Cannes Review: Park Chan-wook’s ‘Decision To Leave’; His First Film To Premiere At Cannes Since 2016

The jury announces its winners at the Cannes Film Festival tomorrow, and speculation abounds over who will walk away with the Palme d’Or this year. And one of the frontrunners to win the top prize is South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook for his romantic cop drama “Decision To Leave.” director is no stranger to Cannes.

The jury announces its winners at the Cannes Film Festival tomorrow, and speculation abounds over who will walk away with the Palme d’Or this year. And one of the frontrunners to win the top prize is South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook for his romantic cop drama “Decision To Leave.” director is no stranger to Cannes.

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.

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.

“Decision To Leave” deals in illusions. Is Song Seo-rae’s dress blue or green? Is she really the innocent wife she claims to be? In her living room, she sits surrounded by sapphire wallpaper, its lines suggesting the mountains near her Busan home that she so loathes — but they could easily be seen as waves, too.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefTang Wei, the Chinese star of Korean film “Decision to Leave,” says she told director Park Chan-wook that he’d made her life complete after seeing the finished version of the film at its Cannes Film Festival gala premiere.The film played in competition this week in Cannes. She revealed her confession on Tuesday at a press event, accompanied by Park, cast member Park Hae-il and scriptwriter Chung Soo-kyung.Switching between Chinese and English, Tang Wei said: “This in not the first time I’ve worked with a Korean director.

While Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden dealt with a lot of sex and kink in its story of a handmaiden who gets into the good graces of her Japanese heiress, only to defraud her, the Korean filmmaker in his latest Decision to Leave, dotes on a detective Hae-Joon (Park Hae-il) who is head over heels with a very possible murder suspect, Seo-rae (Tang Wei).

Zack Sharf Welcome back, Park Chan-wook. The South Korean auteur returned to Cannes six years after “The Handmaiden” with his new detective thriller “Decision to Leave” and earned a five-minute standing ovation.Although the ovation matched the amount of time celebrating “The Handmaiden,” the reception was notably more muted. While the camera the festival uses that normally shows on the creative team’s gracious reaction after the movie, and helps to keep the applause rolling, wasn’t working, the response was quiet even before the technical snafu.“Decision to Leave” centers around a detective who falls in love with a mysterious widow who just happens to be the prime suspect in his latest murder investigation.

“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.

South Korea may have made big inroads on American TV recently with “Squid Game” and “Pachinko,” and the country’s intriguing film and television industry also has a stronger-than-usual presence at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “Squid Game” star Lee Jung-jae’s political thriller “Hunt” premiered as a midnight screening early in the festival; Davy Chou’s “Return to Seoul” landed a pre-Cannes deal with Sony Pictures Classics and is one of the hits of the Un Certain Regard sidebar; and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is in the main competition with “Broker,” his first film shot in South Korea in the Korean language.

Kelly Ripa's son Michael Consuelos doesn't post on social media often, but when he does, it's usually laden with hilarity.MORE: Kelly Ripa stuns with Hollywood-esque transformation - and wowALSO: HELLO! launches Jubilee T-shirt collection to celebrate Queen Elizabeth in styleThe oldest child of Kelly and Mark Consuelos took to his Instagram Stories with a rather unsettling photograph, although quite an intriguing one at that.VIDEO: Kelly Ripa's children steal the show on Live with Kelly and RyanHe shared a throwback of himself as a child, excitedly posing for the camera with his tongue out and braces blared, showing off his blood-spattered t-shirt.The white tee was covered with blood and featured an alien protruding through the chest, a work of clever costuming that paid homage to the sci-fi classic Alien.MORE: Kelly Ripa's Hollywood project revealed as she takes break from LIVE!He looked quite happy with his costume, even captioning his photo: "Back when I peaked," and fans surely would've gotten a laugh out of it.The Riverdale star has had an eventful week, having recently participated in a delayed commencement ceremony for New York University, his official in-person graduation.

It probably says something, in spite of their public comments to the contrary, about the severity of the Coen Brothers’ break-up that each of them has proceeded to make a movie that you not only can’t imagine them making together, but that is so easily classifiable — after all, “Shakespeare adaptation” and “musical bio-doc” are two of the most venerable film types of today. The only genre you could safely consign them to before now was their own; they made “Coen Brothers movies,” and everyone knew what that meant, even if they couldn’t precisely pinpoint it.

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.

“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.

Park Chan-wook made a big impact in Cannes in 2004 with his lurid revenge drama Oldboy, which took the Grand Prix from Quentin Tarantino’s jury, made a cult star of Choi Min-sik, and alerted audiences everywhere to the perils of eating live sushi. Since then, the director has been a semi-regular fixture at the festival, returning in 2009 with his literary vampire horror Thirst and again in 2016 with The Handmaiden, a delirious, taboo-busting erotic thriller set in 1930s Korea. Director Park’s trademark is not just his fluidity when dealing with genre but his mastery in bending it to his will—and Decision to Leave promises to be yet another stylish, category-defying composition.

Zack Sharf A woman was removed from the Cannes Film Festival red carpet during the world premiere of George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” Video footage from the carpet saw a woman trying to crash the event while screaming at the top of her longs. The woman was quickly removed from the carpet by a handful of security guards.The woman appeared not to be wearing a shirt and had the word “scum” written on her lower back.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorErotic love story “99 Moons,” which has its world premiere in Cannes’ ACID sidebar today, has kicked off international sales. Berlin-based M-Appeal is handling the rights to the film, which is directed by Jan Gassmann.Arthouse VOD platform Filmin has taken the rights in Spain, and arthouse distributor StraDa Films has taken the films for Greece. France and Latin America are in negotiation.

EXCLUSIVE: Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo (Harriet) will lead cast alongside Being The Ricardos and Arrested Development star Alia Shawkat in Anthony Chen’s (Ilo Ilo) English-language debut Drift.

“You can’t ever forget about the past,” Anthony Hopkins says with gentle heed and caution, in a key moment in writer/director James Gray’s intimate new film, “Armageddon Time,” a compassionate movie in perpetual contemplation of our collective accounts, both personally, socially and historically. After venturing out into the jungle (“The Lost City Of Z”), exploring the unfathomable unknowns of deep space (“Ad Astra”) and coming to the same conclusions about the dark heart of human nature, Gray returns to the pavement of his New York City roots for one of his most emotionally honest works regarding the elemental moments of life, love and loss.