COMPETITION
The audacious latest from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the Oscar-winning director of Drive My Automobile, is ready primarily in a Paris elder-care facility run by a girl (Virginie Efira) whose progressive treatment approach clashes with the realities of chronic understaffing and bottom-line-driven management. Audiences with the patience to get through a leisurely paced and really talky first hour shall be richly rewarded by a moving and at times transcendently beautiful affirmation of the essential human rights of respect and dignity. — DAVID ROONEY
UN CERTAIN REGARD
Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s debut feature, the primary from a Rwandan director to screen in Cannes’ official selection, is a searing and intimate portrait of a nation’s reckoning. At the middle of a solid of mostly non-pro actors, Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi plays a girl confronting the person accused of murdering her siblings and other relatives — though it’s through the character’s complex, often tense relationships along with her daughter, sister and mother that this concurrently emblematic and achingly specific story involves life. — SHERI LINDEN
COMPETITION
A triptych gay epic that spans a long time and tangles with a very grim time in modern Spanish history, this film from Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo delivers the heady satisfaction of seeing something ambitious land its nervy attempt. With three thematically converging plotlines — and tiny but juicy roles for Glenn Close and Penélope Cruz — the movie earns its high drama by fully immersing us in its world and its ideas, grabbing us with its paean to those that have lived fully in even probably the most dire war-torn circumstances. — RICHARD LAWSON
DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT
Arie and Chuko Esiri’s sharp, stirring film transposes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway from Twenties London to present-day Lagos. The titular protagonist is played with terrific restraint by Sophie Okonedo, while Fortune Nwafor is a revelation because the haunted soldier Septimus. Just because the novel sought to disclose how Britain abandoned veterans, this dreamy and compelling interpretation gestures on the collateral damage of Nigeria’s military. Ayo Edebiri and David Oyelowo are among the many wonderful supporting solid. — LOVIA GYARKYE
UN CERTAIN REGARD
This winsome and clever debut feature from the divisive Jordan Firstman trades the queer provocation of his past work for a comfortable fable a couple of drug-happy Recent York party promoter (played by Firstman) who learns he has a 10-year-old son. Though the movie comprises some Hollywood airbrushing and convenient exculpatory psychology, it’s a confident, exciting directorial bow — stylish in an unobtrusive way, agreeably paced, with a disarming ensemble orbiting around Firstman’s charming lead turn. — R.L.
DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT
Prolific Romanian auteur Radu Jude’s first French-language feature is a caustic modern-day tackle the turn-of-the-Nineteenth century book by Octave Mirbeau. Transforming the story of an exploited maid into certainly one of a Romanian immigrant working as a nanny for 2 passive-aggressive French intellectuals, Jude lambasts the present social order, making room for digressions on communism, Maoism and Nicolae Ceausescu. But he also fills his film with a way of longing — of being removed from family members in a rustic that’s not at all times welcoming. — JORDAN MINTZER
COMPETITION
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (the stellar Sandra Hüller) go on an unsentimental journey in 1949 through West and East Germany in Pawel Pawlikowski’s damn-near perfect period road movie. Exactingly restrained yet exquisitely layered, it forms a loose triptych with Pawlikowski’s last two features, Ida and Cold War, each set no less than partly behind the Iron Curtain. It is a masterful exploration of family, history and angst. — LESLIE FELPERIN
COMPETITION
Romanian Recent Waver Cristian Mungiu (winner of the 2007 Palme d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and a pair of Days) brings his needling focus and unvarnished realism to a knotty drama wherein a suspicion of kid abuse in a Norwegian village escalates right into a full inquisition. Starring Renate Reinsve and an unrecognizable Sebastian Stan because the couple at the middle of the storm, the film is a nuanced reflection on otherness and the way anyone failing to evolve to the values of a community invites distrust. — D.R.
COMPETITION
Korean motion maestro Na Hong-jin’s rip-roaring sci-fi creature feature — about rural villagers warding off a violent invasion — is a perfectly sustained pedal-to-the-metal experience that’s almost dizzying in its bravura. It’s an extended sit at two hours and 40 minutes, but one which never allows your attention to wander, pausing for respiratory space only intermittently and lacing those temporary spells of downtime with invigorating shots of off-kilter humor. Even with messy CG touches, it is a crazy good time. — D.R.
CRITICS’ WEEK
Phuong Mai Nguyen’s animated adaptation of a graphic novel by AJ Dungo is distinguished by elegant hand-drawn simplicity and a robust emotional throughline. The love story — spirited and wrenching — begins with the meet-cute in a Los Angeles highschool of introverted skateboarder AJ and gutsy surfer Kristen. They’re dropped at life by the superb voice turns of Will Sharpe and Stephanie Hsu in a chronicle of two young people weathering a few of life’s harshest storms. — S.L.
UN CERTAIN REGARD
The primary feature from Louis Clichy, who worked on Pixar hits Wall-E and Up, is a graceful and moving coming-of-age cartoon that follows an 11-year-old boy whose life in rural France gets tougher when he has to wear a back brace. Contrasting hard-knock rustic realism with poetic flights of fancy, Clichy captures the anxieties of a working-class household, but additionally those eureka moments you’ve as a child when your world is suddenly opened up by beauty. — J.M.
CRITICS’ WEEK
For her stunning feature debut, cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan tackles the coming-of-age genre in probably the most French way possible, delivering a wealthy, sprawling chronicle of teenage angst that starts off as a laid-back class trip to Italy and regularly turns right into a devastating tale of loss. Featuring a powerful solid of unknowns and a fluid style that captures them with each lyricism and verisimilitude, this winner of the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize proclaims the arrival of a formidable recent talent. — J.M.
COMPETITION
Rami Malek does career-best work as an unapologetically narcissistic performance artist with AIDS in Ira Sachs’ achingly observed portrait of art, love, desire and mortality in Nineteen Eighties Recent York City. Following Passages and last yr’s Peter Hujar’s Day, it’s the filmmaker’s third consecutive feature digging into the complex inner lifetime of gay men, reaffirming his position among the many preeminent movie chroniclers of queer experience. Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and newcomer Luther Ford co-star on this elegy defiantly tethered to life. — D.R.
COMPETITION
This rivetingly hard-to-categorize French epic is a couple of Nazi collaborator — an writer and engineer working for the fascist Vichy regime, played by Anatomy of a Fall‘s Swann Arlaud — who happens to be the great-grandfather of the film’s writer-director, Emmanuel Marre. Fresh and off-the-cuff, it’s a period piece that feels utterly contemporary, as if someone traveled back to 1940 with an iPhone and hit record. Chronicles of far-right obedience and moral decadence don’t get far more scathing than this. — J.M.
COMPETITION
Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Loveless) returns together with his first film made entirely outside of Russia, a loose remake of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife. This rigorously well-made, grippy-as-a-live-squid, anguish-steeped work is each a masterful crime thriller and the filmmaker’s most openly critical commentary on the motherland’s current political, spiritual and moral malaise — a denunciation never said in so many words but expressed with intricate layers of irony. — L.F.
COMPETITION
James Gray follows Armageddon Time with a semi-fictionalized return to his family life during mid-Nineteen Eighties Queens, Recent York, this time recounting a terrifying brush with the Russian mob. It’s a riveting crime thriller, a domestic drama of just about overwhelming power, and a piercing account of the American dream in tatters, with Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller in blazing form. While obvious antecedents is likely to be Coppola or Lumet or Scorsese or Mann, I kept considering while watching of the early crime movies of Akira Kurosawa. — D.R.
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
Iranian actress turned director Pegah Ahangarani uses archive footage and residential movies to craft a robust autobiographical account of the political turmoil that has wracked her homeland from 1979 until now. It’s a gripping first-person cautionary tale about speaking up in a spot where insurrection can cost you your life, and a despairing portrait of a family that lost several family members to a regime they initially supported only to search out their affinities betrayed by despotism. — J.M.
UN CERTAIN REGARD
A droll, peppery Hannah Einbinder stars as an up-and-coming filmmaker on a blood-spattered journey of self-discovery involving a mostly forgotten actress (Gillian Anderson, having a lark) in the newest from Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow). Employing a fictional slasher movie of yesteryear because the portal right into a conversation about self and desire, that is heady, strange stuff, frustrating at times but fascinating in each its confusion and its honesty. — R.L.
DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT
Set in the luxurious forests and fields of northeastern France, this excitingly offbeat first feature from Sarah Arnold depicts a gory factional war between hunters and farmers, haves and have-nots, with one depressed fish-out-of-water gendarme caught in the center. Finding clever recent ways to inform a well-recognized story of crooked cops and small-town corruption, the movie calls to mind each the deadpan thrillers of the Coen brothers and the downbeat ’70s crime flicks of French helmer Alain Corneau. — J.M.
COMPETITION
A spellbinding body-swap puzzler led by a typically fearless performance from Léa Seydoux, this third feature from Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall co-writer Arthur Harari fuses existential horror with naturalistic drama. There’s a surface kinship here with movies like It Follows and particularly Under the Skin, wherein post-coital afterglow sours fast. But it is a sui generis freakout, as mesmerizingly unsettling because it is elusive. I can’t wait to see it again and keep sifting through its mysteries. — D.R.
A version of this story appeared within the May 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.