Stay Through the Credits

ilm fourteen of the festival and Reed Van Dyk's Atonement is the most morally serious American film we've seen at Cannes. A Marine. An Iraqi mother. A knock on the door ten years later. We talk about what the film gets right, where it stumbles, and why Hiam Abbass is giving one of the performances of the festival. Day four dispatch from the Croisette.

We open day four with Words of Love, Rudi Rosenberg's Un Certain Regard family drama about a girl chasing a father who won't answer the door. It's warm, it's funny, it's not trying to win the Un Certain Regard prize, and after three days of Cannes we needed it more than we expected. First dispatch from day four on the Croisette.

Film Twelfth of the festival and Farhadi's Parallel Tales is our biggest disappointment so far. Not a disaster, just a misfire, which from a filmmaker of his caliber hurts just as much. We talk voyeurism, Kieslowski, wasted greatness, and one genuinely interesting idea about sound that arrives too late. Day three dispatch from the Croisette.

Film eleven of the festival and Tangles wrecked us. Leah Nelson's animated debut about a daughter watching her mother disappear to Alzheimer's is funny and drawn in monochrome and completely devastating. Julia Louis-Dreyfus gives one of the best voice performances we've heard in years. We talk about grief, animation, and why we walked out still holding hands.

Film ten of the festival and Pawel Pawlikowski's Fatherland is the one. Thomas Mann, his daughter Erika, a road trip through a country trying to forget what it did, and Sandra Hüller doing things on screen we still cannot fully explain. Our highest score of Cannes so far. Day three dispatch from the Croisette.

Film two of day three and Manuela Martelli's The Meltdown gives us one of the festival's most haunting central images: a country that tried to ship its trauma to a world expo and watch it dissolve. We talk about post-Pinochet Chile, a missing girl in the snow, and why a perfect metaphor sometimes needs a sharper thriller around it. Day three dispatch from the Croisette.

We open day three with Forsaken, Vincent Garenq's docudrama about the murder of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty. The subject is essential, Antoine Reinartz is extraordinary, and yet the film keeps reaching for thriller when it should be reaching for truth. We talk about what this story needed and what it got. First dispatch from day three on the Croisette.

We close out our second day at Cannes with Jane Schoenbrun's wildest, warmest film yet. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is about slashers, orgasms, Gillian Anderson in a fedora, and the radical act of letting yourself feel good. We talk about why this might be the most joyful film at the festival so far. Day two wrap from the Croisette.

Film six of our second day and A Woman's Life gives us the festival's best performance so far in Léa Drucker, wrapped inside a film that starts vast and slowly shrinks. We talk about obsession, facial reconstruction, and why the second half can't quite keep up with the first. More from the Croisette still to come.

Film five of our second day at Cannes, and Ashes is the one that frustrates most. Diego Luna's immigrant drama strips itself so bare it forgets to have a pulse. We talk about what the film owed its source material, what it owed Anna Díaz, and why restraint without depth is just emptiness. More dispatches from the Croisette still to come.