Stories in Motion

Cannes Day Eleven: The Party No One Should Have Attended

Film fifty-two of the festival and Léa Mysius' The Birthday Party is the competition disappointment of the final days. A home invasion thriller with Herzi, Magimel and Bellucci that explains itself into irrelevance. We talk about what the Bellucci subplot promises and doesn't deliver, why Herzi deserved a better film, and what happened to the renegade filmmaker who made The Five Devils.

Cannes Day Eleven: She Has No Fear

Film fifty-one of the festival and Grisebach's The Dreamed Adventure returns to the slow Eastern European Western with a woman at its centre and a genuine discovery in Yana Radeva. The first half is atmospheric and alive. The second half doesn't fully deliver on what the first built. We talk about the film's magnificent faces, what Grisebach does uniquely well, and why the ending lands lighter than thirty years of buried history should allow.

Cannes Day Eleven: She Has Had Enough

We open day eleven with Maria Martínez Bayona's debut The End of It, in which Rebecca Hall plays a 250-year-old former provocateur who has decided she wants to die, and her death is her final artwork. The high concept is genuinely fascinating, the birthday party sequence is one of the best scenes at the festival, and Hall is extraordinary throughout. We talk about why the film can't quite match her commitment, what the bones room says about immortality and the self, and why this is still worth seeing despite everything it leaves on the table.

Cannes Day Ten: The First Kiss Stops Time

Film forty-nine of the festival and Lukas Dhont's Coward is his most mature and most tender film to date. A queer love story at the WWI Belgian front, two young men finding each other in an environment designed to make that impossible, and a first kiss that is among the most purely romantic gestures the movies have produced in years. We talk about what Dhont gets right this time that Girl and Close only reached for, and why Emmanuel Macchia is one of the great debut performances at this Cannes.

Cannes Day Ten: The Mirror Scene

Film forty-eight of the festival and Bertrand Mandico's Roma Elastica is a kaleidoscope of Fellini riffs, carnival grotesques, feminist cannibal peplums, and one extraordinary scene in which Marion Cotillard turns before a mirror and briefly makes everything feel necessary. We talk about what Mandico does that nobody else does, why it works in flashes and exhausts in bulk, and why Cotillard is incapable of giving a bad performance even inside a deliberately incoherent film.