Along with the shiny gold button given to badge-holders celebrating Cannes’ 75th glorious anniversary, this year’s festival can justly be hailed as a return to normality after the Covid-19 pandemic canceled it in 2020 and severely truncated it in 2021. Whether it’s...

Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret’s film is a solid debut indebted to the impressive performances of its child actors.

WINNER OF THE CAMERA D’OR IN CANNES FOR BEST FIRST FILM.  ‘War Pony’, from first-time directing duo Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, deeply immerses the viewer in the roughshod coming-of-age drama of two teenage boys who live on the fringes of the law on a Native American reservation in South Dakota.

Director Serge Bozon offers up a dour, quirky Don Juan (played by Tahar Rahim) for the age of #MeToo.

Sergei Loznitsa’s latest archival cinema essay, inspired by W.G. Sebald’s book and organized within a quasi-symphonic structure, lays out the brutality of fire bombings in World War II and the ways the war machine refused to acknowledge the human costs.

Thomas Salvador’s beguiling second feature innovatively combines a realistic first half with fantasy elements in the second without losing its earlier spirit, achieved through unpretentious storytelling, a superb visual eye and excellent special effects.

Magisterial in the manner of 19th century epic novels and visually influenced by that era’s photography, Hlynur Pálmason’s third feature is a stunning, psychologically rich tale set against Iceland’s awe-inspiring landscapes.

CANNES GRAND PRIX – JOINTLY AWARDED, REVIEWED MAY 26 Set in Central America, Claire Denis’ second English-language film is more straightforward than most of her works but is unmistakably hers in the way she suspends her complex characters in the sweaty grasp of a tropical setting.

Prize-winning French writer-director Léonor Serraille plots a multi-decade family saga in her ambitious but uneven second feature ‘Mother and Son’.

Newcomers Marie Perennes and Simon Depardon’s documentary looks at feminists across France whose posters and slogans try to reclaim public spaces and denounce sexism, violence and femicides.

Michelle Williams reunites with feted indie writer-director Kelly Reichardt for ‘Showing Up’, a modest but moving portrait of frustrated artists and dysfunctional families.

Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu’s first film lensed in South Korea, about a well-intentioned gang who sell motherless babies, is a minor work with only distant echoes of his 2018 Palm d’Or winner Shoplifters, but still imbued with the filmmaker’s militant humanism.

Louis Garrel’s latest feature as an actor-director is a romp reminiscent of the crime comedies from Stanley Donen.

Swiss director Lionel Baier directs a comedy-drama about a mother, her son and the European Union’s refugee crisis that’s unexpected, to say the least.