Flag Day, Cannes review: this father-daughter project won't revive Sean Penn's flagging directorial career

Sean Penn is showcasing the talents of his daughter, Dylan Penn, in his upcoming drama,.

Eddie Vedder‘s daughter Olivia has provided vocals on the song that soundtracks the latest film from Sean Penn.The first trailer for Flag Day, a new drama directed by the Oscar-winner, features Olivia singing a new track called ‘My Father’s Daughter’.Written by the Pearl Jam frontman and Once songwriter Glen Hansard, the track is said to be a moving ode to adopting the traits of your parents, regardless of whether you meant to.It mirrors the storyline of the film – which stars Penn and his

The trailer for Sean Penn and daughter Dylan‘s new movie has been released!

Life is a great adventure.

Jennifer Yuma editorSean Penn’s upcoming film “Flag Day” has released its first trailer, featuring Penn and his children, Dylan Frances Penn and Hopper Jack Penn, as the dysfunctional Vogel family.Sean Penn serves as both star and director for the movie, which is based on Jenifer Vogel’s 2004 memoir recounting her fractured relationship with her father, criminal and con-man John Vogel.

Sean Penn recently made headlines refusing to return to the set of “Gaslit” until all of the cast and crew have been vaccinated. MGM Studios have seemingly capitalized on this media attention surrounding Penn, as they’ve released a brand new trailer for his latest directorial effort “Flag Day” that the studio scooped up during the Cannes Film Festival.

A family goes on a road trip with a difference in Hit The Road, a promising first feature from Panah Panahi, which showed in the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section. The son of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi delivers a lean but affecting drama with a winning humorous streak.

Director Vincent Maël Cardona uses western Europe in the early-1980s as the canvas upon which he paints his layered and achingly genuine portrait of young love, familial bondage, artistic aspiration, and universal chaos. Unburdened by a firm connection to any one genre or narrative archetype, “Magnetic Beats” tells a simple story with a full arsenal of source music, thoughtful set design, and crisp acting at all levels to pull off this love letter to a particular moment in time.

It’s a good thing you can’t catch a virus from an image because if you could, just a few frames of Kirill Serebrennikov‘s fabulously yeasty, bilious, dank Competition title, “Petrov’s Flu” would bring all of Cannes‘ anti-Covid measures to naught.

Tatiana Huezo’s eye for lyrical truth has materialized in documentaries like “Tempestad” or “The Tinniest Place,” works that penetrate some of the most tenebrous corners in recent Latin American history with shimmering compassion. Her stance as an acute observer of the people that survive and persevere through tumultuous sociopolitical and economically disadvantaged contexts produces thought-provoking filmic meditations.

The Robert Bresson quote that opens the anthology film “Year of the Everlasting Storm” — “you don’t create by adding, but by taking away” — makes a tidy adage of the time-honored idea that deprivation breeds innovation.

In “A Hero” (“Ghahreman”), Asghar Farhadi blurs the line of innocence and guilt in a fraught drama about the true weight of a good deed. During a two-day reprieve from prison, Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) and his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) discover a handbag full of golden coins.

When teenaged environmental activist Greta Thunberg made her now-famous speech at the UN Headquarters in 2019, she was met with equal parts admiration and derision, likely an unfavorable imbalance toward the latter. For every A-list celebrity who reposted a clip on their Instagram story, adorned with enthusiastic heart emojis, surely another handful of Internet trolls lurked in the comments and left discouraging messages.

The rise in popularity of true crime stories has seen the line between genuine investigation and lurid exploitation become increasingly blurred. With every new Netflix docu-series, podcast episode, and beach-read paperback, content creators are having to go further afield to dig up some crime forgotten to history to recast in a light that often appears oriented for entertainment first, with any richer insights an inadvertent byproduct.

It would be disingenuous not to begin this review by mentioning that, yes, Panah Panahi is indeed related to the titan of Iranian cinema, Jafar Panahi.

What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops.

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having.

Premiering in competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Nanni Moretti’s wild melodrama “Three Floors” is based on a 2017 Israeli novel called “Shalosh Qomot” from writer Eshkol Nevo and begins with an undeniably tragic event. One dark night on a quiet street of Rome, a drunk driver runs over a lady crossing the road, narrowly avoids hitting a pregnant woman, then finally crashes into a building, landing straight into a family’s living room.

Sean Penn poses with his daughter, Dylan Penn, at the photo call for Flag Day during the 2021 Cannes Film Festival on Sunday (July 11) in Cannes, France.