The below list includes highlights of IndieWire Critic\u2019s Pick reviews as well as other under-the-radar movies across sections beyond the main competition.<\/p>\n
L\u00e9 Baltar, David Ehrlich, Marya E. Gates, Ritesh Mehta, Sophie Monks Kaufman, Chris O\u2019Falt, Vadim Rizov, Anne Thompson contributed to this list.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of a Sudden\u201d (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)<\/p>\n A talky, female-driven, 196-minute drama about the infinitely braided relationship between care and capitalism that\u2019s prone to Wiseman-like meeting scenes and frequent detours into the world of avant-garde theater? It almost feels redundant to say that Ryusuke Hamaguchi<\/a> has returned.<\/p>\n And yet, for a movie that offers such an obvious continuation of his previous work (e.g. \u201cDrive My Car,\u201d \u201cHappy Hour\u201d), the sweet and stirring \u201cAll of a Sudden<\/a>\u201d also takes Hamaguchi to places his work has never gone before. Namely: Paris, where most of the Japanese filmmaker\u2019s latest feature is set, but also \u2014 in an abrupt, almost contrite about-face from the environmental fatalism of 2023\u2019s \u201cEvil Does not Exist<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a palliative realm of pure comfort.<\/p>\n There is much to mourn in this epic two-hander, which was inspired by the letters shared between terminal breast cancer patient Makiko Mayano and medical anthropologist Maho Isono, but few recent movies, or few movies at all, have been so rigorously insistent upon the reasons for hope. Indeed, \u201cAll of a Sudden\u201d is centered around a scene in which the beautifully dying Mari \u2014 played by model and \u201cBatman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice<\/a>\u201d actress Tao Okamoto, whose presence here at long last brings Hamaguchi\u2019s films into the Snyderverse \u2014 literally diagrams the state of the world on a whiteboard. Her impromptu Ted Talk doesn\u2019t solve for capitalism\u2019s insatiable appetite, but it illustrates the problem with a clarity that makes a workable solution feel possible within our own lives, if maybe not in Mari\u2019s own lifetime. And that is ultimately where Hamaguchi\u2019s attention lies: In the pain and promise of conceding to the fact that so much is still possible for this world and its people, no matter how grim the prognosis. \u2014DE<\/p>\n \u201cAtonement\u201d (dir. Reed Van Dyk, Sales Title)<\/p>\n For his feature debut, American director\u00a0Reed Van Dyk<\/a>\u00a0adapts Dexter Filkins\u2019 New Yorker article, \u201cAtonement<\/a>\u00a0After Iraq\u201d published in 2012. This intimate and psychologically astute portrait of the human cost of U.S. imperial violence draws a precise focus from what cinema is built for:\u00a0putting us in a character\u2019s skin<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is a war\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0less ordinary, for it is imbued with the emotional acuity of a life-changing therapist. Following the lead of Filkins\u2019 source material (\u201cI remember reading this piece because I cried all the way through it,\u201d Van Dyk told the audience at a Directors\u2019 Fortnight screening) \u201cAtonement\u201d is not interested in establishing a warzone by showing peripheral acts of violence. Indeed, the only shooting victims shown (in several devastating flashes) are the heart of the film\u2019s insoluble sorrows.<\/p>\n This shooting in the Baladiyat district of Iraq likewise shapes the storytelling focus. Nothing is included that does not relate to its build-up, execution, or aftermath. Narrative is intertwined with character, so that every dramatic development reveals something about the people forever trapped in the crosshairs of April 8, 2003. \u2014Sophie Monks Kaufman<\/p>\n \u201cThe Black Ball\u201d (dirs. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, Netflix)<\/p>\n While it is technically accurate to say that \u201cThe Black Ball<\/a>\u00a0(La Bola Negra)\u201d is a single feature\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0from Spain\u2019s beloved creative duo, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (collective moniker\u00a0Los Javis<\/a>), it\u00a0feels truer\u00a0to say that they have made four films and magically contained them within the form of one. It is nearly impossible to grasp the structural effort required to fluidly create one perfectly coherent story using three narratives told across three timelines, each with a distinct visual identity.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe Black Ball\u201d comprises a neorealist tale of\u00a0a closeted young man seeking membership<\/a>\u00a0at a casino in 1932, a tragic wartime romance set in 1937, and\u00a0a lo-fi drama about a historian prompted to investigate all of this in 2017. The fourth element, which serves as the connective tissue for everything, is a timeless poetic expression of love for all the\u00a0queer storytellers who died before they could truly live<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n An unfinished play, \u201cLa Bola Negra\u201d by the Spanish poet Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, is the basis of the themes explored across all timelines. Lorca was murdered in 1936 by right-wing militias amid the rising nationalism that led to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9. In an act of fantastical baton-passing, Los Javis collaborate with Lorca\u2019s spirit to finalize this play, infusing it with details, moods and lyricism from his life and work. Choice lines from his poem \u201cLove Sleeps in the Poet\u2019s Breast\u201d serve as a time-collapsing flash of lightning, reanimating lost souls so that they are briefly, vividly here.\u00a0\u2014Sophie Monks Kaufman<\/p>\n \u201cClarissa\u201d (dirs. Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri, Neon)<\/p>\n The parallels between post-WWI British society and the upper crust of modern-day Nigeria are more similar than you might imagine, making twin brothers Chuko and Arie Esiri\u2019s adaptation of Virginia Woolf\u2019s \u201cMrs Dalloway\u201d a fascinating exercise. The story of thwarted dreams \u2013 the Esiris drifting back and forth between their characters in their Idyllic early 20s on holiday in peaceful Abraka, to Clarissa\u2019s swanky party at her home in present-day Lagos \u2014 is inseparable from the turmoil and complex history of Nigeria.<\/p>\n This is patient, observant storytelling, with brilliant casting choices (casting director Nina Gold) and performances that speak volumes about how the characters have changed over the decades \u2014 the jump from a buoyant Toheeb Jimoh to a despondent David Oyelowo is particularly heartbreaking. One of the joys of the film is being able to see the beauty of Nigeria, and enter the story of a country whose future means constantly grappling with its past, as the brothers continue (their first film \u201cEyimofe\u201d capturing the cyclical nature of Nigerian poverty) to lift the cinematic veil on a part of the world we never see on our screens. Let\u2019s hope Neon can work its magic to get this film seen by a wider global audience. \u2014CO<\/p>\n \u201cClub Kid\u201d (dir. Jordan Firstman, A24)<\/p>\n Because the filmmakers screened the crowdpleaser ahead of the festival, the buzz around it was loud even before its well-received debut in Un Certain Regard. Comedian Jordan Firstman wrote, directed, and stars in the indie film about Peter, a gay club promoter who finds out he sired a son, Arlo (Reggie Absolom), in a druggy haze ten years ago. At first, Peter has no intention of coming through as a new parent, but circumstances force his hand, and he turns out to be a more sober and caring father than you\u2019d expect. Authentic, edgy, funny, unpredictable, and heartwarming, \u201cClub Kid\u201d is a winning combination. A bidding war drove up the price A24 had to pay to get it ($17 million). It will do well on the fall circuit and could land an original screenplay Oscar nomination, for starters. \u2014AT<\/p>\n \u201cFatherland\u201d (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski, Mubi)<\/p>\n Pawe\u0142 Pawlikowski delivers another black-and-white, Academy ratio, post-World War II stunner in the story of exiled writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika\u2019s (Sandra H\u00fcller) road trip through divided Germany in 1949. The elder Mann\u2019s determination to make the controversial trip triggers a slew of conflicting and complex emotions, opening old familial wounds that sit on the surface but go largely unspoken. Similar to \u201cCold War\u201d and \u201cIda,\u201d Pawlikowski and cinematographer \u0141ukasz \u017bal create compositions that are not only stunningly elegant, but masterfully precise in how each brings to life the raw turmoil brewing inside the restraint of H\u00fcller and Zischler\u2019s performances. The image does more than words ever could in this 82-minute film, which is anything but slight or cold, as it builds toward a final scene that is one of the most beautiful emotional releases in modern cinema. \u2014CO<\/p>\n \u201cFjord\u201d (dir. Cristian Mungiu, Neon)<\/p>\n Intolerance assumes a more progressive sheen with Cristian Mungiu\u2019s \u201cFjord<\/a>,\u201d a characteristically fraught and tangled drama in which the \u201cR.M.N.\u201d<\/a> filmmaker continues to vivisect the reactionary pitfalls of globalization \u2014 this time in Norway, which the annual World Happiness Report<\/a> consistently lists as one of the happiest countries in the world.<\/p>\n Perhaps that explains why Romanian software engineer Mihai Gheorghiu (a bald Sebastian Stan<\/a>, looking more like Damon Lindelof than the Winter Soldier) was so quick to move his brood from the middle of Bucharest to a scenic fjord in Stranda after his parents died; Mihai\u2019s wife Lisbet (Renate Reinsve<\/a>, her performance like a shaken willow) was raised in the area, and her mother is supposedly still around to help care for the couple\u2019s five kids. The religiously conservative Gheorghius might not mesh right away with the ultra-liberal utopianism of their new home, but Jesus didn\u2019t have a problem with good schools and excellent healthcare. He said \u201cthou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,\u201d and for the most part the Gheorghius appear to live by that credo as they settle into a secular community by the sea. Their progressive Nordic neighbors, not so much.<\/p>\n If that sounds like the recipe for a faith-based persecution drama, rest assured that Mungiu is much less interested in defending biblical values than he is in interrogating the nuclear friction at the root of even the \u201cnicest\u201d culture clash. \u201cYou need to learn to apologize when you\u2019re wrong,\u201d Mihai instructs his kids during the opening scene, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of an unseen punishment. But none of the adults in this movie \u2014 Mihai included \u2014 are able to practice what they preach, a failure of perspective that allows the divides between them to grow as thick as the walls that protect the local school from the avalanches that crash down upon it whenever the drama gets too intense. \u201cWhat does it mean to be a good neighbor?\u201d, \u201cFjord\u201d wonders in Mungiu\u2019s usual tones, its probing handheld wide shots infused with the callous indifference of the gods. And why is that so rarely a question that people feel required to ask of themselves? \u2014DE<\/p>\n \u201cI See Buildings Fall Like Lightning\u201d (dir. Clio Barnard, Sales Title)<\/p>\n Like the British young adult series \u201cSkins\u201d but all grown up \u2014 or at least grown up into their 30s \u2014 Clio Barnard\u2019s affecting, punchily edited and directed friendship saga \u201cI See Buildings Fall Like Lightning\u201d tracks a pivotal turning point in the lives of a group of five pals in Birmingham. Other than Rian (Joe Cole), who\u2019s made rich via his knack for flipping affordable-housing-like apartment buildings, the other four are working class, but all in the quintet are facing some kind of internal or external emotional hardship.<\/p>\n There are buried secrets and betrayals that come to light as this melodrama from the director of \u201cThe Arbor\u201d unfolds, punctuated by bravura, kinetic musical sequences, and demolition montages. All the drama onscreen among beautiful people \u2014 with a cast including Anthony Boyle and Lola Petticrew \u2014 should make this an addictive watch for younger audience but one that even older ones can see themselves in. \u2014RL<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll Be Gone in June\u201d (dir. Katharina Rivilis, Sales Title)<\/p>\n In Katharina Rivilis\u2019 sure knockout of a\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ll Be Gone in June,\u201d two worlds of stifling teenage solitude collide at the same time as America mournfully recovers from the jihadist hijacking of four commercial airliners in September 11, 2001, which led to the leveling of the World Trade Center\u2019s Twin Towers and the\u00a0U.S. government\u2019s colonial \u201cwar on terror\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in Afghanistan, among other atrocities.<\/p>\n A widely televised violence,\u00a0the images of 9\/11 are among the most shocking and enduring images<\/a>\u00a0the world has ever seen, sadly to the point of heightening America\u2019s messianic complex and the anti-Muslim rhetoric across the globe \u2014 and perhaps what made most Americans, and white people at large, so inured to livestreamed genocides. In this way, \u201cI\u2019ll Be Gone in June\u201d converses with the current terror even as the film is set in the past,\u00a0capturing what it\u2019s like to witness a violence of this scale<\/a>\u00a0play out in real-time, especially for not-so-clueless young people at the turn of the millennium.<\/p>\n Shot for over 50 days,\u00a0the result is a poetically probing movie<\/a>\u00a0that features the teenager protagonist Franny (Naomi Cosma, in a breakout leading role) as the German-Russian filmmaker\u2019s self-insert in an effort to belatedly wrestle with some of her own history as an exchange student from Germany in 2001 chasing the American Dream by first settling in the sleepy town of Las Cruces, New Mexico before setting out for either New York or California to embrace all the incredible things it has to offer. Except none of the latter would pan out as Franny (and the director\u2019s teenage self) aspired to. With a botched future ahead of her, Franny has to grapple with the new reality around her, at least until June, until she moves back to Germany for good.<\/p>\n While the desert town seems so far removed from the big city, it makes for a perfectly fertile terrain for a semi-autobiographical movie, whose characters aren\u2019t exactly itching to ditch the last vestiges of their youth, even as they contemplate their identities amidst a world still reeling from a massive tragedy, the trauma of which is not lost on Franny after having lived and struggled in Berlin Wall-era Germany, except now she\u2019s an outlander. It\u2019s a lived experience that readily crystallizes whenever fellow teens teasingly take a swipe at her identity, including such remarks as \u201cNazi girl.\u201d \u2014L\u00e9 Baltar<\/p>\n \u201cLa Gradiva\u201d (dir. Marine Atlan, 1-2 Special)<\/p>\n Cinematographer\u00a0Marine Atlan<\/a>\u2018s feature\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0directorial debut \u201cLa Gradiva<\/a>\u201d takes a simple premise \u2014\u00a0teenagers on a class trip<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and uses it to explore the vast worlds of their individual interiority with insight, empathy, and grace. Mercifully free of typical high school movie tropes, the teenagers at the heart of Atlan\u2019s film are fully realized people, whose fears and desires and ambitions and loneliness and dreams, as well as the intensity of their messy teenage feelings, are treated utmost respect by Atland and co-writer Anne Brouillet, allowing their work to reach toward the sublime.<\/p>\n The film\u2019s title alludes to Wilhelm Jensen\u2019s 1902 novel \u201cGradiva: a Pompeian fantasy,\u201d which tells the tale of an archaeologist obsessed with the bas-relief of a woman he sees in an Italian museum. Imagining she was among those who died in Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, he names her la Gradiva (or \u201cshe who walks\u201d). Jensen\u2019s novel led to a psychological reading by Freud and became a popular subject of Surrealist art.<\/p>\n Like the novel and the works it inspired, Atlan\u2019s film is about the layers below our consciousness, where our desires and our fears and our anger boil until we can no longer contain them. But it\u2019s also about the way that we project a version of ourselves to others, and the dangers of allowing our surface-level understanding of people to affect our judgments of them.\u00a0\u2014Marya E. Gates<\/p>\n \u201cLa Libertad Doble\u201d (dir. Lisandro Alonso, Sales Title)<\/p>\n In some respects, \u201cLa Libertad Doble\u201d is a classic sequel that restages\u00a0the first installment\u2019s greatest hits<\/a>\u00a0before introducing new characters and raising the stakes \u2014 but in this case, \u201cgreatest hits,\u201d \u201cnew characters,\u201d and \u201craising the stakes\u201d are all a little different.<\/p>\n Premiering when\u00a0writer\/director Lisandro Alonso<\/a>\u00a0was all of 26, 2001\u2019s \u201cLa Libertad\u201d was the most ascetic gauntlet thrown down during the\u00a0turn-of-the-millennium slow cinema boom.<\/a>\u00a0The\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0eliminated even a gesture toward a plot while showing solitary nonprofessional and real-life ranch-hand Misael Saavedra chopping and hauling logs in the Argentinian hinterlands (in actuality, Alonso\u2019s family\u2019s ranch). It was a strong introduction to arguably most severe filmmaker of his generation, without the\u00a0violent punctuations and levitations of Bruno Dumont<\/a>\u00a0or the\u00a0supernatural and sexual eruptions of Apichatpong Weerasethakul<\/a>, two contemporaries whose slightly-less-withholding works are also regularly staged in deeply personal homeplace landscapes.<\/p>\n As with David Lynch delivering on Laura Palmer\u2019s promise to \u201csee you again in 25 years\u201d with \u201cTwin Peaks: The Return,\u201d Alonso has likewise returned 25 years later with an unexpected and demanding follow-up. Arriving at a moment when the pope has called for films to be more attentive to D.W. Griffith\u2019s oft-cited \u201cbeauty of the moving\u00a0wind\u00a0in the trees,\u201d this textbook piece of slow cinema is precisely on schedule. \u2014Vadim Rizov<\/p>\n \u201cThe Man I Love\u201d (dir. Ira Sachs, Sales Title)<\/p>\n Ira Sachs<\/a>\u00a0directs Rami Malek in the melancholy, sexy, and piercingly sad \u201cThe Man I Love<\/a>,\u201d which is elusive to think about and to hold in your hand but nonetheless makes a scarring impression because of how it shirks the cliches related to the AIDS movie genre.<\/p>\n Malek plays a New York performance artist named Jimmy George in the 1980s, who has an affair with the cute ginger twink who\u2019s just moved in downstairs as a sort of last grab at joie de vivre before the disease inevitably takes him down. There are no Kaposi\u2019s sarcoma lesions on display, or tearful bedside vigils, and there\u2019s only one scene in a hospital that\u2019s instead focused entirely on Jimmy\u2019s partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge) and how he reacts to his boyfriend\u2019s worsening and critical condition.<\/p>\n Sachs, co-writing the\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0per usual with Mauricio Zacharias, has a deep investment in the Manhattan arts scene of the period that pays off in terms of the drama\u2019s immersiveness. The \u201cKeep the Lights on\u201d and \u201cPeter Hujar\u2019s Day<\/a>\u201d director makes period films that you can feel and touch, almost like stepping into an imagined dream of what that particular time in the past might\u2019ve looked like. \u2014RL<\/p>\n \u201cMinotaur\u201d (dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev, Mubi)<\/p>\n After recovering from a near-fatal illness, Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (\u201cLeviathan\u201d) got back behind the camera after a decade with his sixth feature, Grand Prix winner \u201cMinotaur,\u201d an adaptation of Claude Chabrol\u2019s 1969 thriller \u201cAn Unfaithful Wife.\u201d Shot in Latvia in Russian, the movie is less a procedural investigation of a murder and more a portrayal of a corrupt society coping with a new war. The exiled filmmaker, now living in Paris, created believable Russian locations in Riga, Latvia, which still resembles its neighboring country. In one tour-de-force sequence, we follow the murderer for 20 minutes without any dialogue at all. Whatever the physical challenges the filmmaker may still be confronting, the joy he felt directing again is palpable on screen. \u2014AT<\/p>\n \u201cNagi Notes\u201d (dir. Koji Fukada, Sales Title)<\/p>\n A rural farm town some 630 kilometers west of Tokyo, Nagi is the kind of place where everybody knows each other. That makes it a wonderfully fertile setting for a film<\/a> by rising Japanese auteur Koji Fukada<\/a> (\u201cLove Life,\u201d \u201cA Girl Missing<\/a>\u201d), whose characters often struggle to know themselves.<\/p>\n That potential is on full display from the first moments of Fukada\u2019s characteristically probing ( if uncharacteristically sweet) \u201cNagi Notes<\/a>,\u201d in which a divorced architect Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi) pays a visit to her former sister-in-law York \u2014 a sculpter \u2014 out in the sticks. The conversations they share in the artist\u2019s barn are soft but searching, Yoriko carving a camphorwood bust of her model\u2019s face as the two women slowly work themselves back to a familial intimacy on unfamiliar terms. Fukada has always been fascinated by how other people are used to map the fractures that form within ourselves, and it\u2019s greatly rewarding to watch him apply that interest with a greater eye towards closeness than distance for once.<\/p>\n Inspired by a 1994 Oriza Hirata play called \u201cT\u014dky\u014d Notes\u201d (which was itself based on Ozu\u2019s \u201cTokyo Story<\/a>\u201d), Fukada\u2019s gentle adaptation is far too curious and clear-eyed to risk becoming a simple paean to the pureness of country living, but the film palpably taps into the kind of focus that\u2019s only possible in a place so free of distractions, and to the freedom that comes with it \u2014 including the freedom to leave. \u2014DE<\/p>\n \u201cPaper Tiger\u201d (dir. James Gray, Neon)<\/p>\n James Gray\u2019s<\/a> deft and devastating \u201cPaper Tiger<\/a>\u201d is a Jewish-American tragedy in a teapot that \u2014 like all of the writer\/director\u2019s best films \u2014 is both sweepingly mythic and hauntingly personal all at once. That double effect, once a magic trick that Gray\u2019s movies would manage to pull off by the time they ended, has since become the de facto starting condition of his singular auto-cinema, which continues to pick at his formative wounds by processing them through the classics.<\/p>\n As indebted to Aeschylus as \u201cAd Astra\u201d was to Joseph Campbell, or \u201cThe Lost City of Z\u201d was to Henri Rousseau, \u201cPaper Tiger\u201d begins with a telling quote from the ancient playwright\u2019s most famous text: \u201cLet there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further.\u201d Even more telling, however, is the opening shot that follows, which surveys the same reedy marshland \u2014 or at least one identical to it \u2014 from the end of \u201cWe Own the Night.\u201d It\u2019s no surprise that a project first conceived as a direct sequel to 2022\u2019s \u201cArmageddon Time\u201d should point back to Gray\u2019s previous work, but never before has it been so clear, so fast, that he\u2019s trying to process his own, highly specific experience by assimilating it into the curriculum that first taught him how to make sense of the world. The more acutely self-referential his films get, the more broadly they speak to the soft and immortal agony that propels their characters forward.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an agony that goes by many (sur)names, but is colloquially referred to as \u201cfamily.\u201d \u201cPaper Tiger\u201d is many things, chief among them a textbook parable about the American Dream, and a breathless thriller about a working-class schmuck (Miles Teller) whose brother (a career-best Adam Driver)gets mixed up with the Russian mafiya. But, at its most nuclear level, \u201cPaper Tiger\u201d is \u2014 to an even more explicit degree than \u201cLittle Odessa,\u201d \u201cThe Yards,\u201d and any of the other James Gray movies that it hungrily mulches into something all its own \u2014 a remarkably knowing and perceptive film<\/a> about how family is, and has always been, the ultimate devil\u2019s bargain. Our greatest strength and our heaviest cross to bear. The reason our most dangerous risks can seem worth taking, and the most valuable thing we risk by taking them. \u2014DE<\/p>\n \u201cTeenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma\u201d (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)<\/p>\n Visionary filmmaker\u00a0Jane Schoenbrun<\/a>\u2019s work is many things, but you wouldn\u2019t up to this point have necessarily called it optimistic or accessible. The\u00a0enthusiastically queer<\/a>, genre-literate director used their feature debut \u201cWe\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair<\/a>\u201d as not just a love letter to internet creepypastas and the scary stories we tell our young selves for comfort, but also as a coming-out missive.<\/p>\n With the making of that\u00a0film<\/a>\u00a0came Schoenbrun\u2019s revelation of their own nonbinary transness. Next painting on an even grander, more metaphysical canvas, their second feature \u2014 the wounding and masterful metaphor-as-movie \u201cI Saw the TV Glow<\/a>\u201d \u2014 used millennial nostalgia to construct a self-portrayal of their own gender dysphoria.<\/p>\n With Schoenbrun\u2019s slippery latest film, the sapphic slice of cinema \u201cTeenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma<\/a>,\u201d comes a statement about what happens after gender dysphoria\u2019s annihilation \u2014 a reflection on the sexual unease experienced once you\u2019ve finally fit into your body but perhaps don\u2019t know what to do with it. The ways in which we\u2019ve gotten so far in our own heads that sex is now more concept than carnal, surrendering act sets the stage for an erotic explosion in this cerebral, pop-colored tale centered on 29-year-old filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder<\/a>, who\u2019s internalized the role wonderfully).<\/p>\n Bookish and bright, she has been optioned to direct a \u201cwoke\u201d 21st-century reboot of a piece of zombie IP, a transphobic \u201880s slasher movie franchise called \u201cCamp Miasma.\u201d But in\u00a0this\u00a0film, a for-hire industry assignment opens a portal into a sexual awakening with help from the franchise\u2019s original final girl, played by Gillian Anderson. \u2014RL<\/p>\n \u201cThe Unknown\u201d (dir. Arthur Harari)<\/p>\n Certainly the most divisive film to premiere in the 2026 Cannes main competition, \u201cAnatomy of a Fall\u201d co-writer Arthur Harari\u2019s directorial feature \u201cThe Unknown\u201d feels as slippery as a lost Jacques Rivette movie from the 1980s, or as soul-searching as an Eric Rohmer one from the 1990s; shooting on film in Paris also helps the movie look out of recent arthouse past.<\/p>\n The usually enormously beautiful actor Niels Schneider whittles himself down into a dead ringer of John Hawkes at his rangiest, playing a photographer who, after an animalistic sexual encounter with L\u00e9a Seydoux in a trenchcoat, wakes up to find himself inside her body. With the sex change seemingly irreversible, David now aka Eva plays detective on themselves to uncover a potentially more vast network of people who\u2019ve been afflicted by a body-swapping entity. \u201cThe Unknown\u201d is a moody existential mystery that reflects on the materiality of the soul and whether a body is what makes you the person you are. \u2014RL<\/p>\n \u201cYesterday the Eye Didn\u2019t Sleep\u201d (dir. Rakan Mayasi, Sales Title)<\/p>\n Toward the start of Rakan Mayasi\u2019s stirring debut feature, \u201cYesterday the Eye Didn\u2019t Sleep\u201d \u2014 the only feature in this year\u2019s\u00a0Cannes<\/a>\u00a0official selection by a filmmaker of\u00a0Palestinian<\/a>\u00a0descent \u2014 there\u2019s a striking wide shot of women laboring in a fertile field amid the majestic snow-capped Anti-Lebanon mountains. As the still camera zooms in ever so slowly, our attention shifts from one of the\u00a0film<\/a>\u2019s leads, Rim (first-time actor Rim Al Mawla), to the constant sound of a war drone in the distance.<\/p>\n Even if you didn\u2019t know that Mayasi\u2019s film \u2014 shot in March 2025 in eastern Lebanon\u2019s Beqaa Valley, and an outgrowth of his short \u201cTrumpets in the Sky\u201d \u2014 is about a Bedouin family caught up in the country\u2019s age-old intertribal blood feuds and cultural practices of honor and retaliation, you\u2019d appreciate that contemporary Middle East and North African films that turn their eyes inward to their nations\u2019 internal strife can\u2019t avoid acknowledging the past century\u2019s geopolitical cataclysms that have wrecked the region.<\/p>\n How landscape intersects with tribal relations is the narrative backdrop for the somber, surprising, darkly poetic \u201cYesterday the Eye Didn\u2019t Sleep.\u201d When Yasser, the second son of the eight-member Al Mawla family (of the Mawali tribe), accidentally runs over and kills a man from the rival Jabour tribe, his two sisters, nurse Jawaher and fieldworker Rim are sent off to the Sheik of the other tribe as ritual honor offerings. During a fragile truce that is to last three days and a third, the Jabour men debate the sisters\u2019 fate. Will they forcefully marry one to their sons? Will they kill one, or both? This mystery forms the crux of the film\u2019s middle, even as surrealist scenes bring welcome tonal upheaval to the film\u2019s last third. \u2014Ritesh Mehta<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the 2026 Cannes Film Festival in the rearview, let\u2019s look at IndieWire\u2019s favorite movies of the festival…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[18451,88,11337,2695],"class_list":["post-665376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-cannes","tag-entertainment","tag-festivals","tag-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"CANNES,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779770291_322_GettyImages-2277872993.jpg\")
<\/a> ![\"Cristian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779770291_369_204424-2-scaled-1.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/p>\n![\"All](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ALL-OF-A-SUDDEN-Film-Still-1.webp\")
\u2018All of a Sudden\u2019Neon<\/p>\n![\"Atonement\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779770292_721_Atonement-Still-PC-Jon-Peter.webp\")
\u2018Atonement\u2019Courtesy Cannes Film Festival<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/The-Black-Ball-200723-H-2026.webp\")
\u2018The Black Ball\u2019Cannes<\/p>\n![\"Club](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot-2026-05-09-at-9.06.54\u202fPM.png\")
\u2018Club Kid\u2019Courtesy Cannes Film Festival<\/p>\n![\"Fatherland\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot-2026-05-09-at-10.45.11\u202fPM.png\")
\u2018Fatherland\u2019Courtesy Mubi<\/p>\n![\"Cristian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/204424-2-scaled-1.jpg\")
\u2018Fjord\u2019Neon<\/p>\n![\"RGB](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779770297_556_ILL-BE-GONE-IN-JUNE-Still-1-Road-Movies_Giulia-Schelhas.jpg\")
\u2018I\u2019ll Be Gone in June\u2019Road Movies\/Giulia Schelhas<\/p>\n![\"La](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779770298_15_Still_QuinzainCannes_001_JPEG_LLD.webp\")
\u2018La Libertad Doble\u2019Courtesy Cannes Film Festival<\/p>\n![\"Minotaur\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot-2026-05-09-at-10.22.34\u202fPM.png\")
\u2018Minotaur\u2019Mubi<\/p>\n![\"Nagi](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/199811-scaled-1.webp\")
\u2018Nagi Notes\u2019Cinetic<\/p>\n![\"Paper](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot-2026-05-11-at-1.56.37-PM.png\")
\u2018Paper Tiger\u2019Neon<\/p>\n![\"Teenage](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/CampM1.jpg\")
\u2018Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma\u2019MUBI<\/p>\n![\"Léa](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779770301_148_200548.webp\")
\u2018The Unknown\u2019NEON<\/p>\n![\"'Yesterday](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot-2026-05-19-at-3.47.25-PM.png\")
\u2018Yesterday the Eye Didn\u2019t Sleep\u2019Courtesy Cannes Film Festival<\/p>\n