner Kristen (Lyna Khoudri/Stephanie Hsu), to whom the film adaptation is dedicated, made him promise that he would keep her alive through his drawings, as she always supported his artistic aspirations, and he in turn made certain sacrifices to be by her side as illness began plaguing her everyday routine (she’s the one who introduced him, previously a skater, to the surfing world).

The film chronicles their romance from start to finish, sweetly capturing the innocence of the early realization that the two are in love and the decision to initially keep it hidden from their parents; then it transitions to the progressive maturation of their connection, as life prospects and Kristen’s health issues need to be taken into account. In keeping with how their feelings evolved, they decide to treat the daily grind as though it were the ocean, and ride the wave until the metaphorical board allows for it.

Life can be a very fluid thing, and Phuong Mai Nguyen (who, like AJ back in the day, came to the project from the perspective of someone who hasn’t quite mastered any surfing techniques) brings that notion to life in breathtakingly spectacular fashion, aided by her crew of 300 people in delivering a story where the watery imagery dictates not just the visual flow of the movie, clearly shaped by the director’s experience at the prestigious Gobelins animation school in Paris, but also the pacing of a narrative that moves along quite efficiently (an hour and a half, including the credits), and yet always finds the time to let scenes and characters breathe. Sometimes literally, as a big chunk of the emotional power of the voice acting is tied to deceptively simple breathing sounds, paired with the sound team’s efforts to make us feel like we’re with them on the beach or in a hospital room.

And while a conventional happy ending is off the table, In Waves is still very much a celebration of the more joyful windows of opportunity provided during one’s existence, as well as a powerful examination of how art – be it the original graphic novel or this film version – can keep our loved ones alive and grant them a form of immortality. AJ and Kristen may not have been destined to grow old together, but thanks to his skills with a pencil and the filmmaker’s vision behind the camera, the experience the two youngsters shared is, in its own way, a love story for the ages.

Director: Phuong Mai Nguyen
Screenwriters: Fanny Burdino, Samuel Doux
Cast: Rio Vega, Lyna Khoudri, Paul Kircher, Birane Ba de la Comédie Française (French), Will Sharpe, Stephanie Hsu (English)
Producers: Priscilla Bertin, Judith Nora
Music: Oklou & Rob
Sound: Franco Piscopo, Emmanuel De Boissieu, Frederic Demolder
Production company: Silex Films
World sales: Charades
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Critics’ Week)
In French
89 minutes

Twins Racine (Kara Young, I’m a Virgo) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson, Kindred) live, work, and psychically communicate with each other as they avoid the rude stares from people around them: both were injured as children when their father (Sterling K. Brown) set fire to their mother (Vivica A. Fox), leaving quick-to-anger Racine with burn scars on her left arm and back, while the quieter Anaia bears them on her face and chest. The two spent the remainder of their childhoods in a series of terrible foster homes, but when Racine receives a letter from their mother, whom the twins assumed was dead, they’re beckoned south to visit her on her deathbed.

En route, the sisters pause to hug the “Welcome to” signs at the borders of Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi, but this isn’t just a literal journey; they’re traveling to the South of Zora Neale Hurston, of William Faulkner, of Flannery O’Connor, where passions run as thick as the humidity and where both the people and the misdeeds of the past continue to haunt the present. Indeed, once they arrive, their mother — whose burns are far more severe than her daughters’ — commissions the twins: “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.” Their homicidal journey leads them to a number of memorable characters, from a faith healer (Erika Alexander) in a living-room church to a mute storefront lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) to their father’s latest wife (Janelle Monáe), who’s both pampered and abused.

There’s an element of magical realism to Racine and Anaia’s travels, from their ability to conduct lengthy conversations through silent stares (translated for the audience via on-screen titles) to the New Wave editing involved in getting them from place to place. How do they get from a field to a bus? How do they know their father’s current address? Harris spins this yarn in such a way that such details don’t matter.

Having only seen the film, I mean it as a compliment that I can’t imagine how a tale as cinematic as Is God Is could have unfolded on the stage. There’s an exhilaration to Harris’ direction; she brings to the film the confidence of a first-timer who’s both assured and unafraid. She’s certainly eager to tackle heady concepts: Racine notes early on that their mother is God, since she created them, and thus their quest to kill their father is a mission from God.

And if their father also created the twins, he is treated throughout like the devil himself; Harris and cinematographer Alexander Dynan (First Reformed) spend most of the film presenting Brown’s character (credited only as “Man”) in fragments — his mouth, his hands, his eyes, his back — as though we have to work our way toward beholding all of his evil. (And speaking of the Bible, it’s hard not to think about David and Goliath when Racine adopts a rock in a sock as her weapon of choice.)

As the twins, Young and Johnson are asked to shoulder this ambitious feature, and they make a great team, capturing the rage and pathos and humor of these put-upon yet thoroughly indefatigable characters. The marquee names make the most of their relatively brief appearances, but the two leads carry the film with charisma and grace. (With credit due to the makeup and prosthetics department for making the sisters’ scarring vividly realistic throughout.)

Is God Is shrewdly combines its genre thrills — it’s a violent road trip of murder and revenge — with arthouse aesthetics and thought-provoking writing, which gives Aleshea Harris a career path that’s as hard to predict as Racine and Anaia’s literal one. But I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Director: Aleshea Harris
Screenwriter: Aleshea Harris, based on her play
Cast: Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Janelle Monáe, Erika Alexander, Mykelti Williamson, Josiah Cross, Vivica A. Fox, Sterling K. Brown
Executive producers: Stacy O’Neil, Nicole King, Kenneth Yu
Producers: Tessa Thompson, Kishori Rajan, Riva Marker, Janicza Bravo, Aleshea Harris
Director of photography: Alexander Dynan
Production design: Freyja Bardell
Editing: Blair McClendon
Music: Joseph Shirley, Moses Sumney
Sound design: Leslie Shatz, sound designer/re-recording mixer
Production companies: Orion Pictures, Linden, Viva Maude, CYRK
In English
99 minutes

This pretty well sums up the stoicism of the sparse residents of rural Nagi in Okayama Prefecture, an area of virgin hills and mountain trails interrupted by dairy farms on the brink of failure. Cannily filmed in the most ordinary of ways by D.P. Hidetoshi Shinomiya, nature here is shown as an integral part of people’s lives, like the homey weather bulletins read every morning by one of the characters who works in city hall.

According to the festival press material, Fukada adapted his story from a play by Oriza Hirata called Tokyo Notes, which was itself inspired by Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story. One also feels the vibes of Harmonium, Fukada’s 2016 winner of the Un Certain Regard Prize, which showed how the increasingly intrusive presence of an ex-con destabilizes what seems to be a stable family.

In Nagi Notes, too, the story begins with: enter a stranger. Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi) is a striking young woman in a fashionable raincoat and long skirt who appears on a country road out of nowhere, looking lost. Then a boy on a bicycle, Keita, recognizes her and takes her to Yoriko’s farmhouse down the road. The two women, who were childhood friends, meet many years. Yoriko (Takako Matsu) is a gifted artist who sculpts lifesize wooden figures from life, and unlike most films about art, it is obvious even to the untrained eye of the film viewer that she is a pure-blooded professional. Fukada dedicates several scenes to her labor-intensive work of turning a stump of aged camphorwood into a human likeness, a fascinating process that begins with a chainsaw, progresses to a chisel, and ends with an angry, sometimes destructive knife. Yoriko is a passionate artist, and she will destroy a piece she is not satisfied with.

She has summoned Yuri back to her hometown as a model for what is supposed to be a few days. In these years Yuri has made good as an architect, first studying in Tokyo and then working in Taiwan, though there are signs she feels unsatisfied with her work. As she sits quietly for her portrait in wood, bits of information connect the women in a web of family relationships. Yuri, we learn, was married to Yoriko’s brother until their recent divorce, and is hurting from his rejection. But Yoriko, too, has lost a woman she loved deeply, and carries the pain with her.

These tangled roots grow with the story of Keita and his best friend Haruki, whose boyhood friendship seems poised to turn them into a sexualized “couple”. Their little drama of becoming runaways in a big storm is handled with enormous respect and delicacy that looks at the two boys from many different angles at once. Precipitating their unwise decision to break free and leave home (they are in middle school) is Keita’s distress when he learns his father, who is employed in the military, is soon being transferred to another town. They confide in the outsider Yuri, and seem a little disappointed when she refuses to say whether she and Yoriko are or once were “a couple”.

Further complicating things is Haruki’s attractive single dad (Ken’ichi Matsuyama) whose attention to the unresponsive Yoriko seems like it might shift to the newcomer Yuri. In the midst of all this, Fukada subtly keeps the two women in the foreground, allowing both to earn and hold the viewer’s sympathy as artists and as women. The filmmaker has said he was greatly inspired by Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse, and the relationship between artist and model is engaging throughout.

In the background, the entire story is underscored by that infernal booming of mortar fire from the unseen military base, perhaps a reference to Japan’s new spirit of militarization. The unsettling soundscape which is further contextualized in a radio news bulletin about the Russian war in Ukraine. This off-screen menace

irectly opposes the characters’ enjoyment of nature, the varieties of birds and pristine mountain views.

Director, screenwriter: Koji Fukada
Producer: Terutaro Osanai
Cast: Takako Matsu, Shizuka Ishibashi, Ken’ichi Matsuyama, Waku Kawaguchi, Kiyora Fujiwara
Cinematography: Hidetoshi Shinomiya
Production design: Yukari Otsuki
Editing: Sylvie Lager
Music: Lee Pei Chin
Production companies: Hassaku Labs (Japan), Survivance (France) in association with Star Sands (Japan), Nathan Cinemas (Philippines), MOMO Film (Singapore), Wonderstruck (Japan)
World sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Japanese
110 minutes

Veering well away from his much-acclaimed 2019 festival hit and equally dark first feature, the kidnap drama Closeness, Balagov‘s latest outing is a warm, colour-saturated and sporadically magical and comical family drama set in a tightly-knit community in Newark, but with tension and trauma looming ever close on its seemingly happy-go-lucky protagonists.

Bolstered by excellent performances from his cast, especially that of the impressive Kazakh-born Turkish-American first-time actor Talha Akdogan, Balagov succeeds once again with a film that is at once specific in its cultural setting and universal in its meditation about masculinity and its discontents. Based on an idea originally set in his hometown in the Caucasus, he and co-screenwriter Marina Stepnova have produced something that never seems anachronistic. The 34-year-old filmmaker, who fled Russia in 2022 after his outspoken criticism against Vladmir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, plunges the viewer into a social universe that is authentic in its details and unique in its imagination.

Working with cinematographer Jomo Fray (Nickel Boys), Balagov conjures a realistic, empathetic but hardly voyeuristic picture of a working-class, inner-city, ethnic-minority community with all their joys and conflicts, as they try to fashion the American Dream to their own distinct social circumstances. Teaming up with an international crew – Angelo Zamparutti and Judy Shrewsbury with their production and costume designs brimming with details of the characters’ rough and rolling lives, Evgeni and Sasha Galperine’s score that forebodes joy and danger – Balagov should set Butterfly Jam flying through the festival circuit after its premiere at Cannes as the opening film of the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar.

The title of the film alludes to a special condiment made by Azik (Barry Keoghan), a thirty-something renowned in his neighbourhood for his cooking. This gift leads him to dream of one day running his own diner. While soft-spoken and generous in his own way, Azik obviously positions himself as the alpha male of his circle: he acts as a protector to his pregnant sister Zalya (Riley Keough), belittles his slightly unhinged sidekick Marat (British actor Harry Melling), and rebuffs offers to work as a chef in a more well-off friend’s new eating establishment because he wants to be his own man and no one else’s. Balagov reveals the bubbling tension in this set-up from the get-go, as the film begins with all the men joking and jousting with each other over a card game in a dimly-lit kitchen.

As the men exchange barbed comments, enter the beating and fluttering heart of the film. Pyteh (played by Akdogan) is a mild-mannered 16-year-old who seems to be more mature than the adults in the room. However much he seems to revere his father and enjoys spending time and playing pranks with him – their favourite, and one that Balagov illustrates most vividly, being their attempt to set off the security alarms of cars parked on their street – he also despairs of the schemes cooked up by his father and Marat in their pursuit of entrepreneurial success.

Using his real name of Temir, Pyteh (which means “the little one” in Circassian) is already making a name for himself in junior-level statewide wrestling championships. Rather than showing the teenager at his most masculine when he’s doing the sport, Balagov actually teases the sensitive soul in him when he’s on and off the mat. The boy’s pastel-pink singlet sets him apart from his peers, and it’s at practice that he develops a bashful blush at Alika (Jaliyah Richards), a glum Nigerian-American girl blazing with her own adolescent issues. The pair quickly bonds, leading to perhaps one of the most innocuously sensual scenes about acne in the history of cinema.

Bar the out-of-nowhere cameo from Bellucci, the most eye-poppingly bizarre turn in Butterfly Jam involves a pelican Alik procures as a gift for his sister. The comedy of seeing the (real) bird flapping about in a cluttered apartment soon spirals into tragedy, as Alik’s endless boasting of landing the creature – which he considers a sign of his masculine prowess – eventually leads to a violent death, and Pyteh slips into confusion and a misguided thirst for revenge.

Fresh-faced Akdogan’s poignant performance brings Pyteh’s internal contradictions to the surface in the most vivid of ways, as he plays up the awkwardness of his own gangly physique and his tender emotions spiraling slowly out of control as the story moves along. Whereas Beanpole reflects on what femininity should mean and could be, Butterfly Jam poses the same question for masculinity in a different time, place and approach – but with equal power.

Director: Kantemir Balagov
Screenwriter: Marina Stepnova, Kantemir Balagov
Producers: Pascal Cauchetaeux, Pauline Lamy, Marco Perego, Alexander Rodnyansky
Executive producers: David Taghioff, Masha Magonova, Michael Cerenzie, Michael Paletta, Kantemir Balagov, Michael Kupisk, Barry Keoghan, Dessie Byrne, Riley Keough, Gina Gammell, Sacha Ben Harroche, Gaetan Rousseau
Cast: Barry Keoghan, Talha Akdogan, Riley Keough, Harry Melling, Jaliyah Richards
Cinematography: Jomo Fray
Editing: Kantemir Balagov, Juliette Welfling, Mathilde Chazaud
Production design: Angelo Zamparutti
Costume: Judy Shrewsbury
Music: Evgeni and Sacha Galperine
Sound: Valérie De Loof
Production companies: Why Not Productions with Senator Film Produkton, Les Films Du Fleuve, Arte France Cinéma, A.R. Content and Goodfellas
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Opening Film, Directors’ Fortnight)
In English, Circassian
102 minutes