Cannes Film Festival — A–Z of films

Kogonada is the directorial equivalent of a careful tea maker himself, he knows how to infuse his films with complex ideas without getting preachy or overtechnical about it.

As a whole, it appears way too kinetically ostentatious for its own sake, sadly making it less than the sum of its parts, but there are things to appreciate here.

I could not have wished for a more perfect first film to wean me back into the in-cinema press screening world I left behind in March 2020.

Once in a while a director like Gillard comes along as a reminder of the entrancing possibilities of cinema.

The way June 1941 is presented here, the looming warfare seems to happen in the present

The interplay of the spiritual and the sensual is vital here.

The film unfolds at an easy pace, Hansen-Løve making everything matter of fact and yet beguiling, thereby softening viewers up to accept the fantastic or surreal aspects of the narrative as normal.

Binoche gives her all, stripping away any vestiges of actressy pretence to assimilate herself in the community while at the same time investing her performance with an authentic conviction.

Bigger Than Us uses individuals to show how young people across the globe are stepping in - often against powerful opposition - where authorities aren’t.

Bloody Oranges is condemned to straddle between two half-baked tones.

While there's plenty to be said for a subtle approach, Qnia is too laidback for his own good.

Although the heartfelt nature of the film is evident, it's a shame Ayouch became so wedded to its documentary element when its more stylised moments are where it finds its real energy.

Full of unspoken pain and resentment, the treasured Chiara carries her father’s sins in his absence as she struggles to decide which course to follow in her own life.

This is a considered film, a triumph, there are few like it and more's the pity.

The everyday feel is acute – you can virtually smell the pickle jar vinegar and raw spirit and imagine a slight stickiness on the seats as Jani-Petteri Passi’s camera captures the scene with a looseness that rocks along with the rhythm of the train.

Arnold’s camera observes the gait of the animals so that right from the start we understand how they are constrained by their distorted bodies.

Desplechin eases us into the goings-on without sacrificing any of Roth’s complicated and thorny subject matter.

Corsini agilely combines elements of cinéma verité and farce.

Slow to build and with an assembly of characters who are all more complex than they seem on the surface, Drive My Car exemplifies Japan’s growing body of literary cinema.

Europa is unrelenting, claustrophobic in the camera's closeness to Kamal.

François Ozon makes what could have been an impossibly painful subject more palatable but nonetheless affecting.

As a snapshot of the influence parents bring to bear on their offspring it lacks engagement for the audience and takes the attitude that everyone watching should be enrapt by the self-importance Penn brings to bear.

France is a supremely sad film, maybe the saddest Dumont has made in its interplay of the true and the fake.

It all has a very particular flavour. Even a new one.

The reflections and insights are many.

There's a straightforwardness to the telling of this tale that adds to its accessibility.

Beautifully photographed as always, with a colour palette whose soft, shifting hues reflect its moral and narrative ambiguity, A Hero is one of Farhadi’s finest works.

Panahi and his actors shift through emotions so smoothly, you barely notice them until they have immersed you.

Hold Me Tight [has] the sensorial acuteness to abduct us straight to the place where, providentially or not, poignant life decisions are being forged and the creations of new realities begin when the world around seems to collapse.

The subtlety Vogt employs as a director pays off in spades as he gets as much creepy mileage from the disturbance of soil and water as any amount of CGI could muster.

Invincible Demons is a film that understands the aesthetic appeal of environmental abuse, but it doesn’t titillate with images of eco-collapse or sensationalise interviews with long-suffering Delhi citizens.

The closer and more personal this documentary gets, the more it opens up to the largest of issues.

It’s quite a maze to pick your way through as a viewer and Stone does his best ease the path.

The family portrait is devastating.

At the genre level, Medusa is failing. Simply put: it's not scary.

For all the talk of hermetical storytelling, this might be his least hermetic and most approachable movie to date.

The façade of a happy picnic shows all the cracks, despite the lovely geese flying overhead.

With darker themes filtered through the turmoil of adolescence, Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic’s début feature mingles picture postcard imagery with scenes of fish being hacked to pieces, blood and guts part of the day to day order of life.

Set in a futuristic Rwanda, the themes are as old as the hills - with colonialism, identity and self-determination chief among them.

An oneiric, sensory and imaginative journey documenting being young in contemporary India.

Jones has been turning in consistently good work for years now and it’s high time he had a role like this. The art of it lies in how he keeps us alert to his character’s dangerous potential without ever letting us lose sight of his humanity.

This pleasant, thrilling watch shows Muntean is capable of making great cinema in some of the starkest places.

The first-time director shows an adept grip when it comes to the rhythms of her craft, letting silence or specific sounds break out at unexpected moments, including a gripping scene when all we can hear is the spring and creak of the uneven bars.

Harari and his co-writers Bernard Cendron and Vincent Poymiro, show how the war propaganda becomes internalised in these men, so that even when they are given signs that the conflict may be over, they rationalise that it must be some sort of 'fake news' designed to trick them.

Audiard captures the fluid nature of relationships for a younger generation navigating both on and offline opportunities and, because this is French, it also features plenty of gracefully worked sexual encounters.

This is the playground as a warzone, where the sandpit might, indeed, be as deep as the sea and hold dead bodies and where adult authority might only make things worse.

By delving into fiction, Huezo is able to focus on the impact of this crisis on individual human lives.

The best scenes are those where the human condition and awareness of teenagers everywhere at the cusp of adulthood encounters the unfathomable.

The grooming of Strawberry may have some moments of levity but that, in many ways, makes it all the more uncomfortable.

Lafosse makes excellent choices with his editor Marie-Hélène Dozo (long-time collaborator of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) in what is shown on screen and what is left out for us to fill in.

Never directly asking the question, but leaving liberté, égalité and fraternité to hang in the air between scenes and lines, Périot’s latest gives a voice to the voiceless, the disenfranchised, the forgotten.

There's a subtlety to all this that speaks well of Meyer's thoughtfulness - she never goes for easy options such as having one character be prejudiced against the other, instead simply allowing a respectful attitude to grow into an increasingly strengthening bond.

It is impossible to deny the director's poetic and aesthetic talent, as well as her ability to offer a critical deconstruction of social relations through a seemingly simple story.

Theis approaches the coming-of-age formula in a refreshingly new way that focuses on the beauty of weakness.

The costumes in The Souvenir speak volumes about female and male desire and the search for identity that garments can encompass.

Hogg has always had an eye for architectural as well as emotional spaces and we see it here, as she floods the large rooms of Julie's parents' home with light, so that she almost seems to be paling out of them, which, coupled with her often silent reactions as others babble around her makes it seem as though she is the one who might be the ghost.

It progresses in the same sort of manner as leading man Damon in that it's big and bulky, slow and purposeful but somehow, despite this, quite compelling.

The use of traditional folk song and the fact that the language shifts from Italian to Spanish also highlights the way that stories are passed from mouth to ear down the generations and across borders.

The stories might notionally pull together but these feel like a pile of sticks rather than a cohesive nest, a jigsaw that's middling and without edge.

The audience laughed at times that were not meant to be that kind of funny, a primate exhalation of surprise and relief.

The Velvet Underground will restore your belief in documentaries!

Bakalova, who will be familiar to many English-speaking viewers from her multi-award winning turn in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, shows great depth here in a performance which is equally deserving of notice.

There is a lingering, half blossomed melancholy that lies underneath the often very funny, fast-paced moments of quotidian chaos.