Cannes Review: Joel Edgerton & Sean Harris In Thomas M Wright’s ‘The Stranger’

EXCLUSIVE: Orlando Bloom is set to join Pete Davidson, Naomi Scott, Franz Rogowski and Sean Harris in Wizards!, a new film from Australian writer-director David Michôd that reteams A24 and Plan B Entertainment. Michôd also penned the script, which is based on a story by Joel Edgerton and Michôd. Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner of Plan B will produce alongside Liz Watts.

When his mother spoke, Ernest remembers, everything sounded important. “I cling to her light,” he tells us in voiceover, an adult remembering how that felt. The Ernest he is recalling is just a little boy (Milan Doucansi), snuggled against Rose (Annabelle Lengronne, a wonderfully vivid presence), with his grave and clever older brother Jean (Sidy Fofana) sitting opposite on a train taking them from Cote d’Ivoire to a new French life.

Lucas’ bishop warns him of the dangers before he sets out to minister to a remote community of Icelanders in Cannes Un Certain Regard title Godland. “It’s easy to go mad there,” he explains at his Copenhagen dining table, steadily chewing his way through the fabulous feast in front of him. Iceland, where the sun never sets on summer nights, where the weather is extreme, the landscape broodingly monumental: just remember the apostles, “a group of lonely men,” the bishop advises as he wipes his mouth. Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) is not eating; one glance tells you he’s a priest of an ascetic bent.

Kelly Reichardt has been making minimal Americana since the early 1990s, mostly around the state of Oregon where she lives and mostly about her favored awkward squad: quiet square pegs who don’t quite fit the round holes society provides. In this ongoing quest she has found many collaborators, but none more attuned to her recessive brand of naturalism than Michelle Williams.

CANNES – Lukas Dhont’s second feature, “Close,” starts off where most love stories end, and, in that respect, it begins with almost euphoric joy. Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) are the best of friends.

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure, Fugue) makes her english language debut with The Silent Twins, the strange and remarkable story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin sisters who only communicated with each other from 8 to later teen years when drugs and drinking led to petty theft and an arson charge that landed them in the tightly secured medical ward of Broadmoor  for 11 years before being released in the 1980’s. Creating their own puppetry and dolls, poems, and music which they only broadcast for each other on a fake radio program, the “twinies” as they were called by family fell into an odd void that became more pronounced, even when they were forced to go to separate schools at one point, and they carried on this way until becoming young women landing into legal troule  until incredibly being incarcerated for over a decade, five or six times as long as the longest sentence for the petty crimes of which they were accused.

Deadline’s studio at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival kicked off at the American Pavilion by hosting fest-goers such as Joel Edgerton of The Stranger, Jesse Eisenberg and Julianne Moore of When You Finish Saving The World, and many more. Click on the photo above to launch the gallery.

Detective Hae-joon investigating the death of a man who fell from a mountain top. When he meets the deceased man’s wife in Park Chan-wook’s latest film in competition at Cannes, Decision To Leave.  

The challenges of street casting are explored in The Worst Ones (Les Pires), an Un Certain Regard drama about a film within a film. Directed by Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, it sees a film crew hit a working class French town, with thought-provoking and sometimes darkly funny results.  
 Flemish director Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh) is casting kids in Picasso, in the suburbs of Boulogne-Sur-Mer. His feature is about a pregnant teen and her younger brother, and he wants authentic local residents. The neighbors are surprised that he’s only casting “les pires” — what they consider to be the worst ones, or the hoodlums. But there’s raw talent in Lily (Mallory Wanecque) and hot-headed little Ryan (Timéo Mahaut).

Understandably, the terrorist attacks in Paris on the night of November 13, 2015 have been treated with great sensitivity by the French film industry, and the only other film in the Cannes Film Festival’s lineup this year to touch on those events — Alice Winocour’s Paris Revoir — is a lightly fictionalized drama set in the aftermath of the night 130 people were killed, most of them at a rock concert at the city’s Bataclan nightclub. Though many names have been changed, for obvious security reasons, Cedric Jimenez’s Novembre is, by contrast, a heavy-artillery just-the-facts-ma’am police procedural detailing the manhunt that followed in the next five days.

Timing can be cruel. Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s second feature, Sick Of Myself, has the misfortune to arrive in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section in the slipstream of Ruben Östlund’s divisive but funny competition title Triangle of Sadness; the latter being a broader, sillier but much more brutal dissection of class and culture. Sick Of Myself also has to compete with the unexpected longevity of fellow countryman Joachim Trier’s hit The Worst Person In The World, which last year went from the Cannes competition all the way to the Oscars.

For his directing debut after brother Joel’s first solo outing with The Tragedy of Macbeth, Ethan Coen has chosen a similar saga of ruthless ambition and soul-devouring guilt, telling the rise and fall — and rise again — of Jerry Lee Lewis, from farmer’s son to rock’n’roll idol.

“Sexism is everywhere — so are we.” It’s just one of many slogans plastered across the streets of France in the timely documentary Feminist Riposte (Riposte Féministe) which is in the Special Screenings section at Cannes. Filmmakers Marie Perennès and Simon Depardon follow 10 groups of women around the country who are protesting about harassment, rape, femicide — and about the police response to these crimes. “Les flics” — aka the cops — are a silent force in this film, policing protests with grim faces. This is about giving a voice to the young women, recording their dialogue about the cause.

If you’re the parent of a kid who’s thinking about becoming an actor, nothing could be scarier than watching Forever Young (Les Amandiers).

Sometimes it hardly matters whether we know a story is based on truth or not. Watching Ali Abbasi’s thunderously damning Holy Spider, on the other hand, it drives a wedge into your mind knowing that a serial killer really did terrorize the Iranian holy city of Mashhad in the early 2000s, that he killed 16 street prostitutes, that there were police who conspired to help him escape and that there were people in Iran — a lot of people, he keeps assuring his family — who were on the murderer’s side. He was doing God’s work.

CANNES – It may seem obvious, but sometimes combining two compelling stories doesn’t lead to an overall more captivating film. That’s the primary takeaway from Gina Gammell and Riley Keough‘s somewhat messy “War Pony,” which debuted at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival this weekend.

CANNES – We are living in yet another era of European history where old battles over the borders of nation-states are being disputed. Russia has invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine after already annexing the province of Crimea less than a decade ago.

The titular Triangle Of Sadness in previous Palme D’Or winner Ruben Ostlund’s current Cannes competition entry, we’re told, is the small space between the eyebrows and the bridge of the nose where nasty, aging lines register an accumulation of inconvenient emotions that, quite frankly, don’t sell a suit on the catwalk. “Do you think he needs Botox?,” mutters a model casting agent as Carl (Harris Dickinson) — who, being on the wrong side of 20, should worry — struts his stuff. He will soon find himself at a fashion show where a huge neon screen announces “Everyone is equal!” That’s nonsense, obviously. Carl can’t even find a seat.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticWho knew that police sting operations did — or even could — work like the one seen in “The Stranger”? Based on the extensive Mr. Big ruse that brought a notorious Australian kidnapper to justice, this eerie, understated thriller draws the audience into the same deception used to ensnare the culprit, focusing on psychology more than procedure in its entrancing account of a most unusual criminal investigation.

Gregg Goldstein Australian native Thomas M. Wright is no stranger to dark material.