Ioncinema

The last minute addition to the competition line-up (we imagine it was the pending Neon deal) James Gray is no stranger to the competition section in Cannes making his six trip there today. The Yards (2000), We Own the Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008), The Immigrant (2013), Armageddon Time (2022) all showcased here — all show his obsessive preference for themes of family loyalty versus personal freedom, American dream as illusion and a certain emotional repression and doomed longing. We get more or less the same with Paper Tiger. Starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, this is about two brothers pursue the American Dream but get entangled in a dangerous Russian mafia scheme that terrorizes their family, testing their bond as betrayal becomes possible.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

In the Forests of the Night: Gray Frames Fearful Symmetry

Had James Gray been prolific during the glory days of New Hollywood from the late 1960s through the 1970s, he would have been cemented as an iconoclast among the likes of a Scorsese or Schrader, celebrated for his formidable studies of men defined and then broken by the hubris of daring to dream in the impossible shadows of a doomed world. Hearkening back to his first trio of films, Little Odessa (1994), The Yards (2000), and We Own the Night (2007), Gray brings his element of mythical tragedy down upon the heads of two brothers embroiled by greed and circumstance during the Age of Excess in 1986 Queens, New York.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

In a cinema that has worked with themes of escalating moral and psychological pressures, corruption of institutions and personal ethics, with a dash of emotional obsession and destructive intimacy, Rodrigo Sorogoyen makes his first trip to the competition section with The Beloved. The Beasts wowed the Croisette in 2022 – this was oddly programmed in the Cannes Premiere section. Starring Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo, this follows the father-daughter relationship between acclaimed film director Esteban Martínez and middling actress Emilia, as they reunite on set after several years of estrangement, exploring a film crew shooting a motion picture in Fuerteventura titled Desierto, in turn set in 1930s Western Sahara.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Sorogoyen Visualizes Dysfunction & Creative Catharsis

Although it’s a familiar trope, an absent father utilizing a complex ruse to reunite with a child abandoned from a previous relationship, Rodrigo Sorogoyen distills potential extremes into robust parameters depending heavily on shifting visual formats to display fluctuating emotional conflicts roiling in the depths. Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo (Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, 2024) spar as a father and daughter tossed together, arguably on a misguided whim bordering on hubris from the estranged parent, as they commence working on a film, neither quite realizing how tension will be alleviated or potential expiation received.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

The VIP jacket wearing Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of Cannes’ most regular presences, with seven films selected over the years and one Palme d’Or under his belt. So far he has showcased 2001’s Distance, 2004’s Nobody Knows (which won Best Actor), 2009’s Air Doll (an Un Certain Regard selection), 2013’s Like Father, Like Son, 2015’s Our Little Sister, 2016’s After the Storm, 2018’s Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters, 2022’s Broker (which won Best Actor) and finally 2023’s Monster which landed Best Screenplay. A cinema that is not afraid to move into sci-fi or twists genres, the Japanese filmmaker has often explored the fragility and reinvention of family, life from the childhood perspective and emotional inheritance and compassion within social neglect.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK: Koreeda Explores Cruise Control with AI

Somehow, despite being set in the ‘not too distant future,’ Hirokzau Kore-eda’s twee take on robotic children in Sheep in the Box manages to seem like an anachronistic blast from the past. Its title, lifted from the classic 1943 children’s novella The Little Prince, is a thematic reference to how imagination allows us to explore what really matters is on the inside. With a plot usually utilized in nightmarish genre films with robots or cloning (think B-movie drivel, such as 2004’s Godsend), a Japanese couple mourning the loss of their kidnapped son from two years prior are headhunted for a promotional offer to receive his likeness duplicated as a completely passable humanoid robot.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Only Mothers Left Alive: Maurel Funnels Dysfunctional Family Matters

You can’t go home again and it’s a disaster to even try, especially as evidenced in Valentina Maurel’s Forever Your Maternal Animal, a dark comedy of sorts about a willfully oblivious family who could serve as a case study for attachment theory issues. Essentially a tale of a nuclear family who have long since dispensed with any sense of selflessness as regards their commitment to one another, Maurel focuses on the prodigal Elsa, returning to Costa Rica as a way to flee some relationship issues she’s experienced whilst studying abroad in Europe.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Paradise by the Dashboard Lights: Le Gall Finds Love in a Hopeless Place

A self-described ‘wayward photographer’ influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, French writer/director Pierre Le Gall unleashes a vulnerable, semi-autobiographical take on experiencing an all-consuming love jones with Flesh and Fuel. Previously working on short films which also dealt with characters building to a confrontation with their emotional realities despite employing self-defense mechanisms to avoid them, Le Gall mines the innate loneliness of truck drivers, a specific occupational experience further exacerbated by queerness. While it’s a constantly shifting experience where human interactions, sexual and otherwise, are limited to breaks along their routes, an omnipresent sense of alienation further deepens the parameters of the closet for a protagonist who, for the first time, glimpses the dazzling possibilities in living out loud.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Happy-Go-Mucky: Pinell Finds Purpose with a Woman in Transition

“No one ever wanted her forever,” is a partial description of the titular character in Gail Parent’s 1972 novel Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York, widely regarded as the Jewish gender inverse of Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint. Parent’s novel, and character descriptions, are strikingly similar to the eponymous Shana of Lila Pinell‘s latest feature, a young woman who finds herself in a comedic sort of maelstrom which might finally force her out of an era defined by questionable choices in life and love. It would seem no one wants her forever, but Shana is a woman still discovering what or whom she might actually want for herself.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

From Austria, Marie Kreutzer breaks into the Palme d’Or competition for a very first time after having competed in the Un Certain Regard section (and winning) for 2022’s Corsage. Her previous works include The Fatherless (2011’s Berlinale), Gruber Is Leaving (2015’s TIFF), We Used to Be Cool (2016) and The Ground Beneath My Feet (2019’s Berlinale – Golden Bear comp). Starring Léa Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve, Gentle Monster centers on two women quietly eroding beneath the weight of caregiving and compromise. Lucy abandons her ambitions as a concert pianist after relocating to the countryside with her husband Philip, whose burnout has reshaped the family dynamic, while Elsa, a police investigator, struggles to balance the pressures of her work with caring for her aging father.… Read the rest

Continue reading…