Ben Croll

If the three main draws are too confirmed in respective talents to deliver a subpar performance or a slipshod composition, their shared billing can never quite deliver this film from listlessness.

Though the film is all surface, that surface is precisely the point.

The themes are broad and brassy as the film that explores them, and all the better still. It was about time for someone to take such a big swing, and to hit the ball so far out the park.

The always-understated director never mines the domestic situation for excessive melodrama, instead opting to step back and wryly examine the three leads’ contradictory impulses.

Amirpour takes on the Big Easy, mixing a heady cocktail of EDM beats, Hollywood treacle and southern sleaze and sipping down Bourbon Street.

An easy-going film that coolly ambles forward as a series of short sketches and vignettes, while maintaining a fairly detached tone.

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is hardly a disappointment, but it does, in places, feel like a missed opportunity.

For all of his self-imposed restraints, Ozon remains a terrific actors’ director, with both Marceau and especially Dussollier giving lively performances that afford the film its limited spark.

There are sequences and stand-alone shots that will stick with you long after you’ve washed the insipid narration from memory.

Nocturnal Animals is an impressively ambitious effort, one part mean Texas thriller, one part middle-age melodrama, and makes for a meta-textual riddle that is almost as pleasurable to reflect on as it to actually watch.

The Last Duel reveals itself as something all too rare on the current Hollywood field of battle: an intelligent and genuinely daring big budget melee that is — above all else — the product of recognizable artistic collaboration.

Spoor remains witty throughout, breaking even the tensest moments with the lead’s acid-tongued appraisals of the local hunters.

Mike Leigh’s expansive, exhaustive, and extraordinarily thorough portrait of early 19th-century political activism is, to put it one way, deliberate in pace and tone. To put it bluntly — and in an argot more readily familiar to its cast of working-class characters — the film is bloody well dull.

Offering plum roles to Catherines Frot and Catherine Deneuve, The Midwife is a minor-key crowd pleaser about friendship, forgiveness and rolling with the punches.

Call it scenery in search of a film. Call it a film in search of a purpose. Call me when Guiraudie releases his next one, because, damn, the guy’s got talent.

When chewing through some oddly phrased text, Qualley’s non-verbal tics offer twice the information with half the winces, making “Stars at Noon” sometimes feel like two films in one. There’s the paranoid thriller and the dreamlike dirge; a steamy drama and its feminist reappraisal; the work of a master with the promise of new kinks to iron out and maybe greater heights to which to soar.

Aster has always had a knack for confrontation, while Phoenix works best as an open-nerve. That the duo should prove so adept tapping into a vein of neurotic action is one of the many brutal surprises in a social satire as blunt and broad as America itself.

This slight-but-winning confection will have little effect on the controversial director’s galvanizing public image but, after a string of stuffy disappointments, Coup de Chance will offer comfort to the filmmaker’s many completists – especially given Allen’s intimation that this 50th film might well be his last.

Casablanca Beats argues that the power of personal expression can turn the world on its head. And for a good spell, the film does just that.

Downsizing is rife with witty visual touches and inspired comic premises but never quite comes together as fully successful whole.

If, when printed and sent off for posterity, a snapshot like “Coma” offers a small degree of archival value — while answering the question Bonello poses at the start — it might also arrive as a postcard from a time all-too-thankfully gone by.

Feeling simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium tries to ring a warning bell about, well, a lot of things. In the end, though, it works best as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of filmmakers biting off more than they can chew.

It’s a perfectly enjoyable, perfectly forgettable nostalgi-comedy that will be taken to task for not being anything more.

Corsini has delivered a wonderful film, a beautifully calibrated coming-of-age drama that ever so elegantly flutters questions of race, class, guilt and opportunity through a seaside summer breeze.

Unsane brims with curiosity about digital technology, discomfort with corporate bureaucracies, and is spiked through and through with icy wit – in short, it could never be anything but a Soderbergh film, and a particularly delicious one at that.

The breath of life and beating heart at the center of countless, Russian nesting doll layers of artifice and art-house reference, actor Denis Menochet doesn’t just anchor Peter von Kant, he makes the Francois Ozon project a film.

By no means a failed film, this two-hander about toxic-codependency from Romanian director Călin Peter Netzer is best in small-moments and insightful asides, but does a disservice to the relationship at its heart by honing in on one single thought and hammering it home again and again and again.

Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s neorealist indictment of police corruption looks unlike any other film playing in Cannes’ Official Competition. It’s just that what sets the film apart is its visual ugliness.