Cannes Film Festival: Day 3: 18 May 2023
★★★★☆
Cannes Film Festival 2023: Day 3: 18 May 2023
Drama
Holy Spider (Ankabut-e moqaddas) (2022)
★★★★☆
Holy Spider, angrily written and directed by Ali Abbasi (Border), is a grisly, reality-based story of violence against women in a patriarchal, theocratic society.
Listen (2020)
★★★☆☆
Listen, Ana Rocha de Sousa’s powerful first film about forced adoption, is heart-rending and almost unbearable to watch at times.
Flee (2021)
★★★★★
Flee, by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, a documentary made with a blend of animation and archive footage tells an immensely powerful true story of a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark.
A Cop Movie (2021) (Una Película de Policías)
★★★★☆
Award-winning Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacio with A Cop Movie has made a brilliant, intriguing and innovative – and startlingly genre-unclassifiable – film, starring Mónica Del Carmen and Raúl Briones.
FÁTIMA (2020)
★★★☆☆
Fátima is a fascinating glimpse of Catholic faith, respectfully translated to the screen by Marco Pontecorvo.
Hope Gap (2019) – Streaming
★★★☆☆
William Nicholson’s Hope Gap benefits from a starry cast in the stagey story of the death of love in a middle-aged, middle-class marriage on the South Coast.
Border (2018)
★★★★★
Ali Abbassi’s Border (Gräns) is startlingly original, a magical fantasy (or is it?) that blends the real world with Nordic myth and folklore.
After the Wedding (2019)
★★★☆☆
In After the Wedding Bart Freundlich piles unlikely event on unlikely event on Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams in a weepie melodrama that reaches emotional overload.
BFI LFF 2019: The Four Ages of Woman
★★★★☆
Four films at the BFI London Film Festival paint a thought-provoking picture of British women not ‘having it all’ from teenage. coming of age, adulthood to middle age.
Sometimes Always Never (2018)
★★★★☆
Sometimes Always Never, directed by Carl Hunter, is a delightfully quirky film puzzle that revolves around Scrabble and that always-compelling national treasure Bill Nighy.
Cannes Film Festival 2019: Day 3
★★★★☆
Cannes Film Festival 2019: Day 3
Ben is Back (2018)
★★★☆☆
Julia Roberts plays a mother fighting to hold onto her relationship with her son in the face of his drug problems in writer/director Peter Hedges’ drama Ben is Back.
The Kindergarten Teacher (2018)
★★★★☆
The pursuit of artistic desire goes too far in writer/director Sara Colangelo’s slow burning drama The Kindergarten Teacher based on the 2014 Israeli film and showcasing a tremendous performance from Maggie Gyllenhaal.