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What the critics say
Sight and Sound round-up and Wednesday 21 May (below)
There are experiences in Cannes you’ll never forget. One of those happened this Wednesday. The red carpet was still soggy from a thunderstorm that had just cleared and the Croisette was free of the usual celebrity-thirsty crowds as the film that was about to premiere – Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident – didn’t have any big stars. Over the first week of the festival there was much talk of whether the 64-year-old Iranian director would attend the premiere but here he was, walking up the red stairs.
Panahi was subject to a travel and filmmaking ban in 2010 and has not presented any of his clandestinely made films at festivals since then. He has been imprisoned twice by the Iranian regime, most recently in July 2022, when he protested against the detention of two fellow filmmakers. He last attended Cannes in 2003 for Crimson Gold and hasn’t personally presented any of the six features he’s made since 2010 at their festival premieres.
So to witness Panahi enter the festival’s largest and grandest cinema, the Lumière Theatre to a roar of applause and cheers from across the packed orchestra and balcony was quite something. The film itself concerns revenge – the lengths four former political prisoners might go to enact it on someone they suspect of being their torturer. In a Cannes edition when miserablism has been the bludgeoning mode of far too many films, here was a road movie which balances humour alongside the horrors of imprisonment.
Standing ovations after films at Cannes are often gushingly reported in headlines but the one that greeted the credits of It Was Just an Accident was one of the most humbling and joyous occasions I’ve been present at. Over the applause and with a noticeably shaky voice, Panahi dedicated the screening to filmmakers oppressed by the regime asking, “How can I rejoice? How can I be free while in Iran there are still so many of the greatest directors and actresses of Iranian cinema, who, because they participated in and supported the demonstrators during the Femme Liberté movement, are today prevented from working?”
Later he told Reuters: “When you imprison an artist, you’re giving them material, you’re handing them new ideas. You’re opening up a whole new world to them”.
Jury president Juliette Binoche and her fellow judges may well take note that Panahi has never won the Palme d’Or. That said, there have been other strong contenders this year – and mostly from less renowned directors. Below, the S&S team in Cannes detail our highlights from the competition and beyond so far.
Thomas Flew, Editorial Assistant
Palme d’Or prediction: I worry that Two Prosecutors may get lost amid the noise of a brash competition selection; it’s not as eye-popping or as ear-deafening as some of the other titles, but its precise recounting of a well-meaning prosecutor’s pursuit of justice in the grim Great Terror era USSR was gripping and, ultimately, terrifying. Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa’s first fiction film for a near-decade would be a worthy (and politically apposite) winner.
Discovery: An impossibly attractive American biker (Alexander Skarsgård) and a meek and scrawny traffic warden (Harry Melling) start an odd couple dom-sub relationship in Harry Lighton’s treat of a debut feature Pillion. Don’t let the pierced penises and assless latex outfits fool you, this wonderfully British romantic comedy has a tender side, too.
Katie McCabe, Reviews Editor
Palme d’Or prediction: Cannes loves films about filmmaking, and Joachim Trier’s beautifully crafted Sentimental Value, about a self-absorbed director’s fraught relationship with his adult children, got big, well-earned laughs from audiences for its cinephilic in-jokes. Beyond its jibes at Netflix, Trier’s film is a sincere exploration of the lasting damage an artist’s ego can have on their family. It’s a Palme contender for the performances alone, with Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård matching each other’s dry, skewering humour as a father and daughter circling artistic reconciliation.
Discovery: Well-executed film adaptations of video games are a rarity, but Kawamura Genki seems to have cracked the code with Exit 8, an agonising psychological horror about a man trapped in a time loop in an underground passage of the Tokyo metro. It turns the repetitive style of the original walking simulator game into a surreal source of cinematic tension, breaking things up with jump scares as ‘The Lost Man’ descends further into an existential crisis.
Isabel Stevens, Managing Editor
Palme d’Or prediction: Looking beyond Panahi’s revenge thriller, the boldest slice of art came from Oliver Laxe’s ear-pounding dystopian desert trip, Sirât, but I would be equally happy if the jury anointed Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, an entrancing and sprawling saga about a widowed academic on the run from two hitmen in a 1970s Brazil cowering under dictatorship.
Discovery: Splitsville is an open marriage comedy which fires jokes as rapidly as one of its libidinous characters swaps bed partners. It also has a fabulous set-piece fight sequence
The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson’s latest creation premiered at Cannes last week and lands in UK cinemas today. The film, set in “the melting pot of the Near East”, focuses on Anatole ‘Zsa Zsa’ Korda, an eccentric tycoon “on a quest to conjure power and transport wonders and further fortune from the sands”. The role, played by and written for Benicio del Toro, “makes the patriarchs of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) look like pipsqueaks”, writes Nick Bradshaw. While Anderson is known for his ensembles, here he “levers a top-dog protagonist”. “It might be Anderson’s densest confection yet; it’s certainly his most headlong and action-packed, with Korda embodying not so much the great man as the superman theory of cinema on his entrepreneurial mission impossible.”
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
In his eighth outing as Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise squares up against AI in what is likely the last instalment of the Mission: Impossible series. But The Final Reckoning isn’t just about fighting AI, writes Henry K Miller, it’s about watching Cruise defy what has been “his nemesis, all along”: gravity. Unsurprisingly, the film features a selection of spectacular set pieces. “The big moments in Dead Reckoning were on the surface: cars and trains. In Final Reckoning, by contrast, we go above and below: in a shipwrecked submarine beneath the Barents Sea, then up in the air, in a chase that takes place between ancient biplanes precisely because they haven’t been caught up in the diabolical world wide web.” The Final Reckoning “ties things up pretty conclusively”, Miller observes. “But can it really be the end? As we hear more than once, ‘nothing is written’.”
Eddington
Ari Aster’s Covid movie punches in all directions and misses
Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone’s comic talents are lost to one-dimensional roles in a misguided pandemic satire filled with dated jokes and disingenuous political messaging.
Sirât
Oliver Laxe’s thrilling desert parable lets the music take control
A father in search of his lost daughter enters a world of illegal Moroccan desert raves in the Spanish director’s teeth-rattling sensorial experiment.
