REVIEWSetc.

Let us be honest with you. We ended the last film of our third day at Cannes with Parallel Tales, and we are tired, and this film did not especially help. We say this not to be glib about a filmmaker of Farhadi's genuine stature, whose best work ranks among the finest cinema of the last twenty years. We say it because the gap between what this film is and what it could have been, with this cast, with this source material, in competition at this festival, is wide enough to be

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

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 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

There are books you read once and carry forever, lodged somewhere between the ribs. Albert Camus' The Stranger was that book for us, the one that arrived at exactly the right age when the world felt arbitrary and grief felt impossible to perform on cue. Meursault was not a villain. He was just a man who could not make his insides match what the outside demanded. We understood him completely. We were young. The sun had never tried to kill anyone we knew. And yet. So when Fra