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Spend 12 days watching movies, and you can’t help but notice patterns. Some of the recurring elements at this year’s Cannes Film Festival were coincidences, like the many scenes in which women angrily masturbated, or children bulled one of their own, or a house became a portal into generations of family history. But other similarities felt like signs of the times — look at the characters who metaphorically and literally turned the music up in an effort to drown out what’s happening around them. Past and potential disasters cast a shadow over this year’s festival, reflective of an increasingly chaotic global mood. It was telling to watch the people onscreen try to deal with that chaos, whether through resistance, denial, or a meltdown. In Sirât and Yes, characters attempt to dance their bad feelings away, while in Eddington and Die, My Love, succumbing to them is the only choice that makes sense. All of which led to the best iteration of the French festival in years, bolstered by divisive works from artists unafraid to lean into what it means to live through eventful times.
Alpha
Julia Ducournau’s latest was surprisingly polarizing at the fest, with some reviewers panning it and others lavishing praise. I was on the latter side; Ducournau can do almost no wrong, as far as I’m concerned. Her Palme D’Or winner Titane blew me away a few years ago, and I was moved yet again by this film, about a 13-year-old girl named Alpha (Mélissa Boros), her beloved mother (Golfshiteh Farahani), and her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim), who comes to live with them while in the throes of heroin addiction in an unnamed city in the 1990s. Alpha is struggling with her own recent trauma — namely, a very real possibility that she’s contracted a deadly, AIDS-like virus via a stick-and-poke tattoo — and she and Amin fall into a dreamlike, almost symbiotic relationship, blurring the lines of time and space as she awaits her test results. It’s beautiful, challenging, and gut-wrenching, and far less reliant on body horror than Ducournau’s previous works. —Rachel Handler
Die, My Love
There’s nothing like the feeling you get from watching a Lynne Ramsay movie — like somebody has punched you in the solar plexus, but in a good way. This one isn’t quite as plexus-punching as her previous efforts, but it’s still surreal and digressive, light on dialogue and straightforward narrative, heavy on bad vibes. Jennifer Lawrence goes for broke as a new mom losing her mind in the woods, Robert Pattinson downplays it perfectly as her befuddled husband, and Sissy Spacek is staggeringly good as Lawrence’s mother-in-law, who seems to understand her and fear her at the same time. —RH
The Little Sister
French actress-turned-director Hafsia Herzi made a delicate, heartbreaking movie about a queer Muslim woman coming of age in a community that she knows would shun her if they knew the truth. Newcomer Nadia Melliti is incredible as Fatima, a high schooler just figuring out she likes girls. At first, she’s all hard edges and unspoken desire and pain, then eventually breaks open as she experiences her first love, her first real heartache, what freedom really feels like, and the art of forgiveness. It’s her first acting role ever, and she’s magnetic — so much so that the Cannes jury gave her the Best Actress award. —RH
The Mastermind
Kelly Reichardt’s heist film is, of course, not really a heist film at all, but something much subtler and deeper. Josh O’Connor, at his filthy best, plays a disillusioned ‘70s suburban dad married to Alana Haim and vaguely fathering a pair of pathologically chatty sons as the Vietnam War and its attendant protests color the world around them. He decides to steal some paintings from a local museum to make some much-needed cash, and though he’s initially successful, he soon finds the whole thing unraveling slowly and catastrophically. The movie is quietly funny at times, but mostly downbeat and thoughtful, with contemporary politics on its mind as it dredges up America’s past. At the premiere, a visibly sad Reichardt made a plea to the international community about the U.S.: “Don’t give up on us.” —RH
The Plague
This year’s other movie about a kid being tormented by their peers over the possibility of being infected with some contagion is less epic in scale than Alpha, but more anguished in its detailed depiction of what it’s like to go from being the member of a group to its target. Set at an aquatic sports summer camp for kids right on the terrible cusp of becoming teenagers, Charlie Polinger’s debut is centered on sweet, awkward Ben (Everett Blunck), whose precarious place on the bottom rung of the social ladder is imperiled when he’s kind to the designated outcast, whom everyone else has declared has “the plague.” The Plague is exquisitely cast, from the Nickelodeon star smirk of ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) to his cohen target Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a genuine oddball. But what makes it more than just a dead-on depiction of the cruelty of kid dynamics is the way Polinger films his location like a nightmare adolescent hothouse, with dreamlike underwater shots providing glimpses into what feels like the place’s subconscious, limbs kicking frantically to keep heads above water and synchronized swimmers twirling like they’re floating in midair. —Alison Willmore
Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt understand the internal lives of women almost suspiciously well, and the festival agrees, awarding this film the Grand Prix. In his second feature starring actress Renate Reinsve, Trier has yet again made something astonishing about the complexity of the female experience, about family and connection and pain and art. The movie, set mostly at a big familial house on a tree-lined street, looks beautiful, dappled with sunlight and nostalgia, and it’s full of incredible performances from Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård as her emotionally distant father, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as her adoring and protective sister. I cried for about half the runtime. —RH
The Secret Agent
Not the main point but — when Best Actor prize-winner Wagner Moura steps out of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle in the opening scene of The Secret Agent looking rumpled and road-weary and flashing a very period-appropriate display of chest hair in his vintage polo, my heart skipped a beat. Moura’s character Marcelo isn’t actually the specialist the title suggests. But then the movie, which also won Kleber Mendonça Filho the Best Director award, isn’t a thriller in the traditional sense. It is, rather, a more slippery, sideways creation about how Brazil’s military dictatorship era created an oppressive paranoia and peril that seeped into every interaction. In its vivid depiction of ‘70s Recife, it’s in conversation with Mendonça Filho’s last film, Pictures of Ghosts, an elegiac documentary about the city and his own childhood recollections. In The Secret Agent, the city as it was is brought to vibrant life, with its horror looming as large as its pleasures. —AW
A Simple Accident
Jafar Panahi doesn’t appear on screen to play a version of himself in his latest film, the deserving winner of this year’s Palme d’Or, but his personal experiences of being mistreated while imprisoned are all over A Simple Accident, which has the contours of a very grim dark comedy. A chance encounter with a customer at his garage leads Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) to impulsively kidnap the man. He’s convinced this is the intelligence agent he was tortured by, but whom he never actually laid eyes on in prison. His doubts lead him to seek a second, then third, then fourth opinion, until he’s driving around in his van with his prisoner as well as a collection of other survivors who are all at different places in dealing with their rage and trauma. A Simple Accident is a deeply angry movie, but more than that, it’s heartsick in its efforts to grapple with what it means to seek closure, and to balance out ideals with the realities of wanting revenge. —AW
Sirât
Some real fucked-up stuff eventually happens to the characters in Oliver Laxe’s drama, but portents of doom bubble up at the edges from its very start. The film opens at an outdoor rave in Morocco whose participants bob to beats from a wall of speakers, until the party’s broken up by soldiers who announce that the country’s now in a state of emergency and that EU residents must be evacuated. Crackles of news coverage overheard throughout the rest of the movie suggest that World War III is essentially breaking out. But the movie’s main character, a square Spaniard named Luis (Sergi López), has more immediate priorities — he’s searching for his daughter, who’s been out of contact for months, and has brought his young son along to help. When the two impulsively follow a few wayward attendees out into the desert for another planned rave, Sirât turns into a nihilistic survival thriller about the different forms of denial we practice to cope with an increasingly disastrous reality, whether it’s doing drugs and dancing, or clinging fast to the idea that you can personally protect your family even as things go to hell. —AW
Sound of Falling
A series of women living in the same farmhouse over the course of four generations experience something like parallel lives in the second feature from German director Mascha Schilinski. They dream of self-annihilation, grow heavy with lust, wander into dark water, discover what their bodies can do, hide from abusive men, and protect one another. It all unfolds like a dream, breathtaking and lyrical, a long and rich poem. Alison Wilmore agreed, naming it the possible “best film at Cannes” off the bat, and it tied for the Jury Prize. —RH
Splitsville
Michael Covino and Kyle Marvin’s first film together, The Climb, was released into the black hole that was COVID, so the fact that Splitsville plays like a shinier, more expansive redo isn’t a drawback. Marvin plays the genial Carey, whose marriage to life coach Ashley (Adria Arjona) is on the verge of imploding when he takes a note from his best friend Paul (Covino) and his wife Julie (Dakota Johnson), who inform him that they opened up their marriage. None of these characters are actually emotionally prepared to deal with non-monogamy, but what makes Covino and Marvin’s collaborations so pleasurable isn’t just the cleverness of their writing. They also stage and visualize their comedies so ambitiously, and with such well deployed use of long takes and space, that they achieve bursts of slapstick greatness — like in a fistfight in a Hamptons house that makes incredible use of the destructive potential of tasteful modernist design. —AW
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