This has been one of the strongest selections in years, with crowd-pleasers like "Leto" and fully-accomplished films like "Dogman" making an impression on festival-goers. The addition of press screenings to the schedule grid, better organized secured access to the Palais also helped make this seventy-first edition of the Cannes Festival an exceptional one. The jury annoyed and frustrated me by giving Jean-Luc Godard

Everything about “Capharnaum” looked good, for a while. Nadine Labaki, its talented filmmaker, the trailer (“some squirt with killer looks stands in front of a judge in a Beirut court and tells him, “I want to sue my parents for having given birth to me”), the promise of a social drama examining Lebanese society, a film by a woman, going up for the top prize in Cannes. Labaki set out to make a movie about childhood. When young Zain

There is much going on in David Robert Mitchell’s new film “Under the silver lake,” one of the most thematically-dense feats of hardboiled storytelling of this 71st Cannes Festival. In this highly-entertaining “Lake,” to be catalogued under film noir, a tormented, and unemployed, young man, Sam (Andrew Garfield) who dreams of being famous, notices a new occupant in his L.A. apartment complex. Sam is intelligent

Good cinema takes time. Matteo Garrone first thought of the idea behind “Dogman” in 2008. He had this image, that of “a few dogs, locked up in a cage, bearing witness to the explosion of human bestiality” (from the production notes). “Dogman” (Garrone’s fourth film in Cannes) is like a corroded fresco of an Italy that’s concealed from the sightseeing brochures. Like in “Reality,” or “Gomorra,” the characters

En guerre (“At War”) focuses on one event in the life of employees of a French manufacturer of spare parts somewhere in France’s provinces: the shutting down of their plant. Two years after an agreement was reached to maintain jobs at their affiliate plant, the Germany-based parent company decides to call it quits. A strike goes in effect, and Laurent Amédéo (Vincent Lindon, here in his third collaboration with

The Cannes Festival gives so much room to new filmmakers that it leaves one in want of excellence, movies by the top echelon guys, the masters, the dream team. 2018 is a good year in this regard, with two master filmmakers, Lars Von Trier and Spike Lee, coming to present films. Last year, there was only one member from that club, Michael Haneke who presented “Happy End.” 2018 marks a comeback, for the aforementioned

Disappointed, for professional and for personal reasons. This lapsed Catholic grew up in Europe and was raised by Jesuits at one of Paris’s private schools. I’m not a believer, anymore, but I’ve remained a Catholic, existentially speaking, the Vatican being a kind of cultural guide, my go-to moral authority in a Europe that's sometimes hardly recognizable. When I was baptized, I was named after Saint Francis. Pope Francis strikes me