TOAfter 10 days of going to the movies crazy Cannes Film FestivalTimes film critic Amy Nicholson and Times film editor Joshua Rothkopf are nearly exhausted. They leave with 10 recommendations (listed below in alphabetical order), including several titles you'll hear about throughout awards season, but also, admittedly, more reservations than usual.
Amy Nicholson: There are worse ways to spend your life than watching four movies a day in the south of France. For a week and a half, we ran in and out of darkened theaters, blinking in the sun's impact and discussing what we'd just seen with the largest concentration of movie lovers anywhere: most of us drinking espresso or rosé. However, we return home upset because the movies themselves were mediocre. Cannes is destined to launch ambitious and thorny works by great masters and talents of the next generation. This year, the lineup looked like a party with an impressive guest list (Nicolas Winding Refn, Asghar Farhadi, Hirokazu Kore-eda), but upon arrival, all the guests felt like old acquaintances with nothing interesting to say.
I'm being harsh. Cannes also had good films. But I needed this year's Cannes to be great. Audiences returning to theaters deserve to see something fantastic. Instead, too many filmmakers took the crowd's attention span for granted; Even the strongest films in competition could eliminate half an hour of dead air. Fittingly, most of my favorites come from Cannes' more eccentric programming sections, Directors' Fortnight and A Certain Regard, and I suspect many of yours do too. oui?
Joshua Rothkopf: I found a handful of films from the main competition that impressed me, but the point is clear: it serves no purpose if we can't admit that this year's edition was weaker than others. We could blame the screenwriting or the pacing (although, ironically, I was impressed with both of the longer aspects). and shortest films in competition). Perhaps it is a general lack of audacity. When a restored version of Ken Russell's salacious 55-year-old film, “The Devils,” eclipses virtually everything else shown at the festival, it's hard to deny a certain self-consciousness. There were too many “nice” films: perfectly respectable, but not what I want Cannes to be.
Fortunately, we saw enough to narrow down the favorites list. This is what moved us.
'Suddenly'
I'm not convinced that the utopian vision of end-of-life care presented in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's drama has a fighting chance in the United States, but we deserve the chance to grapple with its compassionate twists and have that discussion. The “Drive My Car” director continues his process-focused exploration of workplace relationships in this quietly revealing film, one with a central conversation that deserves comparison to the long walks of Richard Linklater’s “Before” films. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto let a day of walking extend into the depths, while the twilight darkens and human connection develops in all its possibilities. Is it too late for them? It doesn't have to be that way. — Joshua Rothkopf
'The Beloved'
Esteban (Javier Bardem), a renowned Spanish bad boy filmmaker, returns to his homeland from New York to film a period film in the desert. Off-screen, he has given one of the four lead roles to his estranged daughter (Victoria Luengo), an aspiring actress who hasn't seen her father in 13 years. Esteban failed as Emilia's father. Can he succeed as their director, especially when his big break comes with so much pressure? Not likely, especially since Emilia has inherited his disastrous drinking habits. The current director of “La Amada”, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, unleashes his protagonists to become a team of destruction, each one blaming the other for what goes wrong on the set. Both are mired in contradictory narratives about their relationship. Sorogoyen shows us the truth, as well as the visible frustrations of the film-within-a-film cast and crew who risk shutting down this passion project. — Amy Nicholson
'Bitter Christmas'
(Iglesias Mas / Sony Pictures Classics)
Pedro Almodóvar's self-flagellating film about his artistic process has a Charlie Kaufman-esque structure that I prefer to let the audience discover for themselves. In short: Almodóvar's avatar, a filmmaker named Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), is dragged over the artistic embers by the dramatic female characters he's been writing for decades, one of whom challenges him to simply leave his legacy. Too many veteran filmmakers in this year's Cannes competition seem to have accepted that deal, so when Raúl got to the end of a new script and decided it wasn't up to his standards, I almost shouted “Bravo!” Navel-gazing cinema about the creative process isn't usually my thing, but Almodóvar doesn't take his own misery too seriously, not even inserting a manic dream pixie, a stripper-firefighter played by Patrick Criado, to give it a little punch and routine. — Amy Nicholson
'Clarissa'
It has been 101 years since Virginia Woolf first published “Mrs Dalloway,” a novel about fussy party hostess Clarissa Dalloway who clashes with her former lovers, a man and a woman. The plot seems simple, but every look and sigh tells a whole story about modernization, capitulation, cynicism and violence. Twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri transplanted the story to present-day Nigeria and filled the cast with Sophie Okonedo, Ayo Edebiri, Nikki Amuka-Bird, David Oyelowo and the astonishingly talented India Amarteifio as the diva in her captivating youth before she married a boring oilman and began bullying the help. “Clarissa” makes several clever adjustments, swapping a traumatized Boko Haram soldier for a gun-shocked Great War veteran, and raising an eyebrow at the shiny new yoga studios and cafes littering Lagos' once-lush waterfront. Better yet, she's incredibly sexy: the flashbacks are one swimsuit party after another. — Amy Nicholson
'Club boy'
The one-sentence speech from Jordan Firstman's first comedy-drama (a gay nightclub promoter sobers up when he discovers he has a 10-year-old boy) sounded about as fun as snorting a line of aspartame. I correct myself. “Club Kid” is a marvel: a spicy, surprising and irreverent comedy that rarely offers audiences anything artificially sweet. Firstman plays Peter, an aging rakish millennial who comes from a New York scene that never cared about him as a person in the first place. His partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne) is a horror; his selfish roommate, Nicky (Eldar Isgandarov), is even worse and so funny I'd watch a spin-off about him. Peter's striking son, Arlo (Reggie Absolom), has a casual charm that steals your heart, but it's the script's bitter jokes that will have you urging people to get past the saccharine montage and go see “Club Kid” themselves. — Amy Nicholson
'The diary of a waitress'
Radu Jude's latest art punk satire is about a Romanian immigrant with a farcical double life. By day, Gianina (Ana Dumitrașcu, fantastic) is the maid of a silly Parisian family; by night, she's an actress in an early 20th-century farce about a maid whose master nurses her patent leather boots. In neither world can he openly say what he thinks (although in his native language, he curses his employers and his young son a lot). Fast, sharp and sarcastic, “The Diary of a Waitress” gives equal weight to the monotony and absurdity of Gianina's routine. And Jude isn't above including a teasing slow-motion shot of a bratty French kid sniffing out a soccer kick. — Amy Nicholson
'Homeland'
The tension at the heart of Paweł Pawlikowski's period piece, set in a devastated and fallen Germany after the end of World War II, remains unresolved. All that remains are defensive denials, evasions of Nazi collaboration, and the faint hope that something higher has survived. I could watch this kind of guilt-ridden post-apocalyptic movie for hours; on the other hand, this lasts just 82 minutes. The conclusion, a wordless moment between father and daughter to the sound of Bach played on a broken pipe organ, was the most devastating passage of the entire festival. “Fatherland” shows Pawlikowski's exquisite way of evoking European tragedy in black and white, but he has never summed it up so poetically. — Joshua Rothkopf
'Fjord'
People at the festival called it complex; I found myself disagreeing. It's actually a pretty simple story about a religious but mostly sensible family in conflict with an overly sensitive branch of child protective services, and perhaps with all of Norwegian agnostic progressivism. As reactionary as it may seem, I was totally absorbed. In part, that's due to a beautifully plotted courtroom setting and the immersive performances of Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, who reunite after “A Different Man” as parents become increasingly beyond their means. But mostly I give credit to Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who knows a good story when he sees one, crystallizing its power with each camera choice. — Joshua Rothkopf
'Minotaur'
Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev's icy return (after a multi-year battle with long COVID) is worth the wait: a condensation of everything he does well into something so purely distilled it should come with a trial warning. The film begins as a casual portrait of the empty lifestyles of the mini-oligarchs' nouveau riche: fancy dinners, divorces, bathroom gossip. It then becomes an erotic thriller (it's based on Claude Chabrol's 1969 “The Unfaithful Wife,” as is Diane Lane's “Unfaithful”). But the best comes at the end, when the situation is resolved in broad daylight with impressive brutality. The war in Ukraine? Someone else's problem. “Minotaur” takes on Putin's entire dissociated society and places its winners above the blackened clouds, looking down on the rest of us. — Joshua Rothkopf
'Teen sex and death at Camp Miasma'
I'm increasingly loving Jane Schoenbrun's exfoliation of '80s horror obsessions, especially for the film's non-judgmental acceptance: let these films be free in all their “problematic” badness and let them work on you. The fact that “Teenage Sex” sometimes feels like a bottle episode of “Hacks” doesn't hurt. Hannah Einbinder brings vulnerability to a project that needs her brand of self-deprecating bravery. Points also for not turning this into yet another celebration of some forgotten director claimed as a genius. Rather, quite the opposite: It's about an abused scream queen (Gillian Anderson, spunky and campy), liminal, wintry camp, and the thrill of running through the woods in your pajamas. — Joshua Rothkopf
