‘Jeanne Du Barry’, ‘Monster’, ‘Occupied City’ – Deadline

UPDATED with latest: The Cannes Film Festival kicked off this year with opening-night movie Jeanne du Barry, with Deadline on the ground to watch all the key films. Here is a compilation of our reviews from the fest, which last year saw Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness win the coveted Palme d’Or on its way to an Oscar Best Picture nomination.

Check out the reviews below, click on the titles to read them in full, and keep checking back as we add more.

The Animal Kingdom

Section: Un Certain Regard
Director: Thomas Cailley
Screenwriters: Thomas Cailley, Pauline Munier
Cast: Romain Duris, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Paul Kircher
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s certainly a testament to Cailley’s spellbinding magic-realist fable that The Animal Kingdom can be enjoyed at face value without being battered over the head by subtext. Dig a bit deeper, though, and its rich and strange barrage of images and ideas just becomes more and more remarkable and compelling over time.

Anselm

Section: Special Screening
Director: Wim Wenders
Cast: Anselm Kiefer, Daniel Kiefer, Anton Wenders
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s hard to imagine seeing Anselm in any format other than 3D, and if it fails in broadening the reputation of its already internationally known subject, it’s an extraordinary post-pandemic endeavor that succeeds in reminding viewers of the thrill of being in the presence of great art.

Homecoming (La Retour)

Section: Competition
Director: Catherine Corsini
Cast: Esther Gohourou, Suzy Bemba, Aissatou Diallo Sagna, Lomane De Dietrich
Deadline’s takeaway: There is a brisker, tougher and more succinct story buried just out of sight in Homecoming, somewhere on the beach where the jet-skis blast through the waves. Not that there isn’t plenty here to enjoy, but too much time where we feel like Farah, running sand through her fingers and wondering if there’s anything to do in this village.

Jeanne Du Barry

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Maïwenn
Screenwriter: Teddy Lussi-Modeste
Cast: Maiwenn, Johnny Depp, Benjamin Lavernhe, Pierre Richard, Melvil Poupaud, Pascal Greggory, India Hair
Deadline’s takeaway: The film’s pageantry can’t quite cover up the fact that there isn’t much glue to the story, which unfolds as a series of vignettes, and feels more like we’re looking at scenes from a life in retrospect than being invested in watching a wild life being lived to the fullest.

Monster

Section: Competition
Director: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
Screenwriter: Sakamoto Yuji
Cast: Ando Sakura, Nagayama Eita, Kurokawa Soya, Hiiragi Hinata, Tanaka Yuko
Deadline’s takeaway: Monster represents Kore-Eda’s first movie since his 1995 debut feature Maborosi that the director has not had a screenplay credit on, but clearly with its humanist family-centered themes is right in this master craftsman’s wheelhouse.

Occupied City

Section: Special Screenings
Director: Steve McQueen
Text: Bianca Stigter
Narrator: Melanie Hyams
Deadline’s takeaway: We are entering a new era when few people with direct experience of the atrocities of WWII and the Holocaust remain alive. This era calls for a new kind of film about that time – a new way of preserving memory and cautioning us against a repetition of crimes against humanity driven by a racist ideology. Occupied City is that film.

Strange Way of Life

Section: Special Screening
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Director-screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Pedro Pascal, Ethan Hawke
Deadline’s takeaway: The ghosts of John Ford, Howard Hawks, John Sturges, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh and Sam Peckinpah may be surprised at the twist that this 73-year-old fanboy has given Strange Way of Life. That is because though the work of those directors is liberally addressed and tributed in different ways, the plot here is something you would never find in any of their classics.