Cannes Film Festival 2023: All Of Deadline’s Movie Reviews

UPDATED with latest: The Cannes Film Festival kicked off this year with opening-night movie Jeanne du Barrywith Deadline on the ground to watch all the key films. Here is a compilation of our reviews from the fest, which last year saw Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness win the coveted Palme d’Or on its way to an Oscar Best Picture nomination.

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Check out the reviews below, click on the titles to read them in full, and keep checking back as we add more.

About Dry Grasses

Section: Competition
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cast:Deniz Celiloglu, Ece Bagci, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici
Deadline’s takeaway: For Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s many fans, this is another opportunity to slip into his world, spot his sly political references and subside for a while into the life of the mind. That life isn’t an easy ride and — with three-plus hours of dense dialogue — certainly not too quick, but it is a rewarding one.

Anatomy of a Fall

Section: Competition
Director: Justine Triet
Cast:Sandra Huller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner, and Samuel Theis
Deadline takeaway: Were this a simple whodunit, Triet’s film would be just as enjoyable, if a bit overlong, but the director’s masterstroke is to subvert the pleasures of genre convention to explore issues of schadenfreude and plain morbid human curiosity (it makes especially interesting viewing after the many conversations about the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard court case that accompanied the screening of Cannes opener Jeanne du Barry last week).

The Animal Kingdom

Section: In some perspective
Director: Thomas Cailley
Cast: Romain Duris, Adele Exarchopoulos, Paul Kircher
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s certainly a testament to Cailley’s spellbinding magic-realist fable that The Animal Kingdom can be enjoyed at face value without being battered over the head by subtext. Dig a bit deeper, though, and its rich and strange barrage of images and ideas just becomes more and more remarkable and compelling over time.

Anselm

Section: Special Screening
Director: Wim Wenders
Cast:Anselm Kiefer, Daniel Kiefer, Anton Wenders
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s hard to imagine seeing Anselm in any format other than 3D, and if it fails in broadening the reputation of its already internationally known subject, it’s an extraordinary post-pandemic endeavor that succeeds in reminding viewers of the thrill of being in the presence of great art.

Banel & Adams

Section: Competition
Director: Ramata-Toulaye Sy
Cast: Khady Mane – The Best Of Khady Mane
Deadline’s takeaway: There’s a lot to absorb in this beautifully realized production, and on a visceral level alone it’s quite sumptuous, from the gorgeous bright clothes of the Senegalese to a sandstorm that seems to pop out of the screen in 3D. But it’s as a performance piece that it really gets under your skin.

Black Flies

Section: Competition
Director: Jean-Stephane Sauvaire
Cast: Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Mike Tyson, Michael Carmen Pitt, Katherine Waterston, Rachel Nave, Gbenga Akinnagbe
Deadline’s takeaway: The idea behindBlack Fliesis admirable. It does serve to remind us of how screwed up America can be. But despite the obvious gritty filmmaking skills of its lauded French director, something was lost in translation that keeps this from really soaring.

Bread & Roses

Section: Special Screening
Director: Sahra Mani
Deadline’s takeaway: Whether a documentary about women in Afghanistan can effect any change in the country seems too much to hope for. But at the very least, it will help ensure their ordeal is not forgotten.

Club Zero

Section: Competition
Director-Screenwriter:Jessica Hausner
Cast:Mia Wasikowska, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Luke Barker, Ksenia Devriendt, Elsa Zylberstein, Matthieu Demy
Deadline’s takeaway: There is a great deal to admire here in all this. At the same time, you long for her story to explode into something stranger, a story that will take us somewhere we have never seen. Or perhaps that is desire for resolution, dressed up as criticism.

Fallen Leaves

Section: Competition
Director: Aki Kaurismaki
Deadline’s takeaway: If there is any justice,Fallen Leaveswill bring the filmmaker, responsible with his brother for most of the country’s cinematic success in the past four decades, the kind of recognition he deserves. It is a true gem and the first time this year I have heard applause at the end from the usually stone-faced press who attend the early morning pre-premiere screenings at the Palais.

Firebrand

Section: Competition
Director: Karim Aïnouz
Cast: Alicia Vikander, Jude Law, Simon Russell Beale, Eddie Marsan, Sam Riley, Erin Doherty
Deadline’s takeaway: Far more accessible to those who might not be drawn to this kind of costumer, Firebrand is what its title suggests and is consistently engrossing. It also is a fine showcase again for the talents of Vikander, and for Law, who is truly becoming the consummate character actor of his generation.

Homecoming (The come back)

Section: Competition
Director: Catherine Corsini
Cast:Esther Gohourou, Suzy Bemba, Aissatou Diallo Sagna, Lomane De Dietrich
Deadline’s takeaway: There is a brisker, tougher and more succinct story buried just out of sight in Homecomingsomewhere on the beach where the jet-skis blast through the waves. Not that there isn’t plenty here to enjoy, but too much time where we feel like Farah, running sand through her fingers and wondering if there’s anything to do in this village.

How to Have Sex

Section: In some perspective
Director: Molly Manning Walker
Cast: Mia Mckenna-Bruce, Lara Peake, Samuel Bottomley, Shaun Thomas, Enva Lewis
Deadline’s takeaway: The dominant theme here in Walker’s subtle but powerful deconstruction of teenage dreams and desires re is the rub between self-image and reality; everyone here, in a world without any adjacent adults and in true teenage fashion, feels themselves to be older and wiser than they really are, and the drama comes entirely from the tensions that arise whenever reality becomes too real to ignore.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Section: Out of Competition
Director: James Mangold
Cast: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Ethann Isidore, Mads Mikkelsen
Deadline’s takeaway: However much action swirls on the surface of this kind of film, its foundations are built of reassuring nostalgia. Just hearing John Williams’ score, yet another variant on the heroics and theatrics of the original, makes anyone of a certain age feel that everything is momentarily right with the world.

Jeanne DuBarry

Section:Out of Competition
Director:Maïwenn
Cast:Maiwenn, Johnny Depp, Benjamin Lavernhe, Pierre Richard, Melvil Poupaud, Pascal Greggory, India Hair
Deadline’s takeaway:The film’s pageantry can’t quite cover up the fact that there isn’t much glue to the story, which unfolds as a series of vignettes, and feels more like we’re looking at scenes from a life in retrospect than being invested in watching a wild life being lived to the fullest.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Section: Out of Competition
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, Tatanka Means, Michael Abbott Jr.,Pat Healy, Scott Shepherd, Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson
Deadline’s takeaway: Killers of the Flower Moon is a landmark motion picture achievement, if only for the care and handling of how it tells the story of the Osage Nation.

May December

Section: Competition
Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith, Elizabeth Yu, Gabriel Chong, Piper Curda, D.W. Moffet, Lawrence Arancio
Deadline’s takeaway: Much of the fun though is watching it all slowly play out. You could see Cukor or Sirk latching onto this material, just as Haynes has done in sparking to screenwriter Samy Burch’s first produced script.

Monster

Section: Competition
Director: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
Cast: Ando Sakura, Nagayama Eita, Kurokawa Soya, Hiiragi Hinata, Tanaka Yuko
Deadline’s takeaway: Monsterrepresents Kore-Eda’s first movie since his 1995 debut featureMaboroshithat the director has not had a screenplay credit on, but clearly with its humanist family-centered themes is right in this master craftsman’s wheelhouse.

The New Boy

Section: In some perspective
Director: Warwick Thornton
Cast: Aswan Reid, Cate Blanchett, Deborah Mailm an, Wayne Blair
Deadline’s takeaway: Warwick hornton’s eye can find the beauty in a window frame. He is also telling — without stridency and with broad compassion for all his characters, all of them broken in their own way — a version of Australia’s founding story.

Occupied City

Section: Special Screenings
Director: Steve McQueen
Narrator:Melanie Hyams
Deadline’s takeaway: We are entering a new era when few people with direct experience of the atrocities of WWII and the Holocaust remain alive. This era calls for a new kind of film about that time – a new way of preserving memory and cautioning us against a repetition of crimes against humanity driven by a racist ideology.Occupied Cityis that film.

Strange Way of Life

Section: Special Screening
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Director-screenwriter: Pedro Almodovar
Cast: Pedro Pascal, Ethan Hawke
Deadline’s takeaway: The ghosts of John Ford, Howard Hawks, John Sturges, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh and Sam Peckinpah may be surprised at the twist that this 73-year-old fanboy has given Strange Way of Life. That is because though the work of those directors is liberally addressed and tributed in different ways, the plot here is something you would never find in any of their classics.

Vincent Must Die

Section: Critics Week
Director:Stéphan Castang
Cast:Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, Francois Chattot, Michaël Perez
Deadline’s takeaway: You can read the set-up of Vincent Must Die as an metaphor for office politics, and the rest of it as allegory for the internecine nature of social media, where the mildest of opinions can ruin lives and reputations. Most of all, though, it is a joyfully absurdist tale of everyday alienation writ large.

Youth (Spring)

Section: Competition
Director-screenplay: Wang Bing
Deadline’s takeaway: Youth’s purpose isn’t to expose abuse in the clothing trade (although it may make you deeply skeptical next time you go shopping and spot a Made in China jacket, say, selling for a suspiciously cheap price). Wang’s intent is more subtly sociological – Youth explores the connections and even culture, in a sense, that can develop among people thrown together in arduous circumstances.

The Zone of Interest