Adèle Exarchopoulos won a César for Jeanne Herry's ALL YOUR FACES. Will her new collaboration with the director, presently at Cannes, produce similar results?

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is drawing to a close, so I should probably hurry up with this corresponding Cannes at Home program. In the past few days, a number of titles have come and gone on the Croisette, most of them eliciting wildly divisive reactions. Nobody seems to agree on the merits of Na Hong-jin’s Hope, and Arthur Harari’s The Unknown has proven similarly polarizing. While some bet on Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord for the Palme, others are decrying it as a minor work, if not an outright failure. Elisa is a fan, for instance, but TFE’s old friend Nick Davis is a naysayer. In the middle of all this, László Némes’ historical Moulin and Jeanne Herry’s Garance have mostly slipped by under the radar, drawing little attention while also sparing themselves the lacerating putdowns their bolder, more ambitious competition has inspired in film critics and audiences alike.

For this lightning round of Cannes at Home, let’s run this gamut of filmmakers in capsule form. Their films are Nemes’ handsome Sunset, Herry’s actorly All Your Faces, Na’s go-for-broke bonkers The Wailing, Harari’s portrait of Onoda, and Mungiu’s first foray into the intolerance that can emerge in European communities beset by the arrival of outsiders, R.M.N...

Cate Blanchett. Photo © Elisa Giudici

Cate Blanchett came to Cannes ostensibly to spotlight the Displacement Film Fund, the initiative she co-founded with the UNHCR to support displaced filmmakers and stories about forced migration. But the conversation quickly expanded into something broader: a sharp, funny, deeply thoughtful reflection on acting, authorship, AI, artistic risk, and the changing state of cinema itself...

FJORD from Cristian Mungiu

Cristian Mungiu has built an entire career around moral instability, yet Fjord feels particularly thorny. The Romanian filmmaker’s latest Cannes Competition entry begins as a family drama rooted in a real-life custody case before gradually revealing itself as something much larger and far more uncomfortable: a film about the impossibility of reconciling competing moral systems inside supposedly enlightened societies. The Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker has turned  a real-life custody case into a sprawling and deeply unsettling drama about multiculturalism, religion, and the limits of liberal tolerance.

Fjord reunites A Different Man stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a  Romanian father and his Norwegian wife (a deeply religious Catholic missionary)...

Long before he was selected for the Cannes Main Competition, Rodrigo Sorogoyen became an Oscar nominee with his MOTHER short film.

The race for the Palme is heating up… is what you’d assume we’d be saying by the time half the Main Competition had screened. However, this year isn’t like most years at Cannes. Or maybe, it’s an edition where issues that have prevailed for years are finally becoming too noticeable to politely ignore. Thierry Frémaux’s favorite auteurs aren’t bringing it, and most of the biggest critical darlings are showing in parallel sections – think La Gradiva, Kurosawa’s first jidaigeki, Clarissa’s transposition of Mrs. Dalloway to Nigeria and various others. Indeed, Hirokazu Koreeda is receiving the worst reviews of his illustrious career for Sheep in the Box, while Rodrigo Sorogoyen can’t stop drawing depreciative Sentimental Value comparisons because of his The Beloved. Finally, James Gray’s Paper Tiger is proving divisive, which is business as usual for the American auteur.

With those cineastes in mind, let’s revisit Koreeda’s Air Doll about a sex doll magically come to life, Sorogoyen’s agonizing Mother, and one of Gray’s best films, the fraternal melodrama We Own the Night…

Did the film student who directed PASSION dream he'd one day be a Palme d'Or frontrunner?

The 79th Cannes Film Festival continues to unfold on the French Riviera, and things aren’t looking great for Fremaux and his team of programmers. Some of the most acclaimed titles are premiering in parallel sections, while the Main Competition keeps delivering mixed stuff or provoking outright negative reactions. Asghar Farhadi has probably never received worse notices than the ones he’s getting for Parallel Tales, and even something like Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, which looked like a slam-dunk triumph going by pre-fest expectations, is struggling to gather the sort of universal critical praise most had predicted for it. Our own Elisa Giudicci loves it, but the consensus isn’t there yet. And let’s not even discuss Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster, whose every element seems to be open for savage criticism apart from Léa Seydoux’s performance. Well, at least, we have Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose All of a Sudden has inspired a fair amount of “masterpiece,” even though a few naysayers also have showered it with such epitaphs as “long, slow, boring.”

With that in mind, let’s look away from lackluster new works and consider these directors’ pasts, before their big breaks. Think Pawlikowski before Ida and his drift away from British cinema, Farhadi before A Separation and his European misadventures, Hamaguchi before Happy Hour and Drive My Car and the Oscar, Kreutzer before Corsage…

There’s something genuinely startling about seeing the sprawling sci-fi epic Hope in Competition at Cannes. Not because genre films are unwelcome on the Croisette anymore; that battle has largely been wo. The surprise is that Na Hong-jin’s film embraces blockbuster language so wholeheartedly. This is not elevated horror masquerading as arthouse cinema, nor a restrained science-fiction allegory carefully calibrated for festival audiences. Hope is loud, enormous, messy, violent, and frequently exhilarating entertainment. It's a film with giant creatures, extended chase sequences, exploding buildings, machine guns, and a level of visual maximalism that feels almost aggressively unconcerned with prestige filmmaking etiquette...

Pawel Pawlikowski has always been a filmmaker of absence. Empty space, withheld emotion, silence so heavy it seems architectural: his cinema has long depended less on what characters say than on what lingers unresolved between them. Fatherland may be the purest expression of that sensibility, a film reduced to such an essential form that it almost appears to vanish while unfolding, only to return afterward with quiet, devastating force.

At first, it can seem unexpectedly modest by the standards of, say, Cold War. Fatherland is less sweeping, less immediately transporting. But the images begin resurfacing hours later. A corridor swallowed by shadow, a pause stretched slightly too long. A father and daughter speaking with perfect intelligence while emotionally disintegrating in front of one another. Pawlikowski has refined his cinema here into something severe and distilled, and the result is extraordinary...

John McRae & Mihir Kumar starred in "Prince Faggot". Photo © Marc J Franklin

As many readers know a few members of Team Experience belong to GALECA the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics though most of us vote on the film and television side. I have the privilege of also being a voter in the society's Dorian Theater Awards, which celebrate both Broadway & Off Broadway productions. The nominations were announced this past week for the 2025-2026 theater season which wrapped up recently and will be a closed book once the Tony Awards are announced on June 7th. The Dorian winners will be announced on June 1st. The TV-to-Stage transfer Schmigadoon (9) led the Broadway shows and Prince Faggot (7) was the nomination leader for Off Broadway on the Dorian ballots. The latter is a truly riveting play which I actually went to twice (very rare for me with so much to see!). It had the distinction of landing a nomination in every category for which it was eligible.

From the press release: 

“From the radical reimaging of our world in Prince Faggot, to the tender themes of self-discovery in Schmigadoon!, it has been a wonderful season of queer storytelling on New York stages,” says GALECA’s theater wing co-chair Sam Eckmann. “In addition to the new LGBTQ stories that we fell in love with, we were proud to see previous Dorian Theater Award winners Cats: The Jellicle Ball and Titaníque find new, fabulous life on Broadway. Our stories are connecting with wider audiences and enduring on stages both large and small.”

After the jump let's talk the nominees and how they differ (or don't) from the Tony nominations...

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA. MUBI

By the time Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma premiered at Cannes, Jane Schoenbrun had already become something close to a generational folk hero for younger cinephiles. You could feel it inside the Debussy theater before the lights even went down: critics squeezed onto theater steps, festival attendees treating an Un Certain Regard opener like the hottest ticket on the Croisette, audiences buzzing less about Cannes prestige than about what the filmmaker behind I Saw the TV Glow might do next. And honestly, the excitement makes sense. Few filmmakers right now understand how media obsession functions emotionally for millennials and Gen Z quite like Schoenbrun does. Their work isn’t simply nostalgic. It treats pop culture, horror movies, forgotten VHS relics, fandom rituals, and half-ironic internet cinephilia as part of the architecture of identity itself...

IN WAVES

With Cannes now in full swing, let's rank the four opening titles from Un Certain Regard, Director's Fortnight, Critics Week, and Out of Competition.

4. In Waves by Phuong Mai Nguyen (France/Belgium) [Opening Film of Critics’ Week]
In Waves is probably the most polished and emotionally accessible of the festival's four openers, which, for my taste, also makes it the least exciting. The film follows AJ, a shy teenager obsessed with sketching and skating, whose world gradually expands after he becomes close to Kristen, the older sister of his best friend. Through her, AJ discovers surfing, which the film treats less as a sport than as a way of existing inside the world: a physical and emotional state where identity briefly feels stable, harmonious, almost suspended outside ordinary life...

Could Koji Fukada's THE REAL THING have been a Palme contender in 2020?

The second day at Cannes came and went, and the race for festival gold is on. Not just the prizes chosen by Park Chan-woo’s jury, mind you. In a rare move by the programmers, the Main Competition opened with two films that are also up for the Queer Palm. They are Koji Fukada’s Nagi Notes and Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s A Woman’s Life. Neither was effusively received, but there are pockets of praise, even love, here and there. The latter has been getting especially high praise for Léa Drucker’s performance. And yet, this Main Competition might mean even more to the Japanese auteur who was among those selected for the festival edition that never was in 2020. At the time, Fukada was included among the returning cineastes and would’ve likely experienced his first go at the Palme d’Or if not for the COVID lockdown.

So, it only seems appropriate to consider his film that would’ve played at the Croisette six years ago, a near four-hour epic love story named The Real Thing. And to keep things thematically cohesive, let’s also remember Bourgeois-Tacquet's 2021 Critics’ Week selection, Anaïs in Love…

Peter Jackson. Photo by Elisa Giudici

At the end of the ’80s Peter Jackson arrived in Cannes for the first time as a self-taught splatter filmmaker from New Zealand and immediately got thrown out of the Palais for wearing shorts. Nearly four decades later, he returns to the Croisette as the director behind one of the most successful trilogies in cinema history. The director is still talking about movies with the enthusiasm of somebody who never stopped being the kid borrowing his parents’ Super 8 camera to film homemade monsters. Across an unusually relaxed and funny conversation at the festival, Jackson moved freely from King Kong to The Beatles, from Andy Serkis to artificial intelligence, from Tintin 2 to the collapse of DVD culture. What emerges most clearly is how little of his career feels planned in retrospect. Again and again Jackson describes cinema as a chain of accidents, obsessions, and strange coincidences somehow turning into films...

Park Chan Wook and Chloe Zhao © Elisa Giudici

What kind of festival the 79th Annual Cannes Film Festival will be is something the films in Competition and the side sections will ultimately determine. But there’s little doubt that the final perception of Cannes - and the line between winners and losers - will also be shaped by the jury presided over by Park Chan-wook, who today faced the traditional opening press conference.

What became immediately clear is how prepared every juror was to answer politically charged or potentially controversial questions. After the turbulence of Berlin earlier this year, publicists and agents clearly did their homework: politics, Gaza, artificial intelligence and representation were all addressed with awareness and, in most cases, notable intelligence. It also helped that Paul Laverty quickly positioned himself as the most openly political voice on the panel, absorbing much of the pressure around the more sensitive topics...

The 79th Cannes Film Festival is upon us and, as ever, Elisa is on the ground to report directly from the Croisette. Sadly, most of us can only watch from afar. For years, I struggled with festival-related FOMO, but one little annual series here at The Film Experience has helped combat it. Obviously, I’m referring to “Cannes at Home,” the rubric I’m happy to revive once more, perusing past films from the various cineastes in the Main Competition that are widely available. Alas, it’s very rare for a title vying for the Palme to open celebrations at Cannes, and this year is no different. Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss marked the fest’s official start, but it’s playing Out of Competition so the director’s work won’t be showcased here, in “Cannes at Home.”

Instead, let’s rewind to 2001, when the Cannes Film Festival celebrated its 54th edition. A quarter century ago, the Opening Film was actually among the competition lineup. It was none other than Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, the best movie musical yet produced since the millennium changed. Damn, 21st century cinema peaked early…

While I made a real effort to catch all the musicals this season I'm weaker on the plays having seen only 5 of the 18 that opened this past season. Let's talk about the nominees. I'll be sure to mention any film connections to keep the less theater-inclined interested...

© Obscured Releasing

Every year, so-called provocateurs come out of the woodwork with films that promise to shock audiences, challenge norms and push boundaries, leaving behind broken taboos in their wake. And yet, true transgressions are few and far between. More often than not, viewers are met with the pretension of risk-taking on the part of artists too timorous to take any actual risk. When a picture comes about and honestly earns these descriptors, one should take note. So, please note Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film. It’s the sordid yet simple story of the night spent between a gay camboy and the stranger who paid for his company. 

During those hours, perversity takes on another meaning as actors Kieron Moore and Reed Birney playact a scenario in which nothing feels more verboten than a show of affection, empathy extended toward those who would rightfully revolt us. Blue Film forms a lewd poem of broken hearts and sad monsters, a mural of cumstains and razor burns, topped by a secret song that you listen to while feeling like you shouldn’t, like you’re encroaching on something so private that to witness it is a violation. All throughout, there’s this pervading sense one is peeking into what ought to remain unseen…

While The Film Experience is about, well, the movies, longtime readers know that I like to throw in a little live theater whenever possible. And these days as with TV and Film, the line between mediums is ever blurry with stage shows making it to screen or TV and vice versa or both unconnected when they are inspired by the same novel. Though I’ve always tried to be a somewhat regular theatergoer, funding and time often refuse to comply. But during the 2025-2026 season I hit the boards a lot and managed to see 100% of the eligible New Musicals and 40% of the revivals (though I fully hope to make that 80% soon). I did less well with plays though I'll try to see something else before the big night.  In short, my opinions hold more weight (with myself) since I caught a lot more of the season. 

Today nominations were announced for the 79th Annual Tony Awards which will be held June 9th in New York City, and broadcast on CBS Paramount+. This year's festivities will be hosted by Grammy winner P!nk so you can bet there will be aerial action given that one of the two nomination leaders is an adaptation of the 1987 vampire movie The Lost Boys (which, a full review later). So let's talk about the musical nominations...

Should Diane Keaton have been double-nominated, in 1977, for ANNIE HALL and LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR?

With their new rules, the Academy has upturned quite a number of Oscar traditions and stats. For example, actors can now fill more than one slot in each category, receiving nominations for multiple performances in a race. Looking back, it’s fun to speculate about what performers might have achieved this. Indeed, I might write something on that matter later on. Immediately, though, one case stands out. Part of it is that Be Kind Rewind’s video essay is still fresh in the memory. Part of it is that the loss of such a star still stings. Regardless, upon reading the news, I immediately latched onto the idea that Diane Keaton would have gotten two Best Actress nominations in 1977. She won for Annie Hall, but was just as tremendous and lauded for her work in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. 

This all serves as a preamble for another announcement. My Oscar completism project is back on track, as I try to watch every single Academy Award-nominated performance. And since Keaton’s on the mind, especially Keaton in Mr. Goodbar, let’s explore Tuesday Weld’s Best Supporting Actress nomination for that New York drama. Also, Lovers and Other Strangers, which earned Richard S. Castellano a Best Supporting Actor nomination and got Keaton on Francis Ford Coppola's radar, effectively won her the role of Kay in The Godfather…

Creating distance and disorienting your audience is usually not what a filmmaker strives for, especially in their feature-length debut. Luckily, director Sophy Romvari is able to utilize her own fractured memories to tell a deeply personal story in her devastatingly exceptional debut Blue Heron, now playing in limited release.

In our current entertainment landscape, plot points need to be reiterated, all needs to be revealed, and catharsis must be achieved. Romvari has no intention of giving you any of those answers, because she doesn't have the answers herself. She is looking back on her own experience without the benefit of understanding, because some things aren’t possible to fully comprehend...

Ideally, trailers and other promo are meant to sell a movie to their prospective audience, enticing and seducing butts into seats. Ideally, they'll build anticipation for a good time. Ideally, they don't make dread pool in the bellies of those who might have been excited about the project before they laid eyes on its ads. And yet, the trailers for The Devil Wears Prada 2 almost dared us to be optimistic in the face of an obvious nostalgia-drunk cash grab like so many others polluting the multiplex. Indeed, looking at the site's comment section was how I realized this predicament might be more generalized than I thought and that it wasn't just me cringing at what this sequel seemed to promise. 

So, there's bad news and good news. Starting with the negatives, there is a lot wrong with our second go-round with Andy Sachs, Miranda Priestley and the rest of the Runway magazine gang. Form-wise, even fashion-wise, the sequel's a total downgrade when it's not being a shoddy photocopy with printing errors galore, an echo on its way to becoming a structural pleonasm. However, some elements surprise, even delight, including stabs at thematic complexity nowhere to be found in the original flick, even some elegiac tones. Oh, also, Meryl Streep is in fine form, but you might have already guessed that. After all, she IS Meryl Streep…