Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
“The Phoenician Scheme” is, for better or worse, an archetypal Wes Anderson movie. The Cannes Film Festival competition entry is, once again, a timeless motion storybook about affluent eccentrics that’s symmetrical, pastel and droll. While Mr. Anderson’s rigorous mise en scène is always to be admired, telling a tale like this in the techbro oligarchy era is a choice – sort of like the cinematic equivalent of let them eat cake.
Josh Barrett/A24
MOVIE REVIEW
The Souvenir Part II (2021)
“The Souvenir Part II” is, in essence, the making of “The Souvenir,” Joanna Hogg’s maybe autography about Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), the Sloane Ranger-y student enrolled at the Raynham Film School (stand-in for Ms. Hogg’s alma mater, the National Film and Television School) and living in Knightsbridge, who perpetually feigns a smile as her forehead tightens. The school seemingly expects her well-to-do folks (Tilda Swinton, Ms. Swinton Byrne’s real-life mum, and James Spencer Ashworth) to bankroll her student projects. They do, and in turn she takes some of the hard-begged handouts to support the drug habit and wastrel lifestyle of The Worst Fuckboi Ever, Anthony (Tom Burke).
Universal Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
The Boxtrolls (2014)
“The Boxtrolls” is a movie aimed at children. It is also disgusting and immoral. It breaches a line that should not have been crossed — and it’s been rated PG in both Britain and the United States. What the hell are the rating boards thinking? Plain and simple, “The Boxtrolls” is propaganda for the war machine. The normalization of torture in cinema — and most especially cinema for children — has got to stop. Someone has to say it.
MOVIE REVIEW
The Double (2013)
Studiocanal
Sometimes the scheduling at film festivals and the sheer volume and variety of consumed material causes some unlikely connections and comparisons to emerge that would otherwise pass unnoticed. “The Double” received its 57th BFI London Film Festival press screening directly after Terry Gilliam’s latest, “The Zero Theorem,” and for the first half an hour it felt like we’d been left stranded in Mr. Gilliam’s universe. Both films are notionally very different, but the opening act of Richard Ayoade’s second feature will draw comparisons with “Brazil” in the way it posits its hero amidst an unforgiving and absurdist bureaucratic nightmare.
In fact, “The Double” recalls several films visually and tonally, notably some works of Roman Polanski’s and Orson Welles’s “The Trial” in particular. Some may be surprised by Mr. Ayoade’s cine-literacy and visual expressiveness, certainly in comparison with his first film, “Submarine,” which was generally rooted in the humble origins of small-scale British comic drama, despite its lush cinematography and Wes Anderson-esque flourishes. This redoubling of cinematic flamboyance from the former comedian and actor may raise some eyebrows in Britain; while not being as incongruous a cultural rebirth as Takeshi Kitano’s was to Japanese audiences, it’s still roughly akin to Americans imagining, say, that Aziz Ansari had directed a film like “Black Swan.”
MOVIE REVIEW
Submarine (2011)
Dean Rogers/The Weinstein Company
Oliver Tate — the 15-year-old protagonist played by Craig Roberts in Richard Ayoade’s feature-length directorial debut “Submarine” — expresses one of his desires to the audience early on in the film through voice-over narration: “I suppose it’s a bit of an affectation, but I often wish there was a film crew following my every move.” It’s a (sort of) clever gag since Mr. Ayoade is doing just that during the film’s 97-minute running time, and it’s also a standard representation of the type of comedy to follow: quirky, droll, almost mature, supposedly original. But while this kind of comedic bildungsroman has been repeatedly overdone, what saves “Submarine” from becoming the ugly sister to “Napoleon Dynamite” is its smart and strongly developed central character.
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