POMO

The autobiographical story of a young Sorrentino? A nice film about growing up and the effect that a terrible family tragedy has on a young man’s adolescence. In the first half, even the quarrels and friction between the characters are lightened with typical Italian humour and the film is a likable view into a Neapolitan banker's family with funny characters and moments. The second half aptly depicts the emptiness and fumbling of a teenager who has had independence thrust upon him, without the support and love of his parents. Sorrentino with a clearly comprehensible story, without metaphorical embellishments or visual eccentricities. But also with a generally well-worn story.

A slick Hollywood adventure with nicely constructed ape characters featuring flawless digital rendering of their facial expressions. And a screenplay rich in plot development in a beautiful, varied setting. But toward the end, there are some things in it that don’t make sense, that don’t correspond to the preceding meticulous narrative and the building of relationships between the characters or their logical behaviour. It seems as if there wasn’t time to polish the last few pages of the script.

The story of Furiosa and her anticipated revenge, with more looks into the Citadel, is dramaturgically richer than the endless chase in Fury Road. Despite that, it’s not emotional even in the cruellest scenes and hints of feelings. And mainly it doesn’t have Tom Hardy. However, the character of Furiosa, who since childhood has been shaped by violence, inhumanity and filth, is a strong enough draw, the film’s dynamics are incredible from the opening scene and, together with the visuals and the details contained in them, those insane masks and costumes are absolutely amazing. A filmmaking highlight of scenography and creation of an original fantastical world. But I had trouble fully believing Chris Hemsworth as the demented villain.

An extraordinarily gentle, quiet and slow film with a pure melancholic soul. It starts out as a profile of overpopulated, rain-soaked Mumbai with a look into the lives of two friends living there and later shifts to a calmer, quieter place. As the debut fictional film of an experienced documentary filmmaker, All We Imagine as Light reminds us of the interest and thoughtfulness with which original, high-quality Indian dramas can tell us about the feelings of their characters. The socially inhospitable setting and the difficulty of living life in it adds depth to their impressiveness. To be happy here means living in an illusion. [Cannes FF]

If you don’t read anything about Anora in advance or see the trailer, it is flawlessly unpredictable not only in terms of plot, but also in terms of genre. The situation in which the protagonist finds herself easily varies in its degree of seriousness, shifting from tensely comedic to cruelly dramatic. The film masterfully straddles this thin line, eliciting hearty laughter while holding us in suspense and apprehension. Sean Baker is the Steven Spielberg of independent film, an extraordinarily imaginative screenwriter and director with a unique feel for sociology and the ability to tell the stories of people and their souls like no one else. Anora is both an exceptional comedy and a drama that bares the heart from a perspective that you wouldn’t expect. An absolute knockout with extraordinary emotion. Thank you. [Cannes FF]

Don’t be put off by the shallow premise and the B-movie stylisation. The reflection of the rules of television show business is deliberately superficial. Those past their prime must be replaced with young people with perfect bodies. And because of that, celebrities are willing to do anything to their own bodies. For roughly the first one hundred minutes, I didn’t want to believe that such a cheaply stylised trash flick could appear in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival. Of course, Coralie Fargeat has a grander plan for us and takes it in unexpected directions with the inner psychological conflict of the main character and, in terms of genre, with a nod to Peter Jackson’s early splatter flicks. This is taken almost to the point of a transcendental body horror spectacle in which the director doesn’t shy away from humorously using the music of Herrmann from Vertigo and Strauss from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Demi Moore is cast perfectly in the role of a fading celebrity, and Margaret Qualley excels as the up-and-coming star of a television show.  Qualley, incidentally, is enjoying a truly golden period in her career, as she also appeared in Lanthimos’s new film Kinds of Kindness in this year’s Cannes competition. Tarantino deserves thanks for discovering her! If the film hadn’t worked so clearly and predictably with B-movie elements in those first hundred minutes, I would have given it five stars! ___ It occurs to me that female directors are starting to show far more female nudity in their films than their male counterparts. I can cite two examples of this phenomenon just from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, namely Les Femmes au balcon and this film, The Substance, where we see both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s breasts up close, not to mention their curves in leggings. Yum! [Cannes FF]

An entertaining portrait of young Donald Trump as a go-getting property developer with an enormous appetite for business. Not as a politician. Trumps first wife, Ivana, his father, mafioso Tony Salerno, Andy Warhol and especially attorney Roy Cohn, who helped Trump break into the real-estate elite of New York – the important characters in Trump’s life are depicted with refreshing authenticity and documentary-style veracity, in 4:3 television format, often even with VHS tape noise in the picture, giving us that exact feeling of the eighties and nineties that we haven’t had in any feature film for a long time. Director Ali Abbasi takes the characters on a journey through the megalomaniacal American Dream, without pointing a finger at any of them, but rather taking them as people with their own specific priorities and weaknesses. Sebastian Stan is good as Trump and Jeremy Strong is excellent as Cohn. Just don’t expect Scorsese, who’s better suited to the glamorous veneer of Casino. The Apprentice has the nature of a made-for-TV movie. [Cannes FF]

A stultifying and unappealing directorial debut. Needlessly drawn-out scenes with feeble directing (half-baked details in the actors’ behaviour), empty and restrained psychological moments with the main character’s monologues, which don’t take anything anywhere and only to serve to further drag out the film. Trying for a mysterious atmosphere where there is none, dream sequences that we’ve already seen from David Lynch, copying of Memento. And an unoriginal plot with an uninteresting main character. [Cannes FF]

Sorrentino’s visual poetry paying tribute to Naples and feminine beauty (what else?). The first third of the film offers a nice exposition of the characters, from which the writer played by Gary Oldman stands out not only in terms of acting, but also in terms of his nature. Later in the film, there are more and more fragments of emotion whose context and significance in the plot elude me, thus diminishing the enthusiasm for the form of their presentation. What the hell was that “beauty and the beast” character of the ugly priest fingering Parthenope in the church supposed to mean?? Two and a half stars. [Cannes FF]

A young, novice actress’s whining that shooting an intense scene for a butter commercial with Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando ruined her life. Without mentioning that it also made her a global star (which she definitely didn’t want). The first half of the film with Matt Dillon as Brando provides an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the filming of Last Tango in Paris. In the second half, however, Being Maria is a boring, artificially dramatic film that uses a well-known event from the history of cinema to raise the profile of its creator in the post-Me-Too era. The only thing that we learn in the second half of the film is that Maria Schneider let another guy tempt her into heroin and that she found refuge in a lesbian relation (which wasn’t her first). [Cannes FF]