Ioncinema

Bird on a Wire: The Past Haunts the Present in Mysius’ Thriller

For her third feature film, Histoires de la nuit (aka The Birthday Party), writer/director Léa Mysius once again plays with genre conventions, intrigued by characters who have desperately tried to outrun the ravages of a toxic past through a complete overhaul of their identity. Films which have utilized the same title, including the early William Friedkin film penned by Harold Pinter, or even last year’s Willem Dafoe led thriller, find such a titular party to be the stage for deadly or painful confrontation. The original French language title, Histoires de la nuit, more effectively channels the neo-noir motifs Mysius is essentially attempting to deconstruct through deliberate favoring of characterization over narrative, driven by a notable ensemble of actors who are all incredibly well-cast.… Read the rest

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Bent Knee, Limp Wrist: Dhont Explores Love at the Frontline

“We have so much to say and we shall never say it,” is one of the many grim rationalizations in Erich Maria Remarque’s classic anti-war text All Quiet on the Western Front, obviously one of the most aggressively loathed novels by Nazi Germany, where it was burned, banned, eradicated. Belgian director Lukas Dhont turns to the same period in an attempt to recuperate some of those things left unsaid from the perspectives of young gay men who served on the frontline. What might look like, on the surface, to be a familiar exercise about the horrific experiences of wartime on young men, historically, who were offered up as sacrifices, it is actually one of the few films centering queer characters as protagonists on the battlefront.… Read the rest

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The Palme d’Or winner and the Best Director winners are 2026 Cannes Critics’ Panel top graded films according to our twenty international film critics. Cristian Mungiu won his second Palme d’Or for Fjord and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland reign supreme while Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur (winner of the Grand Prix) finished second, and tied for third (with 3.4 average grade) we find Best Actor winning Coward by Lukas Dhont, Best Actress winning All of a Sudden by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Best Screenplay winning Notre Salut by Emmanuel Marre. Here are the final grades:

3.7 Fjord
3.7 Fatherland
3.6 Minotaur
3.4 Coward
3.4 All of a Sudden
3.4 Notre Salut

3.2 The Beloved
3.2 Paper Tiger
3.2 The Man I Love
3.1 Hope
3.0 The Black Ball
2.8 La Vie d’une femme
2.8 The Dreamed Adventure
2.8 Nagi Notes
2.7 Bitter Christmas
2.7 Gentle Monster
2.7 Moulin
2.6 Garance
2.5 The Unknown
2.4 Parallel Tales
2.3 Histoires de la Nuit
2.2 Sheep in the Box

Click on the grid below for a larger version and latest updates!… Read the rest

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Léa Mysius’s cinema as to this point focused on adolescence and sensory awakening, the body as transformation and instability but with her third feature she has moved into genre. She broke through with 2017’s Ava in the Critics’ Week and then Directors’ Fortnight with 2022’s Les Cinq Diables. Histoires de la Nuit aka The Birthday Party sees Hafsia Herzi, Benoît Magimel, Bastien Bouillon, Monica Bellucci and the young Tawba El Gharchi in a home invasion thriller about Thomas, Nora, and their daughter Ida — who live on a remote marshland, with limited social contact apart from their one neighbor.… Read the rest

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We has taken her time with her cinema first shoring up with Mein Stern (2001) which was a FIPRESCI Prize (Special Mention) winner at TIFF, then 2006’s Longing (a comp film at the Berlinale) with her 2017 third feature being showcased in the Un Certain Regard section. Almost a decade since Western, Valeska Grisebach continues in her tradition of slow cinema working with themes of observational storytelling, masculinity and social codes inside cultural displacement and European peripheries with The Dreamed Adventure. This is competition film #21 of 22.

The first of the final two films presented in the competition in what feels like dirty dish water slot – the last day of the fest does no film any justice.… Read the rest

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The Play’s the Thing: Ambrossi & Calvo Connect the Dots

“Dark love is the love that is never named,” wrote Federico Garcia Lorca in Sonnets of Dark Love whose unfinished manuscript of The Black Ball is the connective tissue between three gay men from three distinct periods – 1932, 1937, and 2017. A recuperation of the love that dare not speak its name is the central theme across these eras, charting the stymied progression of social acceptance regarding the queer community in Spain as a contemporary generation struggles to fill in the blank spaces left by systemic erasure. Directors Javier Amrbossi and Javier Calvo (whose previous feature was a musical comedy, Holy Camp!… Read the rest

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From Belgium, Lukas Dhont makes his third trip to the Croisette. 2018’s Girl premiered in Un Certain Regard section and won just about everything from the Caméra d’Or, Queer Palm and Best Performance (Victor Polster) in Un Certain Regard. Close won the second biggest prize in the competition section in 2022. Usually working with themes of masculinity, vulnerability and emotional repression, with identity, bodily experience and social pressures and standards, with Coward, his first period film. Set in 1916, during World War I, Pierre serves at the Belgian front alongside other comrades. Behind the trenches, the soldiers try to keep their spirits up.… Read the rest

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Virtual unknowns in non-Spanish speaking markets, Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo — often collectively known in Spain as “Los Javis” have brought their brand to queer storytelling with their musical sensibilities. Their only work to date had been the musical Holy Camp! (2017) and since then they had worked in television in themes exploring identity, self-invention, queer liberation, pop culture, faith, desire and emotional contradiction. The Black Ball aka La bola negra stars Álvaro Lafuente Calvo, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, and surprise hellos from Penélope Cruz, and Glenn Close, this is set in set in 1932, 1937, and 2017, exploring the inter-connected lives of three gay men.… Read the rest

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He has been owning Sundance since he premiered 1996 The Delta and three decades later the cinema of Ira Sachs has been expanding to new A list film fest destinations with his most recent drops at the Berlinale in for Passages in 2023 and Peter Hujar’s Day last year. Sachs returns to the Cannes comp for a second time – he was there in 2019 with Frankie and returns to the comp with The Man I Love. A pioneer of Queer cinema, he has long focused on emotional intimacy and romantic complexity, aging and personal reinvention alongside class, privilege and urban loneliness especially in his New York landscape.… Read the rest

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A relative newcomer to cinema with only the co-directed Zero Fucks Given (with Julie Lecoustre) selected for the 2021 edition of Critics’ Week, Emmanuel Marre’s cinema looks at marginalized lives andf reedom versus responsibility. With A Man of His Time aka Notre Salut is a 1940s period drama drawn from the filmmaker’s own family history, Un homme de son temps stars Swann Arlaud as Henri Marre — a man who arrives in Vichy carrying a political manuscript, convinced that publishing it will earn him a place in the new regime and, in doing so, save both France and himself from ruin.… Read the rest

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