Ioncinema

IONCINEMA.com’s Top 3 Critics’ Picks offers a curated approach to the usual quandary: what would you recommend I see in theaters this month? Sight unseen, this April we have the highly anticipated (and earning mixed reviews) The Drama that the A24 folks are opening wide and choose not to go the film festival route — a bold move since Kristoffer Borgli saw his first two features premiere at A list fests with calling card Sick of Myself (2022) hitting the Croisette in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, while Dream Scenario (2023) was showcased in the Platform section at TIFF. This month we find three solid offerings.… Read the rest

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French filmmaker Pierre Salvadori will open the 79th edition of Cannes with his 11th feature film — a period piece set in 1928’s Paris that is actually based on an original idea by Cannes vets Rebecca Zlotowski and Robin Campillo. The starry cast of La Vénus électrique includes Pio Marmaï, Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Vimala Pons, Gustave Kervern and Madeleine Baudot in a tale about a grieving painter suffering from creative paralysis after his wife’s death regains his inspiration through a series of staged séances orchestrated by a carnival worker posing as a psychic, only for their deception to grow complicated as she falls in love with him, exploring themes of grief, artistic rebirth, and the blurred line between illusion and emotional truth.… Read the rest

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Land of Steady Habits: Meng Reflects Familial Upheaval in Quiet Saga

“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before…” wrote Willa Cather in her 1913 American frontier classic O Pioneers!. The statement’s universality is a fitting observation which applies to Chinese director Huo Meng’s sophomore film Living the Land, a period piece reflecting on socio-economic transformations affecting four generations of one family in 1991. The displacement of a ten-year-old boy provides the impetus for a narrative highlighting how eroding resources strangle the traditions of peasant farmers whose dwindling communities lead to a sense of desperation for a new generation of families.… Read the rest

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All DJs, Great and Small: Unkovski’s Debut Can’t Stop the Music

While its location might feel inherently unique, the happenings in Georgi M. Unkovski’s narrative debut DJ Ahmet sing a familiar tune. A coming-of-age trajectory defined by the formidable temptation of forbidden love fostered through the life-changing possibilities of music, this tale of a teen torn between tradition and self-fulfillment in Northern Macedonia feels overtly accessible for those satisfied with the familiar and the formulaic. Dealing specifically with a young Yuruk boy, a Turkic ethnic subgroup spread across the Balkan Peninsula, a local community festival provides the dramatic zenith as an act of rebellion towards the rigid expectations imposed upon a youthful generation faced with following the proscribed designs of their parents.… Read the rest

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Welcome back to the second portion of our Cannes Film Festival Competition predictions. Earlier we had ten titles jostling among our prognostications; today we add sixteen more. Enjoy the list below, share it among peers, and make sure to join us on April 9th as we comment on all the Cannes Film Festival selections.

Everything
Sandra Wollner
Producers: Panama Film’s Lixi Frank, David Bohun, Viktoria Stolpe, Sandra Wollner.
World Sales: TBD.

If the past few editions have proved us anything, it’s that fresh voices with no Cannes history can pierce the line-up — Thierry Frémaux has been surreptitiously ading new female auteur voices in his previous line-ups with the likes of Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Agathe Riedinger, and now we’re betting on a Mascha Schilinski Sound of Falling surprise inclusion for this prediction.… Read the rest

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Welcome back to the second portion of our Cannes Film Festival Competition predictions. Earlier we had ten titles jostling among our prognostications; today we add sixteen more. Enjoy the list below, share it among peers, and make sure to join us on April 9th as we comment on all the Cannes Film Festival selections.

Everything
Sandra Wollner
Producers: Panama Film’s Lixi Frank, David Bohun, Viktoria Stolpe, Sandra Wollner.
World Sales: TBD.

If the past few editions have proved us anything, it’s that fresh voices with no Cannes history can pierce the line-up — Thierry Frémaux has been surreptitiously ading new female auteur voices in his previous line-ups with the likes of Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Agathe Riedinger, and now we’re betting on a Mascha Schilinski Sound of Falling surprise inclusion for this prediction.… Read the rest

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With over a dozen acting credits (she began as a teenager) under her belt most notably works with Sebastián Lelio, Martín Rejtman and Andrés Wood’s Machuca (which premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2005), Chilean filmmaker Manuela Martelli‘s first short film efforts Apnea (2014) and Land Tides (2015) which premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight the same Cannes section that welcome her back to world premiere her feature debut 1976 in 2022. The possible thematic strategy appears to include thematic element of disappearance and the backdrop or sentiment of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship. Here is everything we know so far … for Manuela Martelli‘s The Meltdown (El deshielo)

Slowly chipping away at funding with prizing at 2022’s Ventana Sur and 2023’s Torino Film Lab, production would have taken place in late 2024.… Read the rest

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In less than two weeks, Thierry Frémaux will unveil the (never 100% complete but always tantalizingly close) lineup for the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Sure, the trades have intel, but there’s plenty of speculation too—titles long thought ready might still be absent, films everyone assumed were shoe-ins could have quietly accepted an offer from Alberto Barbera, and then there are the real puzzle pieces: “Wait, this got selected?” or “I didn’t even know this existed!” and “I guess Terrence Malick is still editing – sigh”. Normally the total number of selections will situate around 19 to 21 feature mark and as of late we can officially cross the name of Ruben Östlund off from this year’s bingo card.… Read the rest

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Break My Soul: Lapid Explores Compromised Artistry During Wartime

Essentially, YES, the latest film from Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid, is a portrait of an artist as a compromised man. Its innocuous title is essentially a rebuke of a contemporary reality relating to submission as the only real truth of the world. Collectively and individually, we no longer have the luxury of saying ‘no.’ Resistance is futile, we must comply. Destined for instant controversy and an eventual time capsule documenting Israel’s normalizing of barbarism, Lapid’s latest is an admonition of almost shocking import, an increasingly rare example of modern art speaking truth to power.… Read the rest

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Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Jude Skewers the Status Quo

Ownership is an unsaid key word in Kontinental ’25, the latest perambulating spasm from Romanian director Radu Jude, which navigates an intersection of self-accountability, property, language, and culture as precarious notions in a nation bulldozing itself into capitalism’s future. A more omnipresent notion is guilt, mainly regarding its main protagonist, an empathetic bailiff who finds her world turned upside down when a homeless man she was in the process of evicting commits suicide. What follows is an endless parade of guilt performance as a way to reach absolution, perhaps more so in a public realm than the personal.… Read the rest

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