The Shibata family is poor. Osamu, the man of the house, and his boy Shota, get by with petty thievery, one of the women of the household is a sex worker, the other works in an industrial laundry, they all sleep like sardines in a small apartment. Heading home after a shoplifting outing one day, Osamu his son Shota in tow finds Yuri, a little girl who is sitting by the curb. They bring her home. She’s reluctant to talk, keeps to herself.

The Iranian actress Behnaz Jafari receives a video message from a young woman who’s taped her own suicide after reaching the conclusion that she likely won’t fulfill her dream of becoming an actress. The suicide girl lives in a small village, far from Tehran, and any activity that doesn’t involve milking cows or knitting is regarded with a lot of suspicion by the locals, thus bringing dishonor. While suspecting that it is a fake, done to draw attention to herself, Behnaz sets off with director Jafar Panahi to the her village.

Poles wear austere, puritanical expressions on their face. And it’s as if filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski drew on this to style his new film, “Cold war” (“Zimna Wojna”). Every shot is precisely-timed and framed carefully, scenes glisten like a Doisneau photo gallery. There isn’t a single element astray. Pawlikowski shot “Cold War” in black and white, which adds beauty, and gravitas. Zula (Joanna Kulig) tries for a spot on a local choir

The word “the confusão” gets repeated often by the various protagonists in “Another Day of Life.” It describes the terrible chaos, the absolute disorientation that Angola experienced in the early seventies because of an armed conflict. The country’s slide towards civil war, right after it was handed its independence after five centuries of Portuguese domination, would last twenty-seven years and cause the deaths of half a

On the heels of “120 beats per minute,” a unanimous hit last year in Cannes, is Christophe Honoré’s “Plaire, aimer et courir vite,” a film that's in the running for a Palme D’Or. Like “120,” “Plaire” is set in the nineties and conjures up memories of a catastrophic decade for the gay community, one in which the gay community was decimated by the AIDS virus. In “Plaire,” which the Bretagne-born Honoré wrote and directed, an ironic

In the Directors Fortnight section ("Quinzaine des Réalisateurs"), a thriving alternative to the official selection that is celebrating fifty this year, a war/revenge movie by French filmmaker Guillaume Nicloux, who previously brought “Valley of Love” to the Cannes Festival in 2015. The First Indochina War took place in the fifties. Indochina was a French colony, then, that comprised parts of Vietnam

In Moscow there’s a wall, considered one of the city’s landmarks, that's covered with drawings, tags and writings, all tributes to Russian rock star Viktor Tsoy and his band, named Kino. Tsoy (here played by a German actor named Teo Yoo who so closely resembles the real-life Tsoy that it is uncanny), created Kino together with Mike Naumenko, another figure of Moscow’s rock underground, and gave concerts in a rock club, working with

Someone reading the description for “Yomeddine” and believing that A.B. Shawky is trying hard at tugging at the heart’s strings could be forgiven. There’s something vaguely manipulative about a road movie in which a leper and an orphan are paired together and travel across a part of Egypt together on a donkey-pulled carriage, the world oblivious to them. Doesn't this sound like the working script for a Save The Children ad? A leper goes to visit his family with a young orphan

In the Un Certain Regard category, which was created by honorary president Gilles Jacob to allow for some generational renewal in the festival’s programming grid, “Rafiki,” directed by newcomer filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu. The Nairobi-born director (b. 1980) had just one other feature-length film under her belt, “From a whisper,” before coming to Cannes, in the spirit of what was intended with this selection: brand-new, young

Who was this giant of cinema, this at once diffident and arrogant workhorse of a filmmaker, Fassbinder? He was self-destructive, gay, antigay, versatile (he learned just about every trade associated with the cinema), he was terribly vexing and charming, all at once. Trying to pigeonhole him is a fool’s errand (he covered his trail, eluded categorizing). He dominated the melodramatic genre, in all its shades, from the