REVIEWSetc.

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

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

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

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