Ioncinema

Exploring themes of mental health, emotional recovery, companionship, and the uncomfortable stillness of contemporary existence, one of the most assured feature debuts to emerge from this year’s Directors’ Fortnight was Low Expectations. What Norwegian filmmaker Eivind Landsvik gets right is that it is through fragile everyday interactions, small acts of care, and the communal bonds that individuals are able to slowly rebuild themselves. Anchored by a first-time lead actress girl in red (Marie Ulven), this feature debut rejects familiar mythology of the tortured creative genius, instead its boredom, routine, or the plain act of just existing that gives the film its dramatic weight.… Read the rest

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One of the discoveries of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was the Un Certain Regard selected (should have been in competition for the Palme) Everytime, the latest feature from Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner would go onto win Un Certain Regard Prize. Best known for her provocative and unsettling The Trouble with Being Born, Wollner returns with a film that feels at once more intimate and emotionally accessible while remaining every bit as formally daring. Everytime is a work that throws its audience into catastrophe almost immediately, refusing the comforts of gradual exposition as it follows a family navigating the aftermath of unimaginable loss.… Read the rest

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Following the Grand Prix–winning Close, Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont returned to the Cannes competition with a film that explores how war reshapes identity, intimacy, and the very idea of courage. In Coward, set during World War I, Dhont uses the backdrop of trench warfare not only to depict fear as a natural response to institutionalized slaughter, but also to examine repressed emotional and sexual intimacy among soldiers, where bonds formed under extreme conditions become both lifelines and sources of danger within rigid military hierarchies. Through Pierre and Francis, the film interrogates what it means to be labeled a “lâche,” suggesting that masculinity itself can function as a performance—both literal, through staged theatrical acts within the war setting, and social, through the expectations imposed on soldiers.… Read the rest

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A film project we’ve been tracking when the Critics’ Week had launched her short Lili Alone, and then invited her feature debut to Next Step workshop, with her deeply moving A Girl Unknown (La Deuxième fille), Chinese filmmaker Zou Jing crafts a deeply affecting portrait of a young woman shaped by loss, instability, and a lifelong quest for belonging against the backdrop of China’s one-child era. Tracing more than a decade in the life of Wang Juan, the film follows her journey through a succession of homes and identities as she navigates a world where many girls were treated as disposable.… Read the rest

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A film project we’ve been tracking when the Critics’ Week had launched her short Lili Alone, and then invited her feature debut to Next Step workshop, with her deeply moving A Girl Unknown (La Deuxième fille), Chinese filmmaker Zou Jing crafts a deeply affecting portrait of a young woman shaped by loss, instability, and a lifelong quest for belonging against the backdrop of China’s one-child era. Tracing more than a decade in the life of Wang Juan, the film follows her journey through a succession of homes and identities as she navigates a world where many girls were treated as disposable.… Read the rest

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We discovered Argentine filmmaker Federico Luis as one of the exciting, singular new voices when his feature debut, Simon of the Mountain, premiered at Cannes at the Critics’ Week in 2024. Currently mounting his sophomore feature The Dog Trainer (with support by The Residence of Cannes, TorinoFilmLab, the Spanish Film Academy Residency and Oxbelly) Luis shored up with his second competition selected short last week — and he won the big prize in the Palme d’Or. For the Opponents, takes us into the world of child boxing in Tepito, Mexico City, through the eyes of Damián, a young fighter whose expressive presence captivated the director from the moment they met.… Read the rest

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Family of Straw: Hayakawa Paints Busy Coming-of-Age Portrait

Going in the opposite direction of her 2022 debut Plan 75, a sci-fi meditation on Japan’s aging population, director Chie Hayakawa sets her sights on one defining summer for an eleven-year-old girl in 1987 Tokyo. The success of this type of film depends almost exclusively on the lead performance, and newcomer Yui Suzuki certainly impresses. However, Hayakawa unspools a tonally uneven character portrait which cleaves too many narrative paths to aptly explore any one aspect with any depth. An inability to wrap up its sentiments cohesively, paired with a title referencing a specific Jean Renoir painting popping up as an ersatz symbol distracts from what seems as if it’s trying to decorate an otherwise familiar coming-of-age drama about a young girl getting a crash course on death and sexuality.… Read the rest

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The Russians Are Killing the Russians Are Killing: Assayas Bungles Political Espionage

Of the many significant issues severely hobbling The Wizard of the Kremlin, the latest film from French auteur Olivier Assayas, the most egregious is how incredibly stupid it believes its audience to be. Characters freely interpret for us the meaning behind every moment, like professors lecturing us through interpretive stage dialogue. Add to this a thick porridge of Europa flavored accents from the primarily English language performers, led by the shockingly miscast Paul Dano, and it completes a recipe for one of the esteemed director’s biggest failures.… Read the rest

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Set in Mallorca, Cata’s summer is drenched in sun and lazy promise—until it is violently rewritten by the absurd, sudden death of her grandmother, a death witnessed by her eyes alone. Unmoored by a grief no one else can truly understand, she seeks solace in a childhood habit: play-pretend. She slips into her grandmother’s clothes, her perfume, her posture, and not her baking abilities. A protagonist dealing with some unresolved issues, what we have in Spanish filmmaker Lucía Aleñar Iglesias‘ remarkable debut is a tale that blurs the lines, and crosses some lines — memory and presence shake up the dynamics of the family into a delicious, possibly dangerous disarray.… Read the rest

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The Era of Men: Valeska Dredges the Darkness of the Past

There’s an essence of Valeska Grisebach’s cinema which makes one feel as if it’s playing out in real-time, arguably a detriment as the sometimes sinister, sometimes sublime elements of her narratives can evaporate or be eclipsed by the time taken to get where she’s going. Nearly a decade after 2017’s Western (read review), she returns with the promise of something softer in The Dreamed Adventure. Migrating from a masculine perspective and a homosocial atmosphere, Grisebach returns to the peculiarities of border life through the perspective of an inquisitive woman working as an archaeologist on the Turkish-Bulgarian border, where a reunion with an old acquaintance inadvertently thrusts her into a mysterious realm.… Read the rest

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