‘Brother & Sister Review: Arnaud Desplechin’s Captivating Sibling Drama Starring Marion Cotillard & Melvil Poupaud [Cannes]

As a procedural drama centrally interested in the radicalization of a young Muslim boy in Belgium, Adil & Bilall’s “Rebel” pulsates with terrible inevitability. Falling behind at school, with an adored older brother already having made the trip to Syria and a trafficker whispering in his ear, it’s less a question of if Nassim (Amir El Arbi, another tremendous kid actor for Cannes ’22 to tick off) is going to find himself on the Jihadist frontline, but when.

Though shot and set prior to the Russian invasion, by dint of being a Ukrainian picture detailing the aftermath of a woman soldier’s assault in the Donbas, “Butterfly Vision” lays claim to uniquely wretched timeliness at this year’s Cannes. What is an impressive if formally flawed first film from Maksym Nakonechnyi earns some emotional weight vis-a-vis present events: the Ukrainian flags of blue and white, flown with unsparing pride across Nakonechnyi’s images, bear the immediate frisson of beleaguered resistance, and that women Stateside presently face unprecedented threats to their bodily autonomy only compounds the miserable resonance.

This year’s dark horse in competition at Cannes is easily “Leila’s Brothers,” Iranian writer-director Saeed Roustaee’s third feature and worthy follow-up to his intense 2019 cop thriller “Just 6.5.” With hints of “The Godfather” and Arthur Miller evident throughout, the drama is a sprawling tale exploring dysfunctional family dynamics, economic hardships, and generational wealth. READ MORE: Cannes Film Festival 2022 Preview: 25 Must-See Films To Watch “Leila’s Brothers” follows the lives of a Tehran family as they struggle to stay afloat amidst financial hardships and complicated familial relationships.

The exquisite and sublime journeys of Oregon-based filmmaker Kelly Reichardt are arguably, more or less, incidental or oblique political statements about survival in America, often focusing on two or more friends, usually outsiders, and their struggle to endure. “Wendy And Lucy,” about a destitute woman and her soulmate canine companion, was overt about human inequity and hardship; “Meek’s Cutoff” depicted the unbearable burden of living off a hostile, unforgiving land; and “First Cow” presented the warm, but sad futility of two friends trying to sustain themselves under the grueling rigors of nascent American capitalism.

In the late 19th century, two French psychiatrists coined the term “folie à deux,” literally translated as madness for two, to describe what is now widely referred to as shared psychotic disorder, or when two — or more — people transmit delusional beliefs and occasional hallucinations to one another. The condition is most common in people closely related, who live in intimate proximity, and has been lengthily dissected by academics.

You can pretty much bet that whenever the Dardenne brothers show up with a new film in Cannes, it will walk away with some sort of prize. That has been the case since 1999 when their first competition film, Rosetta swooped in at the last minute and won the Palme d’Or and Best Actress. They won a second Palme d’Or in 2005 for The Child, the Grand Jury Prize in 2011 for Kid With A Bike, Screenplay in 2008 for Lorna’s Silence, and Director in 2019 for Young Ahmed. No matter what the jury, the Dardennes continue to impress, yet none of their films has ever brought them an Oscar nomination. 2011’s Two Days, One Night did get a surprise Best Actress nomination for Marion Cotillard but that has been it.

The great majority of us could only aspire, before “Moonage Daydream,” to step into the mind of David Bowie — the persona, the artist, the entity not yet proven terrestrial. Eclectic, unashamedly maximalist, and variously philosophical: all true of both the man himself and Brett Morgen’s feature-length docu-odyssey, which borrows its title from the 1976 hit, and just debuted as part of Cannes’ Midnight slate.

“The Five Devils,” from French director Léa Mysius, captivates from its very first seconds. We see Adèle Exarchopoulos in a sparkling gymnast outfit with other similarly dressed girls, all watching an enormous fire in the background; when she turns around, she is crying — fire, beauty, passion and death all conveyed in one image.

“It’s apparently fun to drown,” says sixteen-year-old Chloé, the droll, moody teen at the heart of Charlotte Le Bon’s debut feature, “Falcon Lake.” It’s a pithy line that echoes Cecilia Lisbon’s response (“Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl”) when she’s asked why she tried to harm herself in Sofia Coppola‘s “The Virgin Suicides.” Unlike Cecilia and her sisters, Chloé only plays at being dead, seeing how long she can float in the lake near her family’s cabin or lie in the road like a deer hit by a passing car.

Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. The actress, 46, put on a leggy display in a thigh-skimming pink minidress featuring silver embellishments as she posed up a storm for photographers.

There’s a lot happening at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival right now and so many big stars stepped out for photo calls during day five.

Cannes Film Festival. The French actress, 46, turned heads in a striking head-to-toe Chanel look at the premiere of her new movie Brother And Sister (Frère et Soeur). Marion, who is an ambassador for the luxury French brand, beamed for the cameras in the sheer ensemble, posing up a storm before heading inside to the swanky screening.

Marion Cotillard shows off her long legs on the red carpet for the premiere of her new film, Brother and Sister, during the 2022 Cannes Film Festival on Friday (May 20) in Cannes, France.

Guy Lodge Film CriticWhatever other flaws “Brother and Sister” may have, you absolutely cannot accuse it of being slow to build. Within its first 10 minutes, two estranged siblings bawl each other out at a dead child’s wake, one declaring the other “an indecent monster”; a screechingly staged single-vehicle car crash imperils an elderly couple and paralyzes a teenage driver; then, a barrelling truck at the scene brings further tragedy.

A silver spoon clunks loudly inside a bowl of beef broth. The meal — well, barely a meal — is served to Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) twice a day, her diet a strict combination of insipid soup and wafer-thin slices of lemon.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentOscar-winning producer and activist Marion Cotillard is joining forces with filmmaker Cyril Dion and producer Magali Payen to launch Newtopia, a production company which will aim at delivering movies, series and shorts with socially relevant themes. The Paris-based company’s first slate of ambitious projects include Dion’s geopolitical thriller “Le grand vertige,” and “Francoise,” a prestige English-language mini-series about the flamboyant life of Françoise d’Eaubonne, a leading feminist writer and activist who created the concept of ecofeminism.

Between her job as a French-English interpreter, the prospect of romantic fulfillment, and the impending deterioration of her father’s health, the woman holding together all the threads in Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning” navigates a wide spectrum of human emotion. In the director’s follow up to last year’s English-language meta homage “Bergman Island,” Sandra (Léa Seydoux) oscillates between desire and grief with believable fluidity.