Cannes Film Festival — A–Z of films

Campillo has a weakness in not knowing when to trim all the talking.

This documentary feels confined by constraints that should have been stripped away in the filming process.

Unquestionably one of the most beautiful films I have seen, every shot is designed, composed, lit and photographed to perfection.

The best way to get the most out of the film is to succumb completely to the singer’s breathless voice, sultry eyes and her volatile genius.

A tremendously powerful piece of cinema.

An accomplished portrait that presents something much more human than we're used to in this context.

Sometimes absurd, sometimes bone-chilling, strikingly original.

Couture by Yves Saint Laurent and lush photography drown us in luxurious chic.

For better or worse, Antonioni’s got his master stylist hat on here, even if it sometimes obscures his vision.

Niki Lindroth von Bahr's film is once again a masterclass of model-making.

Coppola’s desire for a new “soft” approach seems to have emasculated the original material while failing to engross our senses with her storytelling techniques.

Samurai revenge stories are not exactly thin on the ground and it takes something special to get attention today, but Blade Of The Immortal is just that.

Saturday Night Live regular Mooney, who has a twinkly mischievousness and comic timing reminiscent of a young Gene Wilder, plays James as naive, but never stupid.

Pulls no punches as it takes viewers on a terrifying ride through once-familiar territory turned utterly alien.

Carpignano is interested in the margins - and the fringes of those margins.

It is, presumably, his desire for realism that leads him to cross what will be a bridge too far for many audiences.

Capturing this moment, this opening up, writer/director team Cecilia Atán and Valeria Pivato demonstrate that there's room on the big screen for small things.

A cleverly constructed piece of low-budget filmmaking, Directions punches well above its weight.

The earrings are an infuriatingly over-used plot device, with each reappearance becoming increasingly predictable.

Whether she is probing at the ideas of the ties that bind us to a home or considering the morality of goat horns, she constantly nudges us to move around and, perhaps, get a better view.

Few voices are missing from this incredibly thorough piece of work.

The script doesn't patronise its characters, showing they're just as capable of the best of actions and the worst as anybody else, but makes sure we understand the additional pressures they face.

Barbosa's film painstakingly recreates that journey and, in so doing, also gives viewers an oblique insight into the director's feelings about the loss of his friend.

The Safdies invest their own knowledge of their home turf to give it all a frenetic and authentic sense of urgency.

Haneke is a master of his material, revealing just enough to keep the viewer on tenterhooks but not enough to give an easy explanations.

The energy is electric

Despite all the outrageous and mostly un-simulated activity, there is a real sensuality to the couple's contact, as well as a sad undertow to their sadistic influence upon each other.

The writer-director takes great enjoyment in playing around with his various obsessions.

The bobbins are a brilliantly employed metaphor, something that feels freshly sprung from a fairy tale, only silly until you consider how sinister they are.

Akin asks us to shift our perceptions of terrorist attacks in deliberately provocative ways, constantly flipping what we think we know and what we expect to see right up until the film's haunting final image.

Eternal greatness encounters sacrifice and the film dares to musically tackle questions of complicity in evil. Péguy's socialism, patriotism, and Catholicism mix well with the eager young actors. This is unlike any film you have ever seen.

Lanthimos confirms his reputation as one of contemporary cinema’s most original and unsettling directors

If there is rather more surface than substance and the ending is signposted, it is a surface full of intricacy and a signpost of admirable elegance.

Denis and Binoche take a perceptive and light approach to what could have been hackneyed material.

Zegers and Castro are no strangers to strange chemistry, most notably in Post Mortem, and they bring a dark psychological edge to their interactions.

Though the filmmaking is good, the bleakness of the message is unremitting.

The way director Emmanuel Gras eases under the skin of his main subject makes for fascinating viewing.

A crucial historical document, but also a great film.

The balance of the super real with intricately timed artifice and how they collapse into each other is Baumbach's crown achievement.

It's as if I Spit On Your Grave has been transformed into a Kabuki drama.

Bong keeps it all on the move with immense visual flair, innumerable chases and excellent effects.

This film has plenty of hustle even though it sometimes lacks flow.

Even if the facts are fiction, you still get the sense of a man who is driven, at least in part, by an urge to bring some sort of happiness by shooting film rather than bullets.

Hazanavicius directs with flair for the style and mood of the Sixties.

It’s a love story of sorts, but one which demands a lot more of its protagonists – and its audience – than most of its ilk.

The craft, the knowledge, the deep communication with the animal, shown without words - this is breathtaking, transcendent cinema.

While satirically entertaining in places it has too many threads competing for attention and ultimately runs out of steam.

It avoids every cliche laid down in the history of search-and-rescue movies

The society it depicts is one in which ordinary people – and especially women – are crushed beneath the joint burdens of a medieval moral code, and an unfeeling bureaucratic enforcement process.

Like so many anthology films, it suffers from the fact that the sections are uneven, with the middle segment soaring high above the two bookend stories.

A must-see film for action fans.

The film is well-served by its genre action sequences but it's the traces of grief that linger longest, like footsteps in the snow.

This creative and visually arresting adaptation of Brian Selznick’s critically acclaimed novel marks a filmmaker at the top of his game.

It quite subtly toys with the iconography of the genre - poking at the outlying parts of it, the parts dealing with "foreigness" and "home" rather than the more dependable elements of right and wrong.

There's a potency to this film, largely thanks to a carefully judged performance by Marina Foïs as novelist and tutor Olivia, and a charismatic one by Matthieu Lucci as her most difficult student, Antoine.

Nothing plays out as you expect, with Ramsay maintaining an unsettling staccato that keeps both the action and the viewer on edge.