The novelist on the continuing relevance of Ibsen, the joyful quilt art of Faith Ringgold and where to find British scotch eggs in New York

Born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1966, author Claire Messud studied at Yale University and the University of Cambridge. Her first novel, 1995’s When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner award; her 2006 novel The Emperor’s Children was longlisted for the Booker prize. Messud is a senior lecturer on fiction at Harvard University and has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, literary critic James Wood; they have two children. Her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, is published on 23 May by Fleet.

Last year’s Barbenheimer was hailed as saving cinema. Now takings are down and even franchises are falling flat. Can Hollywood manoeuvre itself out of this disaster zone?

In Hollywood, the first weekend of May is traditionally seen as the official kick-off of the summer movie season: an auspicious blockbuster date that has, of late, become rather a boring one.

Since 2007, when Spider-Man 3 (three full cycles ago in that deathless franchise) topped the box office – and barring two years where the global pandemic threw the mainstream release schedule into disarray – that weekend has been the exclusive domain of Marvel superhero adaptations, through to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 claiming the No 1 spot last May. That stranglehold was set to continue this year, with the legacy-milking superhero mash-up comedy Deadpool & Wolverine scheduled for a 3 May release. It doubtless would have creamed the competition, too, had last year’s Hollywood strikes not delayed it to July.

The weather didn’t play ball, but Magnus von Horn’s fierce fairytale and Andrea Arnold’s kitchen-sink take on English mysticism should count among the first-week highlights for Greta Gerwig’s jury

The Cannes film festival opens just as the heavens do, too. It’s raining on the red carpet and on the black limousines and on the immaculate white pavilions that line up on the beach. The rain falls on the A-listers as they climb the stairs to the Palais, and on the stoic huddled masses who gather behind the police cordons. Everybody’s bedraggled and windswept; it feels as though the whole town’s been at sea. “My main wish is that we see some great films this year,” says Iris Knobloch, the festival’s president, casting an anxious eye at the sky. “But also I’m wishing for a little sunshine as well.”

If it’s raining in Cannes, it means there’s a glitch in the script. It’s one of the event’s in-built paradoxes that a festival which predominantly plays out in darkened rooms should be so dependent on good weather; so in thrall to its complementary circus of photocalls, yacht parties and open-air film screenings. All it takes is a downpour to trigger a disturbance in the force, a creeping sense of existential dread. The punters came expecting Technicolor. But the scene is all wrong: the world has gone monochrome.

From female art trailblazers to playful performance fests, a ridiculous funk wannabe to a clubby Argentinian dance spectacular, our critics pick the arts events that will light up your summer

National Treasures
Twelve museums across the UK, closing dates vary
Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire visits Tyneside, Artemisia Gentileschi shows at the Ikon in Birmingham and Caravaggio goes to Belfast in this epic tour of paintings from the National Gallery. The revered London museum has collected art for the nation since 1824 and this celebration sees its masterpieces more widely spread than ever. Jonathan Jones

Cannes film festival
Completed just before his assisted death, the French New Wave master director talks through his ideas as illustrated in his hand-drawn scrapbook

Here is an intriguing footnote to Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary career - a docu-textual movie collage lasting just under an hour in two parts, or maybe two layers, completed just before his assisted death two years ago in Switzerland at the age of 91. His collaborator and cinematographer Fabrice Aragno calls it not the “last Godard” but a “new Godard”. In its way, this little double film shows us a very great deal about Godard’s working habits, and it’s a late example of Godard speaking intimately in his own person about his own creative process.

Scénarios appears to have grown out of thoughts generated by his last film, The Image Book, which emerged in 2018. Godard sketched out his storyboarded or scrapbooked ideas for a short piece, which would juxtapose images, quotations, musical cues and clips in his distinctive manner. Aragno edited and curated the film from this blueprint, then came back to see Godard and to shoot a brief sequence of the director reciting a text from Sartre to go at the end. This is the first short film we see.

An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser

Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.

The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.

John Krasinski and Ryan Reynolds go family-friendly in their new imaginary-friends comedy, while the singer swaps introspection for lust on her long-awaited new album

If
Out now
In what has to be one of the more enviable showbiz lives, John Krasinski has played Jim in The Office, married Emily Blunt, and written and directed acclaimed horror franchise A Quiet Place. Now he turns his hand to family entertainment, writing and directing this part-animated fantasy about imaginary friends made visible with a little help from Ryan Reynolds and Steve Carell.

Cannes film festival
A dying director who fled from the US to Canada agrees to make a confessional film in Schrader’s fragmented and anticlimactic story

Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment. It is based on the novel Foregone by Russell Banks (Schrader also adapted Banks’s novel Affliction in 1997) and reunites Schrader with Richard Gere, his star from American Gigolo. Though initially intriguing, it really fails to deliver the emotional revelation or self-knowledge that it appears to be leading up to. There are moments of intensity and promise; with a director of Schrader’s shrewdness and creative alertness, how could there not be? But the movie appears to circle endlessly around its own emotions and ideas without closing in.

The title is partly a reference to the national anthem of that nation, which is a place of freedom and opportunity which may have an almost Rosebud-type significance for the chief character, an avowed draft-resister refugee from the US in the late 60s, who becomes an acclaimed documentary film-maker in his chosen country. Maybe Vietnam was his real reason for fleeing and maybe it wasn’t. This central point is one of many things in this fragmented film which is unsatisfyingly evoked.

Cannes film festival
Yorgos Lanthimos reinforces how the universe keeps on doing the same awful things with a multistranded yarn starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons

Perhaps it’s just the one kind of unkindness: the same recurring kind of selfishness, delusion and despair. Yorgos Lanthimos’s unnerving and amusing new film arrives in Cannes less than a year after the release of his Oscar-winning Alasdair Gray adaptation Poor Things. It is a macabre, absurdist triptych: three stories or three narrative variations on a theme, set in and around modern-day New Orleans.

An office worker finally revolts against the intimate tyranny exerted over him by his overbearing boss. A police officer is disturbed when his marine-biologist wife returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, and suspects she has been replaced by a double. Two cult members search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.

Cannes film festival
A drama of despair plays out in a remote village, as a debt-ridden father is mortified to discover his son is gay

Here is a self-laceratingly painful tale of repression and denial in a remote Romanian village in the Danube delta, directed by Emanuel Parvu. It’s in the gimlet-eyed observational and satirical style of the new Romanian cinema, a kind of movie-making that in extended dialogue scenes seeks out the bland bureaucratic language of the police and church authorities; their evasive mannerisms, their reactionary worldviews and lifelong habits of indicating opinions in quiet voices and in code, things they don’t want to be held responsible for, and for things they want to keep enclosed in silence.

The drama concerns a careworn guy, Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache), who owes money to a local tough guy and is badly behind with the debt. Then he discovers that his 17-year-old son Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), the apple of his eye – whom he is planning to send to military school next year, and whom he fondly imagines to be dating a local girl – has been badly beaten up by the money-lender’s sons. With icy rage, Dragoi takes this to be the man’s unforgivably violent way of demanding his money.

Jane Fonda in an animal print coat, Lily Gladstone in Gucci and Chris Hemsworth in an old Hollywood jacket – there was a lot to enjoy on the Croisette this week

Speaking at Cannes, the director says Megalopolis, his reworking of ancient Rome’s Catiline conspiracy, has become ever more prescient

Megalopolis review – Coppola’s passion project is megabloated and megaboring

The US, whose founders tried to emulate the laws and governmental structures of the Roman republic, is headed for a similarly self-inflicted collapse, director Francis Ford Coppola has said at the premiere of his first film in more than a decade.

“What’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola told a press conference at the Cannes film festival on Friday. “Our politics has taken us to the point where we might lose our republic.”

Beneath the famous hats was a prime mover in a British golden age, as a biopic is about to show

The legendary fashion editor Isabella Blow is remembered by her hats. A jewel-encrusted lobster which snaked back from her brow like a crustacean mohican. A miniature Chinese garden, complete with tiny eaved pagodas and lilliputian cherry trees with quivering blossoms. Her trademark was so distinctive that Princess Margaret once greeted her at a party with the words: “Good evening, Hat.” At her funeral in 2007, an 18th-century black galleon headpiece with delicate lace sails cascading from its lofty prow, created for her by her favourite milliner Philip Treacy, crowned her coffin on a bed of white roses.

But The Queen of Fashion, a newly announced biopic directed by Alex Marx with the Oscar-nominated actor Andrea Riseborough cast in the title role, is set to highlight Blow’s more serious role as a central figure in a golden age of British fashion, a kingmaker who launched the career of Alexander McQueen, and a powerhouse who helped put 1990s London at the centre of the creative world.

Ruth Paxton’s psychological horror is a gut-wrencher, and Leonardo DiCaprio invades your dreams in the Christopher Nolan gobsmacker. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen a Paris arrondissement fold in on itself …

One night at a party, teenager Betsey (Jessica Alexander) walks into the woods and walks out a changed person. She stops eating and shows all the signs of a mental health crisis, but tells her worried mum Holly (a convincingly frazzled Sienna Guillory) that she has been gifted prophetic, apocalyptic visions. Ruth Paxton’s disquieting psychological horror teases a supernatural answer to Betsey’s symptoms, but it is mainly a gut-wrenching tale of anorexia and how it can affect those around the patient. Guillory is fantastic as the single mother striving to hold her family together but being drawn into her child’s fantasies – at the cost of her own sanity.
Friday 24 May, 11.10pm, Film4

Cannes film festival
The choreography is impressive as people are hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, but the editing is frenetic and the characters cartoonish

Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City – once the most densely populated place on Earth – is the perfect movie setting: a Piranesian labyrinth of squalid high rises and dark, cramped alleys, teeming with crooks, lowlifes, addicts and impoverished families running small businesses, legit and otherwise. This 1980s-set action epic lovingly, meticulously recreates the notorious neighbourhood (which was demolished in 1994), but sadly, the backdrop is more interesting than the story.

At heart it’s a tale of a Chinese immigrant caught between rival gangs. Street fighter Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) is initially scammed by local triad boss Mr Big (a cigar-smoking caricature from veteran Jackie Chan sidekick Sammo Hung). Chan retaliates by stealing a package and, after a great bus-top chase scene, he stumbles accidentally into the Walled City, a no-go area for Mr Big’s goons as it’s ruled by local boss Cyclone (Louis Koo). As well as running a barber shop, and smoking like a chimney even though he is dying of a lung disease, Cyclone rules over the giant slum like a benign dictator, collecting rents but also looking out for its citizens and maintaining some kind of order. He and the rest of the Walled City community take Chan under their wing, and this hard-working orphan starts to feel at home for the first time – until a highly unlikely twist of fate puts all the factions on a path to all-out gang warfare.

Directors Jared Hess and Lynn Wang craft a solid piece of family fun with the tale of a pony aiming for success in disguise

Thelma the Unicorn, a new Netflix animated family movie, has plenty of successful tricks aimed at kids: glitter and cotton-candy pink, a pile of manure jokes, a mini-album of catchy original songs, an endearing hero in its titular singing pony-turned-unicorn. But perhaps its greatest asset is its parable of fame, easy enough for young minds reared on phones to grasp, but winking to those who understand a matching-double-denim-outfits on the red carpet reference.

I have to imagine that it is bewildering to grow up aware of or aspiring to viral fame – Instagram celebrities, TikTok trends, overnight Youtube stars –before you even really know yourself. In the grand tradition of kids movies peppered with adult references and talking donkeys, Thelma the Unicorn, directed by Lynn Wang and Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess, offers up plenty of glitterified, thoroughly silly fun over a decent, sunny message on staying true to yourself in the spotlight.

(A24 Music)
Cult film company A24’s tie-in merch to its rerelease of seminal documentary Stop Making Sense sounds either like karaoke or disconnected from the source material

Responsible for indie hits like Midsommar, Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once, American film company A24 has created a vast lifestyle brand around its cultish reputation, flogging everything from branded shorts ($48) to a Hereditary gingerbread kit ($62). Now, following its rerelease of Jonathan Demme’s seminal Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, its tie-in merch includes a tribute album, featuring all 16 tracks from the film’s soundtrack covered by appropriately vogueish musicians.

The tracks largely use one of two distinct approaches. The acts choosing a karaoke-esque run-through include Toro y Moi (Genius of Love), the National (Heaven) and Paramore, whose faithful version of Burning Down the House includes a barnstorming vocal from Hayley Williams, but isn’t particularly compelling.

Owners of historic buildings used in likes of Bridgerton warned of potential damage to possessions and reputations

When the owner of Drayton House in Northamptonshire was approached to allow his 127-room mansion to be the location of a film called Saltburn, it was “100%” the generous fee on offer that swayed his decision, he said, adding: “These houses don’t run on water.”

But there were unintended consequences of Charles Stopford Sackville’s decision after the movie’s release last year. The popularity of Emerald Fennell’s class satire led to a rush of selfie-taking trespassers after TikTok videos giving directions to the estate went viral.

Yes, there were more flame-throwers, but working on Furiosa was pretty similar to starring in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, says the actor. So how does he duck the crossfire that comes with playing JK Rowling’s Strike?

When Tom Burke was cast in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the prequel to the crash-bang spectacular Mad Max: Fury Road, he sat his 77-year-old mother down in front of the television and showed her the previous film in that post-apocalyptic series, just to give her some idea of what he was letting himself in for. Afterwards, she looked concerned. “Will you be mainly inside or outside?” she asked.

Any parent would worry. As Praetorian Jack, he helps the young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) take revenge against the pharaoh-like warlord (Chris Hemsworth) who killed her mother. Jack’s job is to sit at the wheel of the War Rig, one of those whopping great tankers without which any Mad Max movie would be underdressed, and shoot high-speed pursuers off their motorbikes. The character is kitted out in battered black leather, not unlike Mel Gibson in the original trilogy, with a smudge of grease across the top third of his face like the mask on a cartoon burglar. In addition to the actor’s own scar from childhood surgery on a cleft lip, which has left a jaunty crimp on the upper right side of his mouth, he sports as Jack a crooked duelling scar under one eye.

Coppola’s passion project screens at Cannes film festival to seven-minute standing ovation, but reviews have been polarising

After 40 years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project Megalopolis has finally premiered at Cannes film festival – to polarising reviews that have variously called the film “staggeringly ambitious”, “absolute madness”, and “bafflingly shallow”.

Megalopolis, which screened at Cannes on Thursday night to a seven-minute standing ovation, was once considered a pipe dream for its years of false starts and abandoned shoots as well as its baroque, borderline unfilmable premise about “political ambition, genius and conflicted love” where “the fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems”.

Cannes film festival
Francis Ford Coppola’s question – can the US empire last forever? – may be valid but flashes of humour cannot rescue this conspiracy thriller from awful acting and dull effects

Everyone who loves cinema owes Francis Ford Coppola a very great deal … including honesty. His ambitious and earnestly intended new film, resoundingly dedicated to his late wife Eleanor, has some flashes of humour and verve. Jon Voight’s scene with his bow-and-arrow shoots a witty dart. The film’s heavily furnished art deco theatricality sometimes creates an interestingly self-aware spectacle, like an old-fashioned modern dress production of Shakespeare. And certainly a Coppola failure is a whole lot more interesting than the functional successes of lesser directors – the middleweights who aim low and just about hit the target’s bottom rim.

But for me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence. Yet this sci-fi conspiracy drama-thriller, avowedly inspired by the Catiline plotters of ancient Rome, does ask a valid question. The US empire, like the Roman empire, like any empire, can’t last for ever. Has America’s decline-and-fall moment arrived?

The grimly effective 2008 home invasion shocker gets a strange semi-remake that sucks out all of the suspense

In a genre in which innovation is increasingly resigned to the furthest outskirts, there’s something almost admirable about just how staggeringly redundant The Strangers: Chapter 1 is, early contender for 2024’s most pointless horror movie. It’s the third in a series that should have stopped after one, a reboot that’s more of a remake but sold as a prequel while also acting as the start of a new trilogy, an over-complicated attempt to squeeze new life out of old IP. The 2008 original, which starred Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a couple menaced by three masked invaders, was a short, sharp shock to the system, a bare-bones exercise in drip-drip suspense made scarier by its cold, motivation-less villains (“Because you were home”).

There was a stark, naturalistic nastiness to it, closer to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games than most of the silly genre dreck being churned out at the time and so while the film was a commercial win for Universal, it didn’t lend itself to easy extension. A troubled decade of false starts finally led to 2018’s sleekly made yet maddeningly scare-free sequel Prey at Night and now six years later, with rights moving over to Lionsgate, we have a new trilogy, ambitious in concept if nothing else. The three films are all set to be released within a year, an expansion of a world that worked best on the simplest of terms, a perfect example of unnecessary bloat at a time when we’re surrounded by it. It’s the era of 10-hour TV seasons that could be 100-minute movies and prequels to stories answering questions we never cared to ask and with yet more to come from the worlds of Harry Potter, Twilight and Lord of the Rings, why not stretch a tight 85-minute shocker into a multi-film franchise?

Cannes film festival
Toads who sweat hallucinogens, lonely pre-teens and a sudden German in a kilt: Arnold’s pick’n’mix latest dives as much as it soars

Andrea Arnold’s flawed, garrulous new movie is a chaotic social-realist adventure with big, chancy performances, grimly violent episodes, tragedy butting heads with comedy and physical existence facing off with fantasy and imagination.

It meditates on identity and belonging, the poignancy of not being valued, not being seen, the transition from childhood to adulthood, girlhood to womanhood, sexism and cruelty. The energy and heartfelt good humour offset the moments of cliche and implausibility.

Barry Keoghan plays Bug, a lairy bloke who is over the moon at his imminent wedding and his foolproof idea for easy money: he has imported from Colorado a certain kind of toad whose slime is a powerful (and expensive) hallucinogen. It’s just that the toad needs the right kind of soothing and yet upbeat music played to it, before it starts sweating out the good stuff. And what track does Bug like? Andrea Arnold couldn’t resist it: Murder on the Dancefloor. Perhaps every Keoghan film from now on is going to have a Saltburn gag.

Cannes film festival
Lou Ye’s docu-realist film starts as sophisticated comedy, morphs from looking like a zombie apocalypse to intimate drama, and evolves into a tribute to how a nation handled trauma

Out of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film, evidently inspired by a real-life situation in film production. As well as everything else, the film meditates on what it means to be “unfinished”. Very few of us will leave this life with a satisfied sense of everything achieved, complete, squared away. To be mortal is to feel that things have ended without being finished. It is possibly his best film since the courageous Tiananmen Square drama Summer Palace from 2006 – and set near Wuhan, the city in which his 2012 film Mystery was set in the days when that place was internationally known – if at all – simply for being almost scarily vast and impersonal.

It is 2019 and a film director and his crew gather in a production studio and excitedly unbox a big 00s-era computer, containing the digitised video and audio files for a film he had had to abandon 10 years before – without even having a title – because he had refused to bow to his producers’ demands to soften the content. It is a story of a gay man’s passion for another man who is involved with someone else. Getting the unfinished film now is clearly the end result of legal wrangling. (Lou has evidently had access to genuine footage from a real production.)

Marija Kavtaradze’s new film is a love story with a truly radical approach to intimacy. She reveals how she made a will they/won’t they tale that strays into little-known territory

They meet cute in a dance rehearsal studio. She’s a contemporary dancer teaching a class of deaf teenagers. He’s the sign language interpreter. When he walks into the room and takes off his shoes, they both look down at his odd socks and smile, something clicks. Like so much of the Lithuanian film Slow, the moment is romantic and feels true to life – as if someone is secretly filming real people with invisible cameras.

The pair start hanging out. Then one day, in her bedroom, just as you think this is it, he suddenly blurts out: “I’m asexual.” She splutters a giggle and asks what he means. “I’m not attracted to anyone sexually. Never was.”

Cannes film festival
Nyoni uses unsettlingly playful surrealism in this account of a malign uncle and the family mythmaking that effaces his crimes

Rungano Nyoni is the Zambian-Welsh film-maker who in 2017 had an arthouse smash with her debut, the witty and distinctive misogyny fable I Am Not a Witch. Her new film is an oblique, intensely self-aware and often seriocomically strange family drama about sexual abuse. Its final moments give us something of the magic realism that the title hints at, but its playfully and startlingly surreal images are perhaps at odds with the fundamental seriousness of what this film is about. While it’s such an intriguing idea, an almost absurdist scrutiny of what avoidance looks like and how families choreograph their collective denial, there is something a little bit contrived in it and, though always engaged, I found myself longing for some outright passion or rage or confrontation.

On a dark road in Zambia, Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving a car, wearing a strange sci-fi outfit. The reason for her clothes will be given later, but they give a sheen of dreamlike unreality to what happens next: she stops the car, and gets out to look at a dead body by the roadside, lying weirdly calmly, staring sightlessly upward. It is Shula’s Uncle Fred who has perhaps been dragged to this spot by the sex-worker employees of the nearby brothel where he had probably suffered a fatal seizure.

On the 125th anniversary of his birth – and with a Tom Holland biopic in the works – we run down the finest performances in the Hollywood legend’s eight-decade career

A semi-straight turn from Fred Astaire in this witty comedy drama. He is an American diplomat in London whose employee (Jack Lemmon) is renting a flat from a mysterious, organ-playing landlady (Kim Novak) who is widely suspected of having offed her husband. Astaire brings a touch of old-school sophistication, while he and Lemmon make for an appealing double act, trading gags rather than toe-taps.

Exiled from their home since it was occupied by Morocco in the mid-70s, nearly 200,000 Sahrawis live in camps in Algeria. Now in its 18th year, the FiSahara festival is a window to the world

• Photographs by Susan Schulman for the Guardian

From the outside, Asria Mohamed’s tent in a refugee camp in south-west Algeria could be mistaken for a typical four-door nomadic dwelling used by Sahrawis, people from Western Sahara, though it is smaller in size.

Inside, however, is a series of QR codes attached to 19 melhfas, traditional clothing worn by Sahrawi women, that have been stitched to the tent’s interior walls, forming a colourful tapestry. Visitors are invited to scan the QR codes to dive into the stories of the women behind each melhfa.

Cannes film festival
Loosely based on fact, Magnus van Horn’s fictionalised true crime nightmare leaves you with a shiver of pure fear

Just in case you were thinking that this is an upbeat story of a sweet young seamstress winning BBC TV’s The Great British Sewing Bee, the needle in question is in fact a knitting needle for giving yourself an abortion in a public bath-house in post-first world war Copenhagen. This film from Poland-based Swedish director Magnus van Horn – making his Cannes competition debut – is a macabre and hypnotic horror, a fictionalised true crime nightmare based on Denmark’s baby-killer case from 1921, shot in high-contrast expressionist monochrome and kept at an almost unbearable pitch of anxiety by Frederikke Hoffmeier’s nerve-abrading musical score.

I was unconvinced by Van Horn’s previous film, the social media satire Sweat, but this new one is horribly effective grand guignol, made with enormous technical flair, like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd without the bleak humour – there are touches of Lynch, Von Trier or even Tod Browning here. It is about a world in which women’s lives are disposable and in which the authorities are disapproving of and disgusted by their suffering – and set at a time in which the first world war had normalised the idea of mass murder. I actually found myself thinking of something further back to the Malthusian suicides in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: “Done because we are too many.”

Cannes film festival
Taylor-Joy makes a fantastic action heroine, facing down a hilariously evil Chris Hemsworth in signature high-speed fights

‘My childhood! My mother! I want them back!” With this howl of anguish, young Furiosa, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, sets the tone of vengeful rage that runs through George Miller’s immersive, spectacular prequel to his Mad Max reboot from 2015. Once again, there are the crazily colossal and weird convoy-action sequences which fuse the notion of “chase” and “violent combat” into a series of delirious high-velocity contests between motorbikes, 18-wheelers and armed parascenders all attacking and shooting at each other while fanatically zooming in the same direction. The vehicles themselves are what makes the Mad Max movies so very strange. Many films are called “surreal”, but these strange, ritualistic gladiator-vehicle displays in the reddish-brown emptiness really do look like something by Giorgio de Chirico or Max Ernst.

Furiosa is the origin story of the glamorous, one-armed badass from the first film. Incidentally, I haven’t seen an arm loss like this since 11-year-old midshipman Blakeney got his amputated aboard ship in Master and Commander – and he made a bit more of a fuss about it than Furiosa. It is of course set in Australia’s vast post-apocalyptic wilderness where warlords in their various compounds rule over precious reserves of food, water, ammo and fuel. Furiosa, played in the first film by Charlize Theron, was notionally in the service of the hateful chieftain Immortan Joe; she was in charge of leading raiding parties against rivals and enemies, and fated herself to be a rebel.

Ryan Reynolds leads an all-star cast in a sweet, if a little messy, tale of imaginary friends reconnecting with the grown-ups who once bid them goodbye

If, the new kids comedy from John Krasinski, has all the elements of a family friendly hit: a healthy dose of sentimentality, a heavy emphasis on the power of a child’s imagination and a prerequisite of tragedy undergirding on a girl’s journey. Also, an expensive mix of live-action and animation and an all-star cast of voice actors – among them, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Amy Schumer, Bradley Cooper, Maya Rudolph and Krasinski’s wife, Emily Blunt – playing a roster of Imaginary Friends (Ifs) forgotten by their grown-up creators and companions.

On paper, Krasinski’s first kids film as a writer-director checks the boxes, though in practice it’s not quite as cuddly as Blue, the giant purple bear hug of an If hammily voiced by Steve Carell, looks. There’s an underlying, perfunctory sweetness to this tale of a girl who, in the midst of family turmoil, can suddenly see everyone’s former imaginary friends. But If doesn’t fully conjure the magic that has elevated such family classics featuring sentient non-human companions as Toy Story 3 and Paddington 2.

Speaking at Cannes, the actor said that before more women got greenlight jobs in Hollywood, executives had struggled to see themselves in female roles

The cruel and unwelcoming fashion magazine editor at the icy heart of 2006 comedy hit The Devil Wears Prada may not strike many viewers as Meryl Streep’s most relatable role.

But in a stage interview at the Cannes film festival the veteran film actor revealed that her turn as Miranda Priestly, the boss from hell, was the first role she played that caused men to come up to her afterwards and say they knew exactly how she felt.

Cannes film festival
First-time actor Agathe Riedinger is a wannabe influencer from the wrong side of the tracks in this forthright and fluent film

Feature first-timer Agathe Riedinger is bringing the TikTok energy for this story of a wannabe Insta influencer-princess from the wrong side of the tracks – but the director is also bringing some pretty old school social realism, exerting its downward gravitational pull. The result is forthright and fluent and fiercely acted by a newcomer lead who, in the time-honoured style of movies like this, is defiant, vulnerable and front and centre of almost every shot. But it also sometimes treads water in terms of narrative, running out of ideas before the end, and its final ambiguity about an ultimate success that is there to be hallucinated rather than achieved feels anticlimactic.

Liane, played by Malou Khebizi, is a 19-year-old with a French and Italian background living in Fréjus in the south of France. She was once given up for foster care by her troubled mother but now taken back home and is now in charge of babysitting her kid sister, whom she is busily turning into a mini-me version of her own brassy, sexualised image. Liane shoplifts and sells the stolen goods – which has paid for her breast-implant surgery and she has also had her lips done. She hangs out with her friends, getting drunk, but is fastidious about how and with whom she’s having sex; she has thousands of followers on her Only-Fans-type insta (although oddly, it doesn’t occur to her to have an actual Only Fans account). Liane also has a poignantly religious sense of her own heroic martyrdom, her ill-treatment at the hands of online haters, men and her appalling mother.

She sprays her sets with scent made from sweat, saliva, blood and sperm – and her unearthly debut about a hoarding mother is bagging awards and acclaim. We meet the wildly talented young director whose next film will be ‘an anti-man manifesto’

To reach Luna Carmoon, who is at the other end of a banquet table tucking into her vegetable pie, I have to shuffle sideways along the narrow gap between the seating and the wall. This means 10 seconds elapse between us spotting one another in the London pie-and-mash shop and finally greeting each other across the table. Then I have to shuffle all the way out again to order at the counter. The 26-year-old film-maker, who has thick, frizzy orange hair, might have engineered the whole situation for maximum cringe. “I always make things weird,” she says with a naughty smile.

The proof is in the pie: her debut feature, Hoard, which won three prizes at last year’s Venice film festival, is one of the stickiest, itchiest and most unsettling movies since the heyday of Harmony Korine. It begins in the early 1980s, with young Maria being mollycoddled by her mother, a loving, smothering hoarder who makes nocturnal trolley runs to nearby skips. When the child is taken into care, the film leaps forward to show teenage Maria now living a sedate life. Until, that is, the arrival of her sweaty, shark-eyed foster brother Michael.

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A film professional who attended the first screening told IndieWire the film is about a civilization teetering on a "precarious ledge, devouring itself in a whirl of unchecked greed, self-absorption, and political propaganda," and echoed a Coppola quote: like "Apocalypse Now" before it, "Megalopolis" isn't about the end of the world but the "end of the world as we know it."

"It's a startling film....a very enveloping film, but also highly visual in a '60s experimental way. It felt like Francis's youth was returning to him and pouring through his heart at age 84....the kind of independent cinema that he grew up on....it's a wonderful, larger-than-life, jumps-off-the-screen movie and in a totally personal way....constantly entertaining....it's not like any movie that's out there, I can tell you that...avant garde experimental. "It's principally about a love affair between Driver and Natalie Emmanuel, the daughter of his rival and opponent (Whitaker)....a battle for her heart. Romeo and Juliet....a Shaekespearean battle between two families...a bit like Baz Lurhman's Romeo + Juliet. "The statement that I felt summed up the general response was from Andy Garcia: 'This guy is the reason we're all making movies.'

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