Dan + Julia Reyes

Day five of Cannes and John Travolta opened it. We mean this literally. The man walked onto the stage before the screening and the room gave him the kind of reception that belongs to a different era of stardom, warm and unreserved and a little nostalgic for something it could not quite name. The ten-minute montage of his career that preceded the introduction probably helped. "Stayin' Alive". "You're the One That I Want". Tony Manero. Vincent Vega. There are maybe five film careers in the last...

We ended our fourth day at Cannes, our eighth film of the day and our twentieth of the festival, with a film that had the bones of something genuinely affecting and the editing of something that could not quite decide what it wanted to be. La Frappe arrives with a compelling premise, two remarkable lead performances, and a visual ambition that announces a director worth watching. It also arrives with a pacing problem, a screenplay that keeps its characters at arm's length, and a shaky cam...

The film opens with Léa Seydoux at a piano, playing a stilted, affecting cover of "Would I Lie to You". It is a beautiful choice and a precise one, because the question the song asks is the question the Gentle Monster will spend its runtime refusing to answer cleanly. We watched our seventh film of the fourth day at Cannes with the particular alertness of an audience that knows something terrible is coming and cannot look away from the ordinary life assembled in front of it, the Munich...