#‘Savages’ Review: A Heartfelt and Galvanizing Animated Film Calls for Environmental Protection

#‘Savages’ Review: A Heartfelt and Galvanizing Animated Film Calls for Environmental Protection

Films about the ecological stakes of contemporary life often center the results of unfettered human consumption. By showing the abuses suffered by the environment, they function as both an urgent warning and a desperate plea. Claude Barras takes a different route in Savages (Sauvages), his incisive and edifying animated feature about an 11-year-old girl trying…

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#‘The Invasion’ Review: Sergei Loznitsa’s Doc About Ukrainian Life During Wartime Is Quietly Devastating

#‘The Invasion’ Review: Sergei Loznitsa’s Doc About Ukrainian Life During Wartime Is Quietly Devastating

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s filmography could be neatly divided into three genre buckets: feature films (the last two were Donbass and A Gentle Creature, both from the last decade), documentaries compiled entirely from archive sources (The Kiev Trial), and documentaries about current events, filmed by Loznitsa himself and small crews. The most well-known example from…

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#‘The Girl With the Needle’ Review: A Dark, Urgently Timely Danish Drama About an Unwanted Pregnancy

#‘The Girl With the Needle’ Review: A Dark, Urgently Timely Danish Drama About an Unwanted Pregnancy

Like one of those fiendish knots that tighten the more you squirm, director Magnus von Horn’s Cannes competitor The Girl With the Needle builds to a devastating climax, taut as piano wire. Danish actress Vic Carmen Sonne (Holiday, Godland) offers an understated but multi-layered performance as Karoline, a vulnerable but resilient seamstress living in post-WWI/early-1920s…

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#Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Lineup Unveiled

#Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Lineup Unveiled

The Cannes Directors’ Fortnight section has unveiled its lineup for the 2024 festival, which will open with This Life of Mine, the final feature from the late French director Sophie Fillières. The drama features Agnès Jaoui as a woman whose identity starts to unravel when she turns 55. Fillières died shortly after wrapping principal photography…

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