Paul Verhoeven’s controversial and provocative character-driven rape drama Elle that paradoxically also functions as a lighthearted but twisted black comedy premiered in Cannes to rave reviews. It is the director’s first feature in 10 years and was praised as one of his best films to date, marking some sort of a comeback for the Dutch filmmaker…
Matt Ross’ second feature Captain Fantastic already premiered at Sundance earlier this year and secured itself a slot in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes, where Matt Ross received the award for Best Director. It stars Viggo Mortensen as a counter-culture dad who raises his six children off the grid in the woodlands somewhere in the Pacific Northwest…
David Mackenzie’s feature Hell or High Water played in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival and is a wonderful mix of different genres such as the Western, a heist movie and a road movie with comedic elements. The dark and witty screenplay was written by Taylor Sheridan, who also wrote the critically acclaimed thriller Sicario (selected for…
Xavier Dolan seems to be among Cannes’ favorite filmmakers. He debuted five out of six features in Cannes and shared the Jury Prize for his previous film Mommy in 2014 with Jean-Luc Godard’s film Goodbye to Language. In 2015 he was part of the Jury of the Official Competition and won the Grand Prix and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at this year’s festival for his…
The heartwarming and wonderful dramedy Paterson with Adam Driver in the lead is one of two films Jim Jarmusch debuted in Cannes during the festival this year. The second is the documentary on The Stooges, Gimme Danger, playing in the Midnight Screening’s section. Like many of the directors featured in Cannes this year, Jarmusch is also no stranger to…
Nicolas Winding Refn returns to the Croisette with The Neon Demon; a highly stylized, visually stunning and provocative horror film set in the fashion world of Los Angeles. Both of his previous films – the critically acclaimed crime drama Drive (2011) and the quite polarizing revenge thriller Only God Forgives (2013) – played in the official competition and Winding…
Jeff Nichols’s fact-based interracial drama Loving depicts the intimate relationship of Richard (Joel Edgerton), who is White, and Mildred (Ruth Negga), who is of African-American and Native-American descend, over the course of ten years while the couple was fighting for their right to live in their home state of Virginia as a married couple. The Lovings…
Just two years after Clouds of Sils Maria premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, French auteur Olivier Assayas returned with his highly anticipated follow-up Personal Shopper to compete for this year’s Palme d’Or. The film stirred a lot of buzz before its official red carpet premiere since it was booed…
At first glance Park Chan-Wook’s ‘inspired’ by Sarah Waters Victorian set novel Fingersmith (Waters and Chan-Wook agreed on inspired rather and adapted because of the changes in the second half of the film) is an usual choice. Looking more closely at his previous work and it seems a snug fit, what with…
Andrea Arnold returns to the Croisette for the third time in four films with an idiosyncratic slice of ersatz Americana that follows a band of magazine subscription sellers as they crisscross the American Midwest, leaving in their wake a path of material, physical and mental destruction.