Cannes Film Festival

If you were alive in the 1980s it was impossible to miss out on the once in a lifetime talent that was Whitney Houston. While she came from solid singer stalk in the form of backup songstress Cissy Houston, no one was really prepared for how big her breakthrough as an artist was going to be. To this day she …

SHOPLIFTERS is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s best film to date, and one of the most pleasant surprises of the Cannes Film Festival. A deceptively simple but utterly profound film, it starts and ends on two completely different notes, making it a film that constantly surprises you with its unpredictable yet compelling narrative. A family of shoplifters is trying to get by, with …

Spike Lee, I doubt anyone would argue, has paved the way for the likes of John Singleton, Ava DuVernay, Dee Rees and Jordan Peele and really all black filmmakers of the last 30 years who have given faces and voices to the stories of black America. 1989’s Do the Right Thing is still a landmark film and played the Cannes …

The first hour of Alice Rohrwacher’s third feature Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro) are as languidly paced as a film could be. The denizens of an Italian estate called Inviolata where farmers (well, sharecroppers) cultivate tobacco for their cruel baroness the Marquise Alfonsino de Luna, nicknamed the ‘Queen of Cigarettes. She sits in a penthouse while her workers toil on the plantation …

Lara is 15 going on 16 trans girl with dreams of being a professional ballerina in Lukas Dhont’s touching and humane first feature Girl. She’s far behind the other girls, having started much later than them. Her point work, turns and pliés all need improvement. She’s given an eight-week probation period to see if she can improve enough to be …

Gaya Jiji’s directorial debut MY FAVORITE FABRIC is an undercooked, lacking melodrama that takes points for being one of the rare Arab films not to shy away from nudity in service of a story about sexual repression and hidden desires. Nahla (Manal Issa) lives with her sisters and mother in an apartment in Damascus. It is 2011 and the Syrian …

One of the most commercial and straightforward films of his career, Jia Zhang-ke’s ASH IS PUREST WHITE is accessible but not superficial, entertaining but never meandering or pandering to the audience. A deceptively simple love story, this is a smart reflection on gender relationships as a metaphor for the changing face of China. Qiao (Zhao Tao) and Bin (Liao Fan) …

Ali Abbasi creates the grimmest of faerie tales as two outcasts find love in a hopeless place in this wild, wonderful, surprisingly emotional drama. Tina is a border officer for a small Swedish coastal port. Eyeing passengers as they walk through customs, looking for contraband. But, Tina isn’t just looking; she can smell it. Indeed, like a tracker dog. “Alcohol. …

Survival films can go either way: they can be engaging viewing experiences that expand their scope beyond their basic premise or can be slogs that never rise above the level of average survival stories. ARCTIC falls somewhere in between: it doesn’t fully engage compared to better survival films but doesn’t fall completely flat either. But watching the film, we couldn’t …

Pawel Pawlikowski’s COLD WAR is one of those films that you can respect but not outright love. Beautifully made but far more slight and bleaker than expected, the film features a fantastic central performance and a narrative that may appeal to European crowds and arthouse film lovers who fall for bleak films such as this one. The story is quite …