‘Hold Me Tight’: Mathieu Amalric Deconstructs Loss With Vicky Krieps in A Fractured Family Drama [Cannes Review]

For a film in which John David Washington lurches, staggers, stumbles, shambles, flounders, falters, wobbles, scrabbles and totters across an entire Greek province, getting shot, stabbed, cuffed (often in the very same already broken arm), punched, beaten, chased and stung by bees, is in two-car crashes but also gets hit by a car, escapes in the trunk of a car, gets in a taser fight in a car and eventually falls from a great height onto a car, “Beckett” sure is dull.

Ben Stiller is getting some feedback on social media.

Gael Garcia Bernal is officially blonde!

Note to self: do not get old. The alternative, i.e., death, may not be very pleasant but, sedate and dignified and swathed in vaguely biblical white sheets, it doesn’t get anything like the bad press that old age does in Gaspar Noé‘s “Vortex.” Let’s not forget that in “Enter the Void,” this same director made death seem like quite the trip – infinitely preferable to the progressively demeaning ravages of dementia or the Sword of Damocles that is a dodgy ticker.

Not even a global pandemic could stop prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, but his latest film deals with ideas and tensions that echo questions and perspectives brought to the surface by this global health crisis. Playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, “In Front of Your Face” only slowly reveals its hand.

Bruno Dumont’s peculiar blend of the transcendental with a clumsy kind of realism was a natural fit to “Jeannette” and “Joan of Arc,” both films dealing with the same presumed miracle — an ordinary little girl claiming to be guided by Saints.

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.

A man asks the first woman who enters the room to marry him and then is surprised to find she does not respect him. This sums up “The Story of My Wife” from Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi, playing in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.

In one scene of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria,” Jessica (Tilda Swinton) and a friend browse refrigerated cabinets designed to preserve flowers. “In here, time stops,” the saleswoman says proudly, gesturing at the blue cupboards.

A coming-of-age summer romance yarn, “Mi Iubita, Mon Amour” succeeds in shifting the power dynamic within the classic genre archetype, albeit in a way that increases the creep factor.

Those looking to enjoy “Lamb” from Icelandic director Valdimar Jóhannsson would do well not to learn anything about it beyond its admittedly intriguing premise before watching it — to enter the screening room like lambs to the slaughter, if you will. Playing in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, the film centers on a couple living on a remote sheep farm, where they one day discover an unusual newborn that they immediately decide to raise as their own.

There’s a lovely wind that blows across the island of Fårö, Ingmar Bergman‘s actual home for several years, and his spiritual home for several decades. Even in the summer, when Mia Hansen-Løve‘s “Bergman Island” is set, the breeze is constant, cool and a little salt-dampened, tousling Vicky Krieps’ hair, scudding through the tufts of scraggly dune-grass and sweeping majestically across the vast empty spaces where the point of this movie is supposed to be.

The fact that cows in dairy farms usually tend to have miserable lives should be a surprise to no one in this day and age. This knowledge, however, does not take away any of the power of Andrea Arnold’s “Cow,” playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes.

Of the many films playing at Cannes which have gained in resonance since the coming of the pandemic, “Zero F*cks Given” from French duo Julie Lecoustre, and Emmanuel Marre does not represent the creepiest, most alarming kind of coincidence — that description would better fit “Benedetta” from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven, which features an actual plague, face coverings and quarantine measures.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic“Bergman Island,” the lyrical and absorbing new drama written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve (“Things to Come,” “Eden”), tells the story of two filmmakers who are a couple: Tony (Tim Roth), the more famous of the two, and Chris (Vicky Krieps), who has carved out her own independent niche in world cinema.

One should perhaps not read too much into the fact that the press screening of Kornel Mundruczó‘s “Evolution” was timed to coincide with the final of the UEFA European Football Championship.

Just a few days on the heels of “Stillwater,” another American entry in the Cannes Film Festival main competition section explores the complicated relationship between a father and daughter rooted in down-home Americana and close brushes with the law. “Flag Day” marks Sean Penn’s latest directorial return to Cannes since the critically-lambasted “The Last Face” from 2016.

Cinema’s love affair with trains goes back, of course, to the very origins of the art form, and more than a century later, the flame shows no sign of dimming. To recent examples such as “Snowpiercer” (2013), “Train to Busan” (2016), and the latest of many adaptations of “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) can now be added “Compartment no.6” (“Hytti Nro 6”) from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, premiering in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.