Antoine Chevrollier’s Block Pass captures its working-class milieu well but suffers due to its tired secondhand framing of queer suffering.
Block Pass. A Tyred Vintage.
Category: Festivals
Reviews and dispatches exploring the best new cinema premiering around the world.
Sauna Day. Intimate Masculinity on Display.
Sauna Day, Anna Hints follow-up to Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, trades female intimacy for male suppression, to eroticised and compelling results.
The Story of Souleymane. Cycling Through Limbo.
The Story of Souleymane is a tightly-focussed, Dardenne-esque tale of an immigrant delivery driver trying to make ends meet that brims with heartfelt emotions.
The Empty Pageantry of Savanna and the Mountain
A group of villagers stage a series of increasingly bizarre protests against the development of a lithium mine in the unengaging Savanna and the Mountain.
Parsing the Puzzling Persian of Universal Language
Matthew Rankin’s culture-bending comedy fable throws up all kinds of intellectual questions, but rarely engages on a deeper, emotional level.
Megalopolis Invites You To The Future Of Cinema
Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited, soon-to-be-endlessly-debated, epic Megalopolis asks you to consider the power of art to change the course of time.
Holy Cow. Curdled Maturity.
Love and cheese freely intermingle in Louise Courvoisier’s diverting yet underwhelming debut Holy Cow, (somehow) playing in Un Certain Regard.
(Don’t) Believe The Hyperboreans
Disturbing and entertaining in equal measure, Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña’s wildly inventive metafiction The Hyperboreans is a standout work from Cannes.
Capitalism Is a Locust
The twin spectres of China and capitalism haunt every frame of KEFF’s gangland debut Locust, with shades of Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day.
When the Light Breaks Has (Almost) All The Right Takes
When the Light Breaks is Rúnarsson’s return to his earlier, sadder work, but is undone by an unnecessarily sentimental streak. Opens Un Certain Regard.