CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Sense of realism rewarded at Cannes film festival
Shoplifters
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
JAPANESE film-maker Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters, the story of a shoplifting father and son who adopt a homeless girl, has won the the Palme d'Or at Cannes. A profound and subtle observation of human compassion, it's a world away from Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman which carried off the Grand Prix.
In an explosive satire on racism, Lee uses the remarkable true story of a black cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 70s as the vehicle to skewer the racist recidivism of the Trump era.
The Jury prize went to Lebanese director Nadine Labaki for Capernaum, a neorealist drama about a Palestinian boy who sues his parents for bringing him into the pain of this world. It's a gripping and urgent protest against lives devastated by poverty.
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