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Nostalgia has seldom looked grittier, or more treacherous, than it does in Mario Martone's eponymous new film. The Italian director splashes his teaming, boisterous, unruly native city of Naples across the screen in fulsome fashion in telling the story of a man who left as a teenager but, some 40 years later, is drawn…

You can pretty much bet that whenever the Dardenne brothers show up with a new film in Cannes, it will walk away with some sort of prize. That has been the case since 1999 when their first competition film, Rosetta, swooped in at the last minute and won the Palme d’Or and Best Actress. They won a second Palme in 2005…

Out in the jungle, no one can hear you dragging a body around. Mind you, nobody notices much what you do in the city, either. Colombian director Andres Ramirez Pulido's debut feature, La Jauria, screening in Critics’ Week at Cannes, opens with a grab-bag of images familiar from current Latin American cinema — a couple…

Talk about multiverses. In a parallel cosmos that is apparently just around the corner from you right now, a bunch of boys — and grown men — are living a life so different from yours that they might as well be aliens. You can see them in Owen Kline's Directors’ Fortnight title Funny Pages, hanging out all day in a…

Director Léa Mysius expertly crafts a queer, witchy movie in her Directors’ Fortnight debut film The Five Devils (Les Cinq Diables), which received a five-minute standing ovation at the screening I attended. Mysius takes concepts like identity, sexuality and mysticism and creates an intricate genre film that’s part…

Just when his fans may have figured that David Cronenberg had called it a career (he's now 79 and hadn't made a feature since the misfired Maps to the Stars in 2014), along comes a film that only the Canadian maestro of the perverse could have created. Obsessed more than ever here with body parts and the twisted…

Detective Hae-joon is investigating the death of a man who fell from a mountain in Park Chan-wook's latest film in competition at Cannes, Decision To Leave. It’s been six years since the director’s last movie here, The Handmaiden, which made a splash in 2016. Will Decision To Leave get the same unanimous applause…

Director Emily Atef’s Cannes Un Certain Regard drama More Than Ever is a careful, fastidious, Tradition of Quality film about impending death that's easy to admire but won't exactly pack 'em in. Vicky Krieps impresses yet again, here playing a woman in her early 30s suffering from a likely fatal condition who travels…

The challenges of street casting are explored in The Worst Ones (Les Pires), an Un Certain Regard drama about a film within a film. Directed by Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, it sees a film crew hit a working class French town, with thought-provoking and sometimes darkly funny results.  
 Flemish director Gabriel…

A married man falls for a trans woman in Joyland, the first Pakistani feature to play in Cannes. Saim Sadiq's atmospheric Un Certain Regard drama also explores a whole family, presenting a picture of a clan torn between modernity and tradition in contemporary Lahore. Haider (Ali Junejo) has a seemingly happy arranged…

Understandably, the terrorist attacks in Paris on the night of November 13, 2015 have been treated with great sensitivity by the French film industry, and the only other film in the Cannes Film Festival's lineup this year to touch on those events — Alice Winocour's Paris Revoir — is a lightly fictionalized drama set…

Timing can be cruel. Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli's second feature, Sick Of Myself, has the misfortune to arrive in the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section in the slipstream of Ruben Östlund's divisive but funny competition title Triangle of Sadness; the latter being a broader, sillier but much…