Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance boasts impressive technical sound design and monster work but suffers from a lack of compelling female characters.
The Substance Has Never Met a Real Woman
![The Substance](https://journeyintocinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/the-substance-480x270.jpg)
Exploring the Outer Edge of Film
Reviews and dispatches exploring the best new cinema premiering around the world.
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance boasts impressive technical sound design and monster work but suffers from a lack of compelling female characters.
With alacrity and charm, Daphné Hérétakis’ short What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move takes aim at one of Greece’s most enduring national symbols.
There is beauty and meaning littered throughout the repetitive actions of Jonás Trueba’s endlessly playful Directors’ Fortnight romcom The Other Way Around.
Antoine Chevrollier’s Block Pass captures its working-class milieu well but suffers due to its tired secondhand framing of queer suffering.
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 is a tightly-focussed, Dardenne-esque tale of an immigrant delivery driver trying to make ends meet that brims with heartfelt emotions.
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.
Matthew Rankin’s culture-bending comedy fable throws up all kinds of intellectual questions, but rarely engages on a deeper, emotional level.
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.
Love and cheese freely intermingle in Louise Courvoisier’s diverting yet underwhelming debut Holy Cow, (somehow) playing in Un Certain Regard.