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When his mother spoke, Ernest remembers, everything sounded important. "I cling to her light," he tells us in voiceover, an adult remembering how that felt. The Ernest he is recalling is just a little boy (Milan Doucansi), snuggled against Rose (Annabelle Lengronne, a wonderfully vivid presence), with his grave and…

Lucas' bishop warns him of the dangers before he sets out to minister to a remote community of Icelanders in Cannes Un Certain Regard title Godland. "It's easy to go mad there," he explains at his Copenhagen dining table, steadily chewing his way through the fabulous feast in front of him. Iceland, where the sun never…

Kelly Reichardt has been making minimal Americana since the early 1990s, mostly around the state of Oregon where she lives and mostly about her favored awkward squad: quiet square pegs who don't quite fit the round holes society provides. In this ongoing quest she has found many collaborators, but none more attuned to…

SPOILER ALERT: This review contains details of the first two episodes of Disney+’s series Obi-Wan Kenobi. The Force is not strong with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Debuting a few hours earlier than anticipated on Disney+, the first two episodes of the Ewan McGregor-starring miniseries are nearly all undiluted nostalgia with no…

Belgium's Lukas Dhont takes a deserved step up to the Cannes Film Festival competition with Close, only his second film — a minimalist melodrama that shows a definite growth in visual style but may be confronting to some with its deliberately unhurried, Eric Rohmer-esque aesthetic. The international success of Dhont's…

This year has produced several films about terrorist attacks in France. One Year and One Night by Isaki Lacuesta (which premiered in Berlin this year) and November by Cedric Jimenez which is being shown out of competition at Cannes, and Alice Winocour's deeply personal Paris Memories (Revoir Paris) which was inspired…

Esteemed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda walks a fine line between keen social observation and overt sentimental emotionalism in Cannes competition title Broker. Winner of the Palme d'Or in 2018 for Shoplifters and winner of the Jury Prize five years before that for Like Father Like Son, the writer-director once…

Catalan artist and director Albert Serra (The Death Of Louis XIV, Liberte) returns to Cannes Film Festival Official Competition with a rarity for him, a contemporary feature film, not what we have come to expect from this filmmaker who usually works in period pieces. And even though he is not French he has made a…

A tailor wrestles with his sexuality in The Blue Caftan, a tender Moroccan drama in Un Certain Regard from Maryam Touzani. Also a subtle portrait of a marriage, it slowly unveils the issues of its characters with an empathetic, admiring gaze: these are two people who are highly principled and strive to be thoughtful…

Arguably the most timely film in Cannes this year, Butterfly Vision will also likely remain one of the least seen, in that it exists overwhelmingly as a marker of a very specific time and place rather than as anything many people might actually choose to watch. Presented in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, this somber…

A widower is threatened by land developers in Domingo And The Mist, the Un Certain Regard drama from director Ariel Escalante Meza. The Costa Rican film is a slow-burning comment on corruption pierced with a tinge of magical realism. We first meet Domingo (Carlos Ureña) when he is walking slowly up a hill past his…

On the one hand, Emin Alper's Burning Days is a discreet but telling account of the resurgence of homophobia — a key plank of right-wing populism — in Turkey. On the other hand, it's a half-and-half genre film: half crime thriller and half western. In the Cannes Un Certain Regard entry, a conscientious public…