CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
Latest editorial
Reel concerns at Cannes Film Festival
AB Shawky's Yomeddine sees a pair of outcasts flee a leper colony and an orphanage in a captivating portrait of modern Egypt
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
WITH less emphasis on glamour and red carpet, Cannes got off to an unusually strong start with one of the most substantial opening films in years.
Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows is a tense Spanish-language kidnapping drama starring Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem in which Laura (Cruz) returns to Spain to attend her sister’s wedding in a rural community where everyone’s lives are intermingled in innumerable ways.
The nuptials, involving the whole village, are suddenly plunged into darker territory when, during a power cut, Laura’s daughter is kidnapped and the repercussions are intriguingly tangled.
Similar stories
RITA DI SANTO takes us through the prize winners, and takes the temperature of a festival that prioritised narratives of exile, state violence and class division
Rita Di Santo speaks to Hungarian director LASZLO NEMES about his new film, a portrait of the French Resistance leader and hero, Jean Moulin
ANDY HEDGECOCK is astonished by a portrait of contemporary Greece, complete with political protest, organised crime and people trafficking, told from the point of view of — wait for it — runaway poultry
RITA DI SANTO gives us a first look at some extraordinary new films that examine outsiders, migrants, belonging and social abuse