‘The Balconettes’ Review: Noémie Merlant’s Sweaty Midsummer #MeToo Ghost Story

Guy Lodge Film Critic Like her fellow documentarian Frederick Wiseman, Claire Simon is drawn to institutions, and the human flow that keeps them running. Where many of Wiseman’s films favor a big picture, a systemic view, Simon often works in more intimate close-up, picking out faces and personalities from a larger institutional community.

Lisa Kennedy Just because Celestina, the soon-to-be young wife in the “The Young Wife” told friends and family that while the honor of their presence was requested, they would be attending a party, not a wedding, doesn’t make it so. The weight of family, community and ritual aren’t so easily evaded.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Nobody really makes AIDS dramas anymore, which seems as good a reason as any to make one now. The disease that, forty-odd years ago, decimated a generation of queer people and prompted a prejudice-driven global panic hasn’t gone away — least of all in various developing countries, where it isn’t popularly defined by gender or sexuality, and death rates are still high.

Guy Lodge Film Critic No major film festival is complete without at least one Love Letter To Cinema™ from a filmmaker of some renown, to advocate the joys of the medium to an audience that doesn’t have to be told twice. French writer-director and Cannes regular Arnaud Desplechin brings that to the Croisette this year with “Filmlovers!,” a duly warm and nostalgia-washed cine-valentine, but one with a little more to say than just, “Movies, amirite?” Indeed, the film’s somewhat inelegant English-language title risks concealing the more specific focus of this unassuming but winning hybrid documentary: The French title, “Spectateurs!,” makes clear this is first and foremost a celebration of spectatorship rather than filmmaking, probing the dynamics of cinema audiences and their relationship to the screen.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you sit down to watch a documentary about the Beach Boys, you know what you want: to be immersed in the California dreamin’ of the group’s early surfin’-hit days, in the jaunty beauty of songs like “I Get Around” and “Help Me Rhonda,” and in the story of how Brian Wilson began to figure out a way to turn pop songs into miniature symphonies. You want to be immersed in the recording of “Pet Sounds,” in the Beach Boys’ rivalry with the Beatles, in the derailed masterpiece that was “Smile,” and in how Brian’s mental and emotional problems began to tear himself and the group apart.

CANNES – After screening “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” a world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, one has to breathe a sigh of relief that director and screenwriter Mohammad Rasoulof is safely out of Iran. A victim of a politically motivated jail sentence for supporting the 2022 Masha Amini hijab protests, Rasoulof‘s latest feature will likely anger the Iranian government even more.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic For more than two decades, Iman (Misagh Zare) has functioned as a civil servant, doing work that his kids — who represent Iran’s younger generation — would be ashamed of. Better to keep them in the dark. At last, for his loyalty, Iman has been given a promotion, not to judge (the job he wants) but to inspector (a job no one wants).

Woman, life, freedom. Down with theocracy! The slogans shouted in the bloody streets of Tehran over the past year echo through The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof’s long, heartfelt story of an Iranian family that starts to tear at the seams when Iman’s two daughters are told what he really does at the office.

Jessica Kiang The dogged pursuit of the relationship unicorn that is the good break-up informs the wit and winking wisdom of Jonás Trueba‘s “The Other Way Around,” a delightful showcase for the Spanish director’s lithe, airy style, here accented with glistening strands of Madrileño meta-melancholy. A hip, popular twosome decide to call it quits after 14 years, cuing a very funny yet properly grown-up portrait of the ideal couple trying to smoothe, and even to celebrate, their transition into ideal exes. It’s the celebration aspect that will prove their undoing.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Love, as everyone has long agreed, makes you do crazy things. Silly things, too, and vastly indulgent things, and occasionally even beautiful ones.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Welcome to the Motel Destino, which may be some distance from the Hotel California, but is very much programmed to receive — or give, if that’s your preference. With mirrors on the ceiling but definitely no pink champagne on ice, the run-down roadside sex den that houses most of Karim Aïnouz’s Olympically horny new film isn’t so much a palace of pleasure as a this-will-do hideaway for the illicitly amorous couples (or throuples, or more, no judgment here) checking into any of its hastily wiped-down rooms.

Carlos Aguilar The lasagna-obsessed feline with a near-pathological aversion to Mondays, who first came into popular consciousness in the late ‘70s as a comic strip, is a diluted version of himself in “The Garfield Movie.” Not only is his suave apathy mostly replaced by an excessive excitedness with only sporadic glimpses of his endearingly negative qualities, but this Garfield jumps off trains, stages a heist, and is subjected to trite physical comedy by way of numerous predictable action sequences. The ordeal mimics a rehashed plot from the dull “The Secret Life of Pets” franchise with Garfield forcefully plugged in.

Carlos Aguilar For about the first hour of their documentary “The Falling Sky,” Brazilian directors Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha introduce us to the traditions and ongoing plight of the Yanomami Indigenous people — namely, fending off invaders — without making their presence known. There are no title cards stating where we are and why, and the only voiceover we hear comes directly from the Yanomami, most often Davi Kopenawa, their current leader and co-author of a 2010 book bearing the same title as the film.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Depending on who you talk to, the world is either in crisis, on fire, at war and/or simply lurching toward a frankly deserved final judgment. So what can be done to save it? Why, a carefully worded provisional statement, of course, from the global leaders currently in possession of both the gas canister and the lit match, but not a surfeit of great ideas for the future.

Mubi has swooped on its third 2024 Cannes competition title, Variety has learned. Having acquired worldwide rights to Coralie Fargeat’s buzzy body horror “The Substance” and U.K.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The very title of “Everybody Loves Touda” poses a kind of challenge to viewers. If everybody loves Touda, dare you not? Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch‘s forthright musical drama certainly doesn’t permit much room for dissent.

Ben Croll Noemie Merlant’s sophomore feature “The Balconettes” plays as a raunchy horror-comedy with a greater social conscience. The film follows three roommates – an actress, played by Merlant, a camgirl played by “Dune: Part Two” breakout Souheila Yacoub and a frustrated writer played Sanda Condreanu – who are initially infatuated and eventually repelled by a lothario neighbor from across the yard. Exploring questions of coercion and consent with a healthy dose of blood and guts, “The Balconettes” wants to entertain and energize in equal measure.

Guy Lodge Film Critic A hot, strong summer wind is the overriding soundtrack to “Three Kilometers to the End of the World” — the kind of dry, whirring weather that swallows conversations held even a short distance away, and carries stray, light objects far from where they meant to land. For 17-year-old Adi, however, it’s not loud enough to keep his secrets safe, nor heavy enough to lift and float him away from the home in which he feels increasingly imprisoned.

How can you be a leader to your people if you’re on the run from them? It’s a fascinating question, one that could serve as the basis for a great book or film, but one that’s hard to embed in a six-part mini-series, a format that proves the wrong one for the story of how a fake movie played a role in the life of Black Panthers leader Huey P. Newton.

Noémie Merlant’s star is rising as an actress. Baby Ruby and Tár won her international recognition across 2022 and 2023, while anticipation is growing around her starring role in Audrey Diwan’s English-language reboot of erotica classic Emmanuelle. In the meantime, Merlant is hitting Cannes with The Balconettes, her second film in the director’s chair after Mi iubita, mon amour. Set against a Marseille heatwave, the riotous comedy and gorefest co-stars Merlant alongside Souheila Yacoub and Sanda Codreanu as female flatmates who are pushed to the brink when a late-night drink with an attractive neighbor (played by Emily in Paris actor Lucas Bravo) takes a bloody turn.