Though rife with sexual violence and graphic dialogue, the last film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival was also the most elegantly made in the competition: Paul Verhoeven’s blunt, button-pushing, stinging comedy.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s blackly comic satire—a discombobulating rush of inventiveness and imagination that doesn’t let up.
Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, a posthumously published novella about a devious widow who goes husband-hunting for both herself and her daughter. It has intrigue, musings on marriage, and a fascinating female lead.
Jacques Audiard’s moody heartbreaker, the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or last year, daringly places a rough-and-ready, documentary-ish shooting style alongside confident, startling artistry.
Director Jeppe Ronde uses a real-life event as the basis for a haunting, ethereal film, a sort of inverted Rebel Without a Cause. These teens don’t lash out so much as cave in.
Asghar Farhadi reminds us of how, ultimately, there are countless external factors that determine and alter our lives that we have no control over.
A fictionalized meeting that is very funny at times and boasts actors fully committed to communicating the bizarreness of a particular time and place in American history.
Based on 17th-century stories by the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, who inspired the Brothers Grimm, one tale ends with a sting, another ends in triumph, and the third concludes somewhere in the middle. All of them linger.
Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier reminds one of a young Steven Spielberg. Not the family-friendly Spielberg but the mean, young, hungry Spielberg who had a taste for genre filmmaking.