THR Critics Pick Favorites – The Hollywood Reporter

AFTERSUN

(Critics’ Week)
In Charlotte Wells’ sharp and tender debut feature, a young Scottish father (brought to vivid, mysterious life by Paul Mescal) goes on summer holiday with his tween daughter (Frankie Corio, a real discovery). The result is a spellbinding duet that explores the gap between the sensory detail of a sun-drenched vacation and the unknowable interior lives of the characters. — SHERI LINDEN

ARMAGEDDON TIME

(Competition)
James Gray (Ad Astra, The Yards) returns to the Queens neighborhood where he grew up for this loving but unvarnished family snapshot that traces the seeds from which the artist evolved and the lessons that shaped his character. It’s a refreshingly understated drama, with unimpeachably lived-in performances from Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Anthony Hopkins and newcomers Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb. — DAVID ROONEY

THE BLUE CAFTAN

(Un Certain Regard)
Moroccan writer-director Maryam Touzani’s stirring second feature maps a melancholy relationship triangle involving an artisanal tailor, his dying wife and his male apprentice. The slow-burn yet richly emotional and beautifully acted drama should land attention by virtue of the paucity of queer films in Maghreb cinema alone. But this is compelling storytelling by any standard. — D.R.

BROKER

(Competition)
This year’s Best Actor winner Song Kang-ho (Parasite) leads the ensemble in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s piercingly poignant drama about a Korean alternative family looking to find a home for an abandoned baby. It’s not on the level of the Japanese director’s 2018 Palme d’Or winner, Shoplifters, but its gentle road-movie engine pulls you along, and every one of the key cast makes an indelible impression. — D.R.

BROTHER AND SISTER

(Competition)
Arnaud Desplechin’s propulsive drama revolves around middle-aged siblings (Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud, at the top of their game) forced to face their parents’ mortality and their own decades-long blood feud. Desplechin is a keen observer of human behavior, creating judgment-free zones in which to embrace even the most insufferable self-absorption. — S.L.

CLOSE

(Competition)
Winner of a shared second-place Grand Prize, Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont’s heart-crushing but emotionally rich drama is a tale of two 13-year-old boy besties (Gustave De Waele and Eden Dambrine) whose intense bond is tested when they start secondary school. But as Cannes audiences discovered with a shock, it’s also about so much more: betrayal, shame, denial, love and eventually healing and growth. — LESLIE FELPERIN

DECISION TO LEAVE

(Competition)
South Korea’s Park Chan-wook (winner of this year’s Best Director prize) delivers a luscious neo-noir whose restrained surface gradually gives way to churning currents of sensuality and danger. Exploring the magnetic pull between an insomniac detective and a murder suspect oddly unfazed by her husband’s death, the film is crafted with sly humor, ravishing visuals and commanding maturity. The result is intoxicating. — D.R.

DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA

(Directors’ Fortnight)
Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor take us not only inside the world of invasive medical procedures in Parisian hospitals, but as far inside the human body as a feature-length doc has ever gone. For those who can stomach it, this fascinating look at modern surgery is a memorable experience, making us ponder our own humanity as we watch people reduced to pure flesh and blood. — JORDAN MINTZER

EO

(Competition)
Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski chronicles several adventures in the life of a donkey traveling across Europe as it passes through various hands and tries to find some peace. A companion piece to Robert Bresson’s great Au Hasard Balthazar, the film (which won a shared third-place Jury prize) is an engrossing, immersive marriage of breathtaking imagery and minimalist narrative. — J.M.

FUNNY PAGES

(Directors’ Fortnight)
The cinematic equivalent of a dark, morbidly hilarious graphic novel, this feature directorial debut by The Squid and the Whale star Owen Kline is about a 17-year-old who ditches his comfy suburban lodgings to try and make it as a cartoonist in Trenton, New Jersey. It’s grungy and bitterly funny, with a cast of unforgettable side characters. — J.M.

GODLAND

(Un Certain Regard)
A young priest travels from Denmark to Iceland in the late 19th century, where his mission is mocked by nature and the corruptibility of his faith in Hlynur Pálmason’s transfixing epic. That description suggests brooding portentousness, but there’s a marvelously odd vein of sneaky humor running through the film, along with an unpredictability that keeps you glued. — D.R.

JOYLAND

(Un Certain Regard)
Saim Sadiq’s debut feature thoughtfully observes how gender norms, obligation and vague notions of honor constrict, and then asphyxiate, members of a Pakistani family. The individual and collective fallout when one of them falls in love with a trans woman is a process that the film chronicles with aching consideration. — LOVIA GYARKYE

LEILA’S BROTHERS

(Competition)
Like a 19^th century novel by Zola or Dickens condensed into a three-hour story, Saeed Roustaee’s third feature follows five siblings struggling to stay afloat in a dog-eat-dog Iran stifled by fraud, clan rivalries and an economy on the brink of disaster. Filled with powerhouse turns, the sprawling drama reveals the 32-year-old writer-director to be a masterly filmmaker whose voice is one to be reckoned with. — J.M.

THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH

(Cannes Premiere)
A brooding drama that brings to mind movies like Zodiac, Dominik Moll’s latest follows two hardened French detectives (the well-matched Bastien Bouillon and Bouli Lanners) trying to solve a gruesome murder that constantly eludes their clutches. Taut and piercing, the film uses a genre template to delve into issues of violence, gender and policing in contemporary France. — J.M.

ONE FINE MORNING

(Directors’ Fortnight)
A sublime Léa Seydoux plays a single mom juggling an ailing father and a new lover in the quietly miraculous latest from Mia Hansen-Love. Buoyed by brisk pacing and touches of humor alternately mordant and sweet, it’s further evidence that few filmmakers evoke the passage of time, the forces of change, and how we fumble and flail, but ultimately adapt, with such understated poignance. — JON FROSCH

R.M.N.

(Competition)
Romanian auteur and Palme d’Or laureate (for 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) Cristian Mungiu puts his country’s ecological, racial, social and political tensions under a microscope in this masterly slow-burn drama set in rural Transylvania — a land at the crossroads of several nations and languages that come clashing together over the Christmas holiday. — J.M.

RODEO

(Un Certain Regard)
Leading a cast of mostly non-pros with take-no-prisoners intensity, Julie Ledru plays a motorbike rider who claims her place in the brotherhood of outlawed dirt bike “rodeos.” The strife and hustle of Paris’ suburbs have been portrayed before, but never through the eyes of such an uncategorizable protagonist. Lola Quivoron’s exhilarating genre mashup is a celebration and a lament, gritty and transcendent. — S.L.

SHOWING UP

(Competition)
The Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland makes a sublime setting for Kelly Reichardt’s thoughtful, affecting and unexpectedly funny character study of a woman (Michelle Williams) making art while navigating the exasperating whirl of everyday problems outside her garage studio. The film demonstrates once again that Reichardt’s work with Williams is among the most rewarding collaborations of contemporary American independent cinema. — D.R.

TORI AND LOKITA

(Competition)
A pair of kids from West Africa watch each other’s backs as they try to navigate the Belgian immigration system and a criminal underworld in the tense latest from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. It’s perhaps the brothers’ saddest film, but also their most emotionally engaging in a while — a tragedy told with utter clarity, centered on protagonists entirely deserving of our sympathy and empathy. — L.F.

UNDER THE FIG TREES

(Directors’ Fortnight)
Erige Sehiri’s understated and intimate narrative debut chronicles and animates the lives of a group of women Tunisian fig harvesters. Trailing the characters as they pick fruit, gossip and quarrel, the movie is a pleasurable and immersive portrait of sisterhood, imbued with a finely detailed realism and sense of soul. — L.G.

A version of this story first appeared in the May 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.