Stay Through the Credits

We close day six with Jim Queen, a raunchy French animated feature about a disease that turns gay men straight. It is not deep. It is not trying to be. The audience we watched it with laughed like people being seen for the first time in a long time, and on the last film of a very long day at Cannes, that was exactly enough. Full day six wrap from the Croisette.

Film thirty-three of the festival and Na Hong-jin is finally back. Hope is a Korean monster movie with the largest budget in Korean film history, one extraordinary hour of pure brawling joy, and a CGI creature design that looks like it belongs in a different decade. We talk about what the first hour gets absolutely right, where the film falls apart, and whether Michael Fassbender playing a motion-capture monster in Competition at Cannes is genius or madness.

Film thirty-two of the festival and Yukiko Sode's All The Lovers In The Night is the slowest and most interior film we've seen at Cannes this year. A woman who has made a life out of not being known. A physics teacher who explains how light travels. Shot on 16mm in Tokyo and utterly unhurried. We talk about what the film earns and what it occasionally costs, and why Misato Morita might be the stealth performance of the festival. 

Film thirty-one of the festival and Judith Godrèche's debut feature adapts Annie Ernaux's most intimate novel with the knowledge of someone who lived a version of it. She cast her own daughter in the lead. The film is assured, disturbing, and exactly as personal as it needs to be. We talk about the lightbulb shot, Tess Barthélemy's extraordinary performance, and what this debut says about Godrèche as a filmmaker. 

Film thirty of the festival and Jeanne Herry's Another Day is one of the most quietly honest addiction dramas in years. Adèle Exarchopoulos plays a functioning alcoholic over eight years in Paris without a single false note. We talk about what the film gets right, where the ending gets too tidy, and why this performance deserves to be in the awards conversation. 

Film twenty-nine of the festival and László Nemes brings his aesthetic brilliance to the story of French Resistance hero Jean Moulin. The photography is extraordinary, Lellouche is excellent, and the film's central idea about ordinary courage is genuinely original. So why does it flatline so often? We talk about what Moulin gets right, what it leaves on the table, and how it compares to Son of Saul. 

Film twenty-eight of the festival and Dupieux's Full Phil is his most unexpectedly sincere film yet. Woody Harrelson, Kristen Stewart, a clogged toilet, Tim and Eric as Nobel-winning mad scientists, and somewhere underneath all of it, a real family drama. We talk about what makes Dupieux's absurdist universe so distinct and why this Hollywood cast fits inside it perfectly. 

We open day six with Katharina Rivilis' I'll Be Gone in June, a German exchange student in New Mexico in the weeks after 9/11. Shot from memory, built on a breakout performance by Naomi Cosma, and one of the most quietly spellbinding debuts at this year's festival. We talk about what it means to watch a national tragedy from the outside, and why this film says things about that moment that most American films could not.

Film twenty-six of the festival and James Gray's Paper Tiger is the one we will be talking about when Cannes is over. Queens, 1986, the Russian mob, Adam Driver in a career-best performance, and Scarlett Johansson growing more hollowed out with every scene. Gray has made his masterpiece and we are still not over it.

Film twenty-five of the festival and Sorogoyen's The Beloved is one of the most satisfying films in Competition. Bardem plays a famous director trying to mend things with the daughter he abandoned, and the film uses a chaotic desert shoot as the arena for thirteen years of unfinished business. We talk about the fish stew scene, Bardem's masterful controlled performance, and why this is exactly what the making-of-a-movie genre needed.