‘Three Floors’: Nanni Moretti’s Latest Melodrama Is Misjudged & Unconvincing [Cannes Review]

Guy Lodge Film CriticIn a small Arabic village in Israel, at what is meant to be the emotional crescendo of a crowded, elaborate wedding, several cages are opened to release a flight of doves into the air. Except “a waddle of doves” might be a more appropriate term, given the birds’ reluctance to spread their wings, as they tip-claw tentatively into the outside world.

Nigeria during a shoot for their documentary “We Were Never Lost,” about Jewish tribes on the African continent.Activist and Columbia University graduate Rudy Rochman, director Noam Leibman and French-Israeli journalist Edouard Benaym flew from Israel to Nigeria on July 6, according to reports.

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.

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.

Sorrow mounts to the exclusion of everything else in Three Floors (Tre Piani), a decade-spanning account of the ongoing misfortunes of multiple families residing in a comfortable Roman apartment complex.

Caroline Framke Chief TV CriticNaomi Osaka’s first Grand Slam victory was so dramatic as to feel like the scripted climax to a movie. In 2018, the rising tennis phenom faced Serena Williams, one of the greatest to have ever played the sport and one of her longtime idols, and won in straight sets.

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.

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.

Alissa Simon Film CriticA Palestinian citizen of Israel, Sayed Kashua is an award-winning writer, newspaper columnist and creator/showrunner of the hit Israeli TV series “Arab Labor” and “The Writer.” His work is known for testing the limits of a Palestinian-Israeli’s freedom of expression and displays a deep understanding of divided lives along with dark, ironic humor.

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.

A wedding guest gets stuck in his home village in Let It Be Morning, the Cannes comedy/drama from Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin, based on a book by Palestinian novelist Sayed Kashua. Showing in the Un Certain Regard section, it stars Alex Bakri as Sami, a married Palestinian who’s attending his younger brother’s wedding in an Arab village in Israel.

Mention of “the Berkshires” conjures images of pastoral New England abutting major cultural institutions: The Norman Rockwell Museum, Mass MoCA, Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow. Every quaint town center enjoys an abundance of good ice cream and even better coffee.

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.

Eran Kolirin is best known to worldwide audiences for his debut breakout, 2007’s The Band’s Visit. That film was Israel’s submission to the Oscars and had a good shot at taking the Foreign Language prize, but its use of English ultimately saw it disqualified. Since then, Kolirin has made just three features, including this year’s Un Certain Regard premiere Let There Be Morning.