POMO

A metaphorical night-time journey to freedom and a better life. A lighthouse with an old keeper in the middle Lebanon built up with towers, a mystical fortune-teller and a couple heading to the coast to catch a boat that is supposed to take them to Europe. Everything said and done in the film has a meta hallucinatory dimension, but the interconnectedness of it all holds it together and the actors’ facial expressions become almost hypnotic. But this film is certainly not for everyone. A typical work from the heavily anti-mainstream Cannes section with the fitting name “Acid” (as in LSD). [Cannes FF]

A sensitive film about the joy, anticipation and depth of disappointment that a teenage girl experiences while on holiday with her friends. Though at first glance it seems to be just another needless Netflix movie, it turns out to be an extraordinarily perceptive chamber drama due to the gradual revealing of the main protagonist’s emotional and psychological experience of events. Lead actress Mia McKenna-Bruce delivers a superb performance and, in particular, director Molly Manning Walker does an admirable job with her debut feature. [Cannes FF]

A dialogue-based exploration of a woman’s complicated sexuality through flashbacks to her youth, childhood, relationship with her father, etc. Though this is an interesting subject for viewers, it is conveyed in a banal and overly safe manner reminiscent of a family film, without any creative artistic investment. The only part of the film that isn’t hackneyed in cinematic terms is the depiction of the first signs of sexual development in childhood. [Cannes FF]

A tribute to selfless paramedics for their dedicated work in a job that takes an extraordinary psychological toll, especially in New York, where they are more hated than appreciated by the junkies and criminals they rescue. More stress and terror than in Scorsese’s Bringing out the Dead, made as intense as possible in every scene. Black Flies offers a constant melancholic mood of hopelessness, assiduous acting and an unrelenting dramatic drive, but there is also a slight superficiality and some borrowing from elsewhere. I most enjoyed the intimate scenes of naked bodies touching, healing all of the bad things around them. [Cannes FF]

Pulp Fiction’s motif involving the necessity of disposing of an inadvertent corpse, effectively elaborated into a feature-length film in the Moroccan suburban “wilderness”, where you can’t dig a hole in the ground with a shovel. The core of the drama comprises a father/son team of losers who have to deal with the situation. Aware of his responsibility for the son he has dragged into this situation, the father makes one bad decision after another. An authentic setting and symbolic scenes in the increasingly tense atmosphere of one long, stressful night. And a crew of interesting characters among whom the man and his boy seek help. This impressive drama received a long standing ovation. [Cannes FF]

The sex-charged glamour of the joy and sorrow of the show-business movers and shakers of the Hollywood music industry. Fulfilling intimacy and catchiness of the music-video scenes, a designer ultra-luxury villa and Depp’s diligent daughter Lily-Rose. In terms of its plot, The Idol didn't arouse in me a desire for more episodes, but as a way to boost the sexy atmosphere on a date with a well put-together home cinema, it's great. [Cannes FF]

Powerful motifs involving the troubled lives of two social outcasts in a bland bit of filmmaking. Scars on the soul deepen mutual tolerance and love, but the past and a higher power always catch up with you. And redemption lies in coming to terms with that. Along Came Love is a dramaturgically functional, well-acted drama with the nice coastal architecture of Normandy, but it’s enough to watch it on television. [Cannes FF]

The subject of acid rain caused by air pollution has already become a bit much for a serious-looking disaster drama. The screenplay doesn’t offer anything interesting, as it works only with adapted clichés and, furthermore, becomes increasingly, mind-numbingly stupid the closer it gets to the climax, which in turn almost becomes an unintentional parody. Only one scene, involving the unexpected death of an important character somewhere in the middle of the film, has any emotional value and hits the mark. Acid is a below-average, unnecessary French genre movie. [Cannes FF]

At the beginning, you think that this two-and-a-half-hour “meditative” film perhaps wants – with a hint of an attempt at tearing down the viewer’s expectations – to let the viewer feel the miserable existence of the poor Indians on their spiritually withering reservation. But it doesn’t do that. Rather, it is absolutely incapable of filling those long and, in the context of the whole, needless scenes with anything meaningful or interesting. And it wants to torture even the most patient viewer to death. Some existential thought eventually springs from it, but it comes only from the action that happens in scenes that would make up a half-hour short. And the presence of Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni constitutes fraud! [Cannes FF]

Jonathan Glazer is again powerfully creative and artsy. In The Zone of Interest, we don’t see a single Auschwitz prisoner in the film or any of the atrocities perpetrated behind the walls of the camp. The minimalistically staged but effectively arranged action takes place inside the Hösses’ villa and in their garden, which is bordered by the wall, over which the tops of the concentration-camp barracks loom. Höss dutifully goes to “work” and spends his free time with his family. Höss’s wife enjoys the flowers in the garden. Their children play by the swimming pool. Höss occasionally receives a visitor on business, such as engineers with a design for a more efficient crematorium. Sometimes someone brings them a bag of nice clothes to pick through... The whole time, we hear the distant droning of the death factory in operation, sometimes people screaming, dogs barking, gunfire. Black clouds of ash fill the sky. The Höss children’s perception of the world outside the house is also evident in small nuances. The little girl’s nocturnal dreams in black-and-white inverted images are the most impressive of the artistic ornaments with which the film is packed to the maximum satisfaction of the festival viewer. The scene with Höss on the stairs with the dark empty corridors is brilliant and the highlight of the film in my opinion. The Zone of Interest is a different view of the Holocaust, with the most unpleasant music you have ever experienced accompanying the closing credits. This puts Jonathan Glazer in the company of masters like Michael Haneke and Yorgos Lanthimos. [Cannes FF]