Critic's Notebook

Recipe for Love

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
The Pot-au-Feu (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

“The Pot-au-Feu” is like a tender lover, leaving you both sated and ravenous for much, much more. It is a movie about the art of cooking and how food and its preparations are a gift for those you love. It’s set in the 1890s, features a character repeatedly and sincerely called “the Napoleon of gastronomy” and deserves every single possible plaudit for how respectfully it takes the art of pleasure. Writer-director Tran Anh Hùng won the best director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which should be the first of many, many awards for this exceptional film. Everyone it goes it should be thrown a parade, followed by a feast.

The Portraits of a Lady

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
Bonnard Pierre and Marthe (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

Pierre Bonnard was a leading post-impressionist painter, an artistic revolutionary who never quite achieved international fame and prominence, though he is well-known in France. Director Martin Provost, who also wrote the script with regular collaborator Marc Abdelnour, has significant previous experience in shining a light on the personal lives of underappreciated French artists. The Cannes Film Festival is the natural home for this work, a solid piece of entertainment which demonstrates that life may imitate art, but art imitates the human heart.

Leap of Faith

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
The New Boy (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

Cate Blanchett became a global superstar so quickly after her movie debut that it’s been a very, very long time since she has played an Australian. Evidently life in lockdown had her reconsider; and she worked closely with writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton to bring “The New Boy” to the screen, starting with the Cannes Film Festival. She is one of its producers, as is her husband Andrew Upton, and their daughter Edith Upton is credited as a “morale officer.” It is a showcase for herself and the 9-year-old Aswan Reid as the new boy, in a parable of religion, duty and how rules for living both create and prevent happiness. It is a strange and sad experience, and unfortunately not imaginative enough to have its desired effect.

Before Sunrise

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
Strangers by Night (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

Longtime readers of this site will know this critic has a serious weakness for the genre of romantic comedy where the couple spend the night walking around a city, talking and getting to know each other as they explore the world instead of each other’s bodies. The previous entry in this genre was the Toronto charmer “Stay the Night,” while “Strangers by Night” is set in Paris. Its couple is older, with less reason to get together than most, but the irresistible pull between them is something the movie does a wonderful job exploring, up to a point.

Disappearing Act

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
Close Your Eyes (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

Victor Erice made a stone classic of Spanish cinema with “The Spirit of the Beehive” back in 1973 but in the intervening decades has made only one other feature film and one documentary, until now. After a gap of 31 years “Close Your Eyes” delighted the Cannes Film Festival with the demonstration of a master at work, telling a sad and complicated story with patience and respect, as well as plenty of nuns. The trouble is that this movie has so clearly been fretted and fussed over that it has lost the freshness and spontaneity the best cinema hopes to capture. This sense of being over-rehearsed is perhaps understandable, but unfortunate, as it prevents this good movie from being a truly great one.

An Exercise in Feudality

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
Kubi (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

The opening shot of the film is of crabs crawling out of a corpse's spinal cavity, from the space where a head normally rests on a neck. And if you think that's gory you ain't seen nothing. Writer-director Takeshi Kitano has made a movie which required over 80 swordfight specialists to be thanked in the credits, and in which so many people are stabbed, shot, burned, decapitated or otherwise that the kill count is likely in the thousands, but somehow the mayhem is entirely watchable. It's not played for laughs but it's not done as torture porn, either. This is a balance that's virtually impossible to achieve but Mr. Kitano has done it. “Kubi” is quite the sensation.

Late-Life Crisis

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
A Brighter Tomorrow (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

It is a truth universally acknowledged that once a middle-aged male artist hits a certain level of success, his works of art become only about the struggles of a middle-aged artist to maintain that level of success. Though normally this happens in literature – cf. every campus novel about a professor sleeping with his students – director Nanni Moretti is here interested in how a middle-aged filmmaker and former radical is meant to achieve genuine artistic success without the help of Netflix. And there is one mercy – the woman having a relationship with a much older man is the director’s daughter. So, time is marching on and looking up at least? Sometimes, yes, but for the most part this is a movie for making, not for watching.

Spark Joy

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
Perfect Days (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

When Wim Wenders hits, he scores. “Perfect Days” is an unbearably emotional film about being able to find peace and joy in a daily routine that keeps you alive, and the happiness that follows from living, in however small a way, on your own terms. This is not a movie for children, by which is meant people who think life is a limitless playground of opportunity. This is a movie for adults, as in people who understand how choices and circumstances prescribe a life, and that the ways in which people cope with that are the only true choices you have.

Star-Crossed

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
Fallen Leaves (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

It's good to be reminded that a country can have a social safety net that's the envy of the world without necessarily making life easy for its people. It's also good to be reminded that a person’s choices can make life easier or harder without the safety net coming into it, though of course accidents can and do happen. But writer-director Aki Kaurismäki has always been interested in exploring people whose lives are constrained either by circumstance (being broke in Finland) or choice (not focusing on education when young). But everyone deserves to be safe, warm and well-fed, that is taken for granted. It's the pursuit of happiness that's in question.

Witch Hunted

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
Omen (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

This has been quite a year for Baloji in the West. First one of his songs was used on the soundtrack of “Magic Mike’s Last Dance;” and now his first film has won a special New Voice prize in the Un Certain Regard track at the Cannes Film Festival, to reward his vision and encourage him to continue with his career. This film is also the first in the history of Cannes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a point the head of the festival, Thierry Fremaux, made pains to highlight. When Baloji introduced the film he was visibly shaking with nerves, but he needn’t have. This is a movie that manages to both be on the inside and the outside of a place – a difficult trick but one that’s achieved with flair. “Omen” is a very strong debut, and the jury was right to send such an encouraging message.