Cyril (Thomas Doret) is an unruly twelve-year old who moves into an orphanage after being abandoned by his father (Jérémie Rénier). The kid is obsessed with finding a father who's gone missing and who also sold the boy’s beloved bike. His path crosses Samantha’s (Cécile de France), a hairdresser who will eventually become his surrogate family and accept to take the boy in on weekends. She buys back his bike, helps him find his father

American cinema has always been prominent in the Cannes Festival’s programming, thanks to Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux, president and programming director respectively, both of whom give our cinema ample screen time (the festival will take place May 11-May 22. Italy’s Nanni Moretti will be president of the jury). Last year, Cannes was the launchpad for two American productions, The Artist, which went on to win the Oscar, and Tree

Every March Hollywood thrusts forward a summer blockbuster that is neither summer nor blockbuster. It has a habit of being directed by Zack Snyder and always contains overly heavy CGI. This year, that film is John Carter. It is also a $250-million risk, and this adaptation of old Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novels has a great deal of potential energy for backfiring. The fact that the film is repetitive and not particularly eye-catching

How long can any film review go before calling Salmon Fishing in Yemen a fish out of water story? Not to mention that the film stars Emily Blunt and her prominent lips. Every time Ewan McGregor’s Scottish fish expert looks at mackerel, he must think of her. The man who took over Obi-Wan Kenobi becomes a new Dr. Jones, taking on an impossible mission of faith in Arabia. At one point, he even mentions the Ark of the Covenant

Teenagers in movies are smarter than those in real life. They’re smoother. They’re cooler. They spend Friday nights at hip parties with hip music, rather than locked in their rooms with their best friends lip-synching to an embarrassing amount of Katy Perry. Mass-marketed films with teenagers operate outside of the neuroses of growing up, the insecurities of personality, in confidence rather than confusion about sex.

Act of Valor begins with the sort of sappy voice-over letter that someone should regret. Preceding the storyline (and hence the letter) directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh appear on camera in what looks like a pre-emptive apologia. Speaking directly to the audience, the two men explain they cast real-life, non-actor Navy Seals and their families in hopes of celebrating the real people and capturing the experience raw. These real

Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, a meditative fable about love, memory and loneliness that jumps deftly between contemporary Lisbon, colonial Africa and the landscape of dreams has been gathering steam on the festival circuit, notably in Berlin this month. The film takes both its title and structure from F.W. Murnau’s final cinematic statement, a collaboration with Robert Flaherty. Shot in grainy black and white, the film begins with a brief

Billy Bob Thornton’s Jayne Mansfield’s Car is the director’s return to the big screen since 1999’s All the Pretty Horses, adapted from the Cormack McCarthy novel. Thornton said he was delighted to be back to directing his own material. He has chosen a quirky tragi-comedy set in the American south in the 1960s that is a double portrait of two families, one American, the other British. It has been twenty years since Naomi Caldwell left her

It’s commonly accepted among the film literate that this is the year of living in the past. What else could it be? The frontrunner for a Best Picture Oscar is a silent movie for crying out loud (or not crying out loud, as the case may be). Can flagpole-sitting and the Charleston be far behind? While the conventional wisdom has reached this conclusion, it hasn't established what the wisdom of eating a bowl of sugary yesteryear for

Inspired by the 2001 Dos Palmas kidnapping of foreign tourists and missionaries by the Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Philipino director Brillante Mendoza, a Cannes Festival favorite (Kinatay, Serbis) Captive excruciatingly follows the twenty hostages as they are dragged at gunpoint from their hotel, spirited onto a fishing boat and led through various towns and jungles for over a year. Isabelle Huppert