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

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

Donbass is a region in Eastern Ukraine that’s occupied by various criminal gangs, the Ukrainian regular army, supported by volunteers, and separatist gangs, supported by Russian troops. In "Donbass," the film, the events that are richly-depicted by Ukraine-born Sergei Loznitsa (“Maidan,” “Austerlitz,” “My joy”) in stunningly-realistic fashion bring the point across, with great clarity, that this war didn’t just happen in the open fields. It happened in the homes, the bunkers, the government offices, the food drives of this community. In fighting this proxy war through the separatist gangs

Last night’s opening ceremony, which was shown to the press corps via simulcast in the Debussy theater, was pure joy, especially if you speak French. French film and theater actor Edouard Baer emceed the event with ironic bonhomie and a piano player who accompanied him as he delivered a spoken-word-style love letter to cinema and to humanity at large. With Anna Karina, the actress from “Pierrot le fou,” (this year’s poster depicts a scene from that movie) watching him in the audience, he played short clips from the film and entertained the audience with quips.

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

Among all the films at this year’s Tribeca festival, the most stunning one was “State Like Sleep,” a modern-day film noir with all the suspense of a Hitchcock movie.  The story, set in the underbelly of Brussels, follows the widow of a deceased Belgian actor who one-year after his death decides to investigate the mystery behind his apparent suicide. The film’s heroine, Katherine Waterston (“Alien: Covenant,” “Fantastic

Tribeca 2018 was truly the year for female filmmakers. With “Egg,” actress and director Marianne Palka (“Glow”) proves that she’s just as talented behind the camera as she is in front of it. Fresh off the success of writing and directing her dark comedy “Bitch" (2017) Palka takes on a more dialogue-driven relationship story. In “Egg,” two art school friends and their husbands meet for an afternoon in New York. While discussing

The Cannes Festival just announced this year's jury composition. The members are, Chang Chen (an actor from China), Ava DuVernay (writer, director, producer), filmmaker Robert Guédiguian (“The snows of Kilimandjaro”), Khadja Nin (a songwriter and composer from Burundi), actress Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, and Russian writer-director Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose film “Loveless”