REVIEWSetc.

The word closure is one of the most dishonest words in the English language. It implies that grief has a door, and that the right conversation, the right apology, the right moment of witnessed pain, can shut it. Reed Van Dyk's Atonement knows this. It is a film about a man who wants closure and a woman who has learned to live without it, and it is wise enough to understand that those are not the same journey and cannot be resolved into one. That wisdom, more than anything els

After three days of Cannes, of competition films and docudramas and animated grief and Farhadi losing the thread, we walked into day four needing something that would simply, generously, let us feel something uncomplicated. Words of Love is that film. It is not trying to be Fatherland. It is not trying to be anything other than what it is: a warm, fluent, emotionally honest family drama about a girl who wants to know her father and a mother who does not know how to give her t

We reached for each other's hand about twenty minutes into Tangles. Not dramatically, not consciously. Just the quiet, involuntary reach of two people sitting in the dark who have both known what it is to watch someone they love begin, very slowly, to go somewhere they cannot follow. Tangles, the fourth film of our third day at Cannes and the eleventh of the festival, is that kind of film. The kind that finds you where you actually live and does not apologize for it. Leah Nel

We have been waiting for Fatherland. Not this specific film exactly, but the feeling of it. The particular gravity of a Pawlikowski picture arriving at Cannes in black and white with Sandra Hüller in it, the sense that something has been made with absolute certainty about what it wants to be and absolute patience in becoming it. After three days and nine films, some of them beautiful and many of them wanting, Fatherland arrived as our tenth film of the festival like a deep br

There is a particular kind of political cinema that trusts its audience to feel the weight of history without being told what that history was. Manuela Martelli's Chile '76 was that kind of film, and so is The Meltdown, her tense and quietly devastating follow-up. We are in 1992. Pinochet has been voted out. Democracy has been formally restored. A child named Ines is spending time at her grandparents' Andean ski resort, and a teenage girl has disappeared, and everyone around

Day three of Cannes begins with the heaviest subject we have encountered at this festival so far. In October 2020, Samuel Paty, a French schoolteacher, was murdered by an Islamist terrorist after teaching a class on freedom of expression and the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. He was 47 years old. He had asked students who might be offended to temporarily leave the room. He was a man trying to do his job thoughtfully, in a country whose founding principles he believed in, and those p

We have been watching Jane Schoenbrun come into themselves across three films now, and it has been one of the genuinely thrilling things to witness in contemporary American cinema. We're All Going to the World's Fair was a coming out, tender and strange and made from the inside of a particular kind of loneliness. I Saw the TV Glow was a wound, one of the most viscerally upsetting films about gender dysphoria we have ever seen, wearing its metaphor like armor. And now, at the

Film five of our second day at Cannes, and we arrived at A Woman's Life running on fumes and hoping for something that would justify staying awake. Léa Drucker delivered. She always does. The film around her delivered about two thirds of the way, which on a long festival day is more than enough to leave an impression. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet's sophomore feature follows Gabrielle, a facial reconstruction surgeon in a crumbling French public hospital who is also, simultaneou

We are continuing our second day at Cannes with Ashes, and we left the theater with the particular tiredness that comes not from a bad film exactly but from a film that asks you to do most of the work yourself and then does not give you enough to work with. Diego Luna's fourth feature as director is an intimate, well-intentioned portrait of a young Mexican woman navigating immigrant life between Madrid and Barcelona, based on an acclaimed novel by Brenda Navarro. The source m

By the third film of our second day at Cannes, we had begun to wonder whether this festival was going to give us something that truly settled into us, something quiet enough to hear. The Electric Kiss was too noisy with competing intention. In Waves was too smooth, too surface. And then we sat down with Nagi Notes, and the festival finally exhaled. Koji Fukada's film takes place in a rural Japanese town 630 kilometers west of Tokyo, a place so small that everybody knows each

We have in particular fondness for films that open by doing something you have never seen before. Butterfly Jam opens with Barry Keoghan feeding his friends a jam made of insects. He is beaming. He is proud. The friends eat it without complaint. And we were, immediately and completely, in. Kantemir Balagov's English language debut is the kind of film that announces itself as an event before it has earned the right to be one, and then, quietly and unexpectedly, earns it anyway

We have a particular weakness for animation that treats itself as art rather than product, that uses the freedom of the drawn line to go somewhere live action cannot follow. So we arrived at In Waves, Phuong Mai Neguyen's adaptation of AJ Dungo's graphic memoir, with genuine anticipation. The images delivered everything we hoped for. The story delivered something we have seen too many times before, dressed up in colors too beautiful for the clichés underneath. The film is, at

We are in Cannes. We have walked the Croisette, felt the particular electricity of a festival that has been doing this longer than any of us have been alive, and sat down in the dark for the first film of the year's most anticipated two weeks. The opening night slot at Cannes carries a specific kind of weight. It is not always given to the best film in the program but it is always given to a film that is meant to set the tone, to announce what kind of festival this is going t

As we're gearing up for the latest Cannes Film Festival to start, I figured now would be a perfect time to celebrate the upcoming event by talking about the festival. What exactly am I going to discuss? I could've jot down potential films I think people should be on the lookout for as next season's award players, or write down what I think could win the coveted Palm d'Or prize this year. Instead I think it'd be more appropriate to discuss my top five personal favorites that c