• Lukas Dhont’s WWI queer romance Coward received a 13-minute standing ovation at its Cannes world premiere
• The film was inspired by a real photograph of a Belgian soldier cross-dressed behind the frontlines during WWI
• Newcomer Emmanuel Macchia stars alongside Valentin Campagne in the two-hander romance
• MUBI has acquired the film for the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand
• Critical reception has been divided, ranging from comparisons to Casablanca to charges of emotional artificiality

When the lights came up on Coward at the Grand Théâtre Lumière Thursday night, the Cannes audience didn’t move. For 13 minutes, they stood and applauded — one of the biggest crowd responses to any film in this year’s competition. Director Lukas Dhont, visibly moved, told the room that everyone should share “love, not war.”

It’s a line that cuts right to the heart of what Coward is. Set at the height of the First World War, the film follows Pierre, a young Belgian farmer’s son newly arrived at the front, and Francis, the flamboyant ringleader of a makeshift theatre troupe performing for soldiers behind the trenches. As the violence rages on, the two men find each other — and the film quietly, insistently asks what it actually means to be brave.

The answer Dhont arrives at is not what the war genre has traditionally offered.

A Photograph That Changed Everything

“It’s based on a black-and-white photograph I found four years ago of a young man right behind the frontlines dressed up in a sandbag skirt performing for the other soldiers,” Dhont told Deadline earlier in the festival. “And I thought that it was something so modern in that picture, even though it was black and white, but seeing this young man cross-dressed, smiling in front of all these other men really inspired me to create something.”

At the film’s press conference, he elaborated on what that image meant to him personally. Growing up in Belgium — where WWI cemeteries are woven into the landscape, where school trips to the trenches are a rite of passage — he thought he knew the war. Then he saw a photo he’d never been shown.

“They had turned sandbags into skirts, and they were having fun. To me, that was the ultimate picture of resistance. It was an act of liberation,” he said. “I grew up with the First World War. When you go to school, you learn about it and visit the trenches, but I had never seen those particular images. That’s when I realized that the memory has a kind of politics about it. There are certain images of the war that you are shown.”

That realization became the engine of the film. Dhont discovered that throughout many wars, across many armies, soldiers waiting to fight created small performances for one another. “We have pushed those images to the front, and we have forgotten and made those images of softness and of expression rather invisible,” he told Reuters.

He wanted to push them back into the light.

What the War Film Has Always Got Wrong

Dhont is direct about his frustration with the genre. “This genre of film, for me, has always been a genre in which men are given a very limited space to exist in, and where their value is measured on their ability to hurt and destroy and not necessarily intimately be there for one another,” he said at the press conference. “I think the most tragic part of it is that male friendship, male bonding, has too often been used as a tool to destroy.”

Coward, co-written with Angelo Tijssens, deliberately moves away from trench-based misery to reimagine the front as a place of romantic possibility — and, crucially, of queer desire that the war itself, paradoxically, helped make possible. “These men live in a time where their love had to be unspoken, had to be incredibly silent,” Dhont said. “But weirdly enough, the war at that time brought them together.”

The film’s title carries its own weight. “We named this film Coward because that fear is a topic, but I think also the film questions, what does it actually mean to be brave — not only in relationship to another, but also in relationship to ourselves, in choosing the truest parts of ourselves; in choosing to express ourselves, even when the world around us expects us to behave or to act in a certain way,” Dhont said.

Two Newcomers at the Center

Emmanuel Macchia, in his screen debut, plays Pierre — a farmer’s son drafted to haul shells and retrieve the wounded, quiet and wide-eyed amid the bravado of his unit. Valentin Campagne plays Francis, the troupe’s gaunt, willowy ringleader, a tailor by trade who transforms parachute cloth and hessian sacks into elaborate drag costumes and stages full revues for his fellow soldiers.

Dhont found Macchia by visiting agricultural schools in Belgium. “He was so soft speaking and so tender, and he just moved me,” the director recalled. “He just carries this film, with so much maturity also.”

Variety’s review describes Macchia as “a gently stoic, aptly unformed presence with a stolid sadness in his trudging gait, who can go from boy to man with a slight shift in the light,” and calls his first kiss with Campagne “among the most purely romantic gestures the movies have seen in a minute.” Deadline’s Pete Hammond went further, comparing the romance to Casablanca, Brief Encounter, and The Way We Were — “a classic movie love story for the ages.”

The Wrap noted that Coward is “all but certain to be Belgium’s Oscar submission” — which would make it a successor to Close, Dhont’s 2022 film that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. MUBI, which also released Close, has already acquired Coward for the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. Lumière will distribute in Benelux; Diaphana Distribution in France.

The Critics Aren’t All Singing

The audience in the Lumière gave it 13 minutes. The critics? More complicated.

Variety called it Dhont’s “most satisfying film to date,” praising cinematographer Frank van den Eeden’s work and the chemistry between the two leads as something “visible almost entirely in the different ways their bodies move and balance each other: one still, one quicksilver.” The Wrap framed it as a corrective to historical erasure — “a clear product of its moment,” arguing for queer inclusion “on rah-rah terms” rather than as counterculture.

The Hollywood Reporter was considerably less convinced. Critic David Rooney called the film “self-conscious” and “grandiose,” writing that it “reeks of manneristic affectation and phoniness” and that the leads have “minimal chemistry.” He compared it unfavorably to Oliver Hermanus’ Moffie and Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection as more textured explorations of queer men in the military.

It’s a split that echoes the reception to both Girl and Close — films that drew serious acclaim alongside criticism that Dhont manipulates difficult subject matter for emotional effect. Whether Coward lands as a transcendent wartime love story or a beautifully lit exercise in feeling depends, it seems, entirely on how much you surrender to it.

The Palme d’Or jury will make their call at Saturday’s closing ceremony. Dhont already has a Grand Prix on his shelf from Close in 2022, and a Caméra d’Or from his debut Girl in 2018. This is his third time competing at Cannes, and by the sound of that 13-minute ovation, the crowd at the Grand Théâtre Lumière had already made up their minds.

“For me, the reason to make a film about the past is to say something about the present,” Dhont said at the press conference. Given everything, it’s hard to argue with the timing.

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• Lukas Dhont’s third feature Coward premiered in competition at Cannes 2026, distributed by MUBI
• The WWI-set queer romance follows two Belgian soldiers — one stoic, one flamboyant — falling for each other behind the front lines
• Dhont was inspired by a real black-and-white photograph of a soldier cross-dressing in a sandbag skirt to perform for his unit
• Critics are split: Variety calls it his most mature film to date; The Hollywood Reporter says it’s hollow and emotionally fraudulent
• Leads Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne are making their major festival debuts in the film

Few directors working today generate quite as much passionate disagreement as Lukas Dhont. His first two films — Girl, about a trans teenager pursuing ballet, and Close, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature — were both acclaimed and contested in roughly equal measure, with admirers praising his emotional precision and detractors accusing him of exploiting vulnerable subjects for maximum tearjerker effect. With Coward, his third feature and his most ambitious by a wide margin, that divide hasn’t closed. If anything, it’s gotten wider.

Premiering in competition at Cannes 2026, Coward is a World War I love story between two Belgian soldiers: Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia), a broad-shouldered farmboy who barely speaks and flings himself into the violence of the front with grim determination, and Francis (Valentin Campagne), a willowy, theatrical tailor who forms a performing troupe to boost his fellow soldiers’ morale — dressing in elaborate drag costumes made from hessian sacks and parachute cloth. The two are drawn together first through the stage, then in something much harder to name in 1914.

The film is being released by MUBI, and was co-written by Dhont and his longtime collaborator Angelo Tijssens.

Where the Idea Came From

Dhont, 34, has been sitting with this story for four years. The spark was a single photograph. “It’s based on a black-and-white photograph I found four years ago of a young man right behind the frontlines dressed up in a sandbag skirt performing for the other soldiers,” he told Deadline at Cannes. “And I thought that it was something so modern in that picture, even though it was black and white, but seeing this young man cross-dressed, smiling in front of all these other men really inspired me to create something.”

The history of soldiers entertaining their comrades in drag troupes is well-documented — a form of bravery hiding in plain sight inside the most aggressively masculine environment imaginable. That tension is exactly what drew Dhont in. “It’s a part of history that I hadn’t seen portrayed before,” he told Variety. “That got my ideas flowing. I thought, ‘Wow, it would be really special to see these men creating a theater piece while in the background, there are explosions and the war is still going on and there’s death all around them.'”

He’s also acutely aware of where he lives. “I live in Flanders, so I live on the soil on which the First World War was fought,” he said. “When I drive around, I go past the cemeteries filled with the bodies of young men who gave their lives in order to fight. Making this film was nearly a transcendental act of bringing those stories back to life.”

What the Film Is Actually About

The title is doing a lot of work. On its surface, Coward refers to the soldiers who desert — men so broken by the carnage that they flee the trenches, even knowing execution awaits if they’re caught. But Dhont is after something bigger than a verdict on those men. “I wanted to examine our notions of heroism,” he said. “In war films, masculinity is portrayed in a very narrow way. There’s this idea that fighting for our country is always a noble goal, and the fear of being a coward has broken a lot of people or led to their deaths.”

He’s also thinking about the present. With war ongoing in Ukraine and the Middle East, and conversations about national service requirements resurfacing across Europe, Dhont says the film’s questions feel uncomfortably current. “I’m talking about the past but there’s a sense that I’m telling a story about something in the present. It makes you think: What would you do? Would you fight for your country? Or would you try to resist that circle of violence?”

And then there’s the queerness of it — which, for Dhont, is inseparable from the film’s central argument. In an era when homosexuality was criminalized, Pierre and Francis might never have found each other at all without the war throwing them together. The extreme danger of the front strips away social convention in ways peacetime never could. “What’s really interesting is that in those darkest of times, they are more free than society allows them to be, or that they will be when the war ends,” Dhont said. “Heroism throughout history has often been linked to a man’s ability to be brutal. I wanted to turn that upside down and talk about the amount of courage it takes to love.”

At Cannes, he put it even more plainly: the film questions “what it actually means to be brave… in choosing the truest parts of ourselves; in choosing to express ourselves, even when the world around us expects us to behave or to act in a certain way.”

It was, he admits, the hardest thing he’s ever made. “I was making a war film, but I needed to find a way to keep the intimacy that I love from my previous work,” he said. “It was an exercise in trying to create a scale and a world, which is much more ambitious in its production elements, but try to keep it truthful to the emotions of the characters.”

What the Critics Are Saying

Here’s where it gets complicated. The reviews out of Cannes are genuinely polarized in a way that feels almost designed to illustrate the ongoing Dhont debate.

Variety’s Guy Lodge is firmly in the admirer camp, calling Coward “pleasingly like a step forward” and “his most satisfying film to date” — notably because it pulls back from the battering-ram tragedy tactics that made Girl and Close so divisive. Lodge singles out a first kiss between Pierre and Francis as “among the most purely romantic gestures the movies have seen in a minute,” shot with “rapt, blissed-out, time-stopping intensity.” He praises Dhont’s “rich, tactile sense of how men — queer men especially, but not exclusively — watch other men,” and argues the film “thrives on that understanding.”

He also has warm words for the two leads. Macchia — making his screen debut — is described as “a gently stoic, aptly unformed presence with a stolid sadness in his trudging gait, who can go from boy to man with a slight shift in the light.” Campagne, Lodge writes, is “far more vocal” and “focus-pulling,” and the chemistry between them is “visible almost entirely in the different ways their bodies move and balance each other: one still, one quicksilver; one molded by the men around him, one brazenly opposing that physicality.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney lands in a very different place. He calls Coward a film that “reeks of manneristic affectation and phoniness,” and says Dhont “strains for lofty emotional peaks in moments that instead come off as hollow and artificial.” Where Lodge sees a swooning love story, Rooney sees leads with “minimal chemistry” — one inexpressive, one “archly theatrical” — and a director so enamored of his own formal elegance that the film never generates genuine heat. “I found this movie obstinately unaffecting,” he writes.

Rooney is particularly pointed about the film’s performance sequences, which he describes as escalating to the point of exhaustion — “Oh no, another f**king song?” — and notes that the WWI setting feels underpopulated and cramped, rarely conveying the true scale of the conflict. He compares it unfavorably to recent queer military films like Oliver Hermanus’ Moffie and Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection, as well as Hermanus’ recent The History of Sound, which also uses WWI to frame a queer love story.

Both reviewers, at least, agree on the visual quality of the film. Cinematographer Frank van den Eeden — Dhont’s regular collaborator — shoots the trench sequences in crisp, wheaten daylight and the performance numbers in floaty, powdery pastels that feel deliberately otherworldly, a visual shorthand for the suspension of normal life that the stage represents for these men.

The Bigger Picture

Whether Coward is a triumph or a misfire, it’s clearly the film where Dhont makes his play for a larger stage. The production is bigger, the historical canvas is wider, and the love story is front and center in a way his previous work never quite allowed. That MUBI is distributing suggests a path to audiences who followed Close to its Oscar nomination — and to a new generation of viewers drawn to queer cinema that doesn’t shy away from either the sensuality or the stakes.

Whatever the final verdict, Dhont’s ambition here is not in question. “[‘Coward’] was the most challenging film I’ve ever made,” he said simply. The Cannes competition will have a say in how that challenge is judged.

The post Is ‘Coward’ Lukas Dhont’s Best Film Yet? appeared first on Cream.

• Sony Pictures Classics acquired Iron Boy out of Cannes, picking up rights for North America, Latin America, India, and Southeast Asian TV.
• The hand-drawn animated film is the solo directorial debut of Louis Clichy, a former Pixar animator who worked on WALL-E and Up.
• The film premiered in Cannes’ prestigious Un Certain Regard sidebar and drew strong reviews from international press.
• Clichy drew from his own rural French upbringing — and his real experience wearing a corrective corset — to shape the story.
• His own son, Gary Clichy, voices the 11-year-old lead character.

Louis Clichy spent years helping bring Pixar’s most beloved films to life. Now he’s stepping out on his own — and the world is paying attention. The French director’s hand-drawn debut feature Iron Boy has been acquired by Sony Pictures Classics following its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, with SPC landing rights across North America, Latin America, India, and Southeast Asian TV.

The deal was brokered by Playtime co-CEO Nicolas Brigaud-Robert, who made clear just how well the film landed on the Croisette. “Coming into Cannes, we knew the film would be well received, but its success exceeded even our expectations both in terms of sales and reviews from the international press,” he said. “It feels only natural that Iron Boy has found a home in the U.S. with SPC. Over the years, we built a strong working relationship with Tom, Michael, and Dylan. They are not only exceptional distributors, admittedly among the very best in the industry, but also people of great sensitivity and taste. They will take this film very far.”

Variety called it “both visually dazzling and deeply personal” — and that’s not just critical shorthand. This one comes from somewhere real.

A Story Rooted in the Director’s Own Childhood

Iron Boy — known in French as Le Corset — follows Christophe, an 11-year-old boy growing up on a farm in rural France with a strict, emotionally distant father. Without explanation, Christophe begins to lean sideways and topple over, landing him in a metal brace that runs from his torso up to his chin. Unable to work the farm, he finds an unlikely escape through the enormous pipe organ at his local church, and through the quiet mentorship of an elderly organist who shows him more kindness than most people in his life ever have.

Clichy didn’t have to imagine much of it. “I come from an agricultural background, but I moved to the city when I was 11 and my parents divorced,” he told Variety. “I didn’t want to tell my own story — I just borrowed some things that were important to me.” That includes the corset itself, which the director wore as a child. “The corset is a metaphor for adolescence,” he said. “When you’re that age, you don’t feel comfortable; you want to cover up your body. It exaggerates this whole idea of not being happy with what’s going on. Also, in a way, you have to be very ‘straight’ to survive on a farm. And he’s different.”

He was also careful not to let the film’s emotional weight tip into caricature. “I didn’t want anyone here to feel like a stereotype,” Clichy said. “Christophe’s father doesn’t like to express his feelings — he’s from that generation of men — but he loves sentimental pop songs and that already tells you a lot.”

The organist character, Michel, is played by Alexandre Astier — Clichy’s former co-directing partner on the two Astérix films. The casting is fitting: Clichy describes the relationship between Christophe and Michel as something deeper than a music lesson. “He finds another father figure in that church organist. Christophe needs someone to take care of him. I’m not sure if this boy is actually a good musician. I didn’t want him to play in a big concert or win a competition à la Billy Elliot. He’s not Mozart, you know. He just likes this teacher and appreciates their time together.”

Hand-Painted, Frame by Frame

After years at Pixar and two CGI-heavy Astérix features, Clichy made a deliberate choice to go back to basics. He calls Iron Boy “traditional animation” — developed frame by frame, rendered in what the film’s Variety review describes as Chinese inkbrush paintings that “make straight lines feel fluid, like memories.”

“CGI and 3D have become so fashionable, but after Astérix I wanted to go back to something much simpler,” Clichy said. “That’s exactly what I’ve done.” The roughness of the style was a feature, not a bug. “I liked the fact that everything was a bit… rough. It allowed me to be spontaneous, and fast and furious. It can be tough because you still want to communicate so much, and all you have is one line. It forced me to be precise.”

He also took an unconventional approach to voice recording, placing actors on actual farms rather than in sterile studio booths — a choice that gives the film a naturalistic texture that critics noticed immediately. The voice cast includes Gary Clichy (the director’s own son as Christophe), Rod Paradot, Brune Moulin, Dimitri Colas, Aurélie Vassort, and Jean-Pascal Zadi, with animation by Chloë Aubert. The screenplay was co-written by Clichy and Franck Salomé.

The film was produced by Céline Vanlint and Nicolas de Rosanbo for Eddy Cinéma, in co-production with Fabrice Delville and Christophe Toulemonde for Beside Production, and Agathe Sofer and Alexandre Astier for Regular Production, along with France 3 Cinéma, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma, and RTBF.

The smaller budget, Clichy said, ultimately freed him. “With animation, people either go very commercial or very arty, and then many viewers go: ‘This is not for me.’ I wanted to take a little bit of everything. There are animated films like that — it’s enough to look at Miyazaki, who often paints a realistic picture of the state of the world. I was really inspired by that.”

A New Voice in Animation — and Cannes Noticed

Clichy was candid about what it feels like to show up at Cannes as an animator. “For us animators, Cannes is a foreign world. There’s way more ego around. Also, there are still all these stereotypes about what animation is, like it being ‘over the top’ or just for children. But we can do subtle stuff too, because animators are really good actors.” He paused, then added: “Animation is expensive, so many people don’t want to take risks. But that’s our responsibility!”

The critical response suggests he made the right call. Reviewer Chase Hutchinson described Iron Boy as “a bittersweet, gorgeously animated family film that looks like a watercolor painting come to life” — a solo debut whose “sense of imagination is matched only by its sharp craft and the passionate care of its storytelling.” He went further: “Drawing from much of the director’s own life and proving all the more vibrant because of its specificity, it’s the type of film that already feels like it could become a new classic for animation lovers new and old.”

With Sony Pictures Classics now behind it, that new classic has a path to American audiences. No U.S. release date has been announced yet — but given SPC’s track record with prestige international cinema, Iron Boy is exactly the kind of film they’ll know how to bring home.

The post Sony Pictures Classics Picks Up ‘Iron Boy’ Out of Cannes appeared first on Cream.

• The first teaser trailer for Victorian Psycho dropped May 21 as the film premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard
• Maika Monroe plays Winifred Notty, a murderous governess at a remote gothic manor in 1858
• The film was originally set to star Margaret Qualley, who dropped out just days before production began
• Director Zachary Wigon describes the film as “demented” — blending horror, pitch-black comedy, and fury
• Bleecker Street will release Victorian Psycho in U.S. theaters this fall

Maika Monroe has made a career out of making audiences deeply, viscerally uncomfortable — and her latest role looks like it might be her most unsettling yet. The first teaser trailer for Victorian Psycho arrived on May 21, the same day the gothic horror film made its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, and it is exactly as unhinged as the title promises.

Monroe plays Winifred Notty, a young governess who arrives at the sweeping, remote Ensor House in 1858 to teach the children of the well-to-do Pounds family. It doesn’t take long before staff begin to mysteriously disappear — and suspicion starts circling the eccentric new arrival. The teaser makes little effort to hide where that suspicion leads. Set to the jarring, anachronistic punk needle drop “Throw Yourself to the Sword” by Die Spitz, it builds around a genuinely chilling monologue Monroe delivers to her young charges.

“What is the most important thing in life? Knowing good from evil,” Monroe intones in voiceover. “But what is evil? Can you touch it? Can you smell it? Can you taste it on your tongue? Can you feel it rolling around inside you? Squeezing hard?”

It’s the kind of line that makes you want to check that your doors are locked.

From ‘It Follows’ to Period Horror — Monroe’s Darkest Role Yet

Monroe has been building toward something like this for a decade. She broke through in the slow-burn nightmare of It Follows, then cemented her scream queen status opposite Nicolas Cage in Neon’s Longlegs last year. But by her own account, Winifred Notty is a different beast entirely.

“It terrified me,” Monroe told THR’s David Canfield in an exclusive first-look interview. “I knew that it would be the hardest role that I have ever done — and so incredibly different from anything I’ve ever done.”

“There’s always a little part of me in roles that I do, something that I can ground it with or connect it with within my own personal life — but this role was really a departure from that,” she continued. “It was working from the ground up, creating this character where I couldn’t rely on my own self. It really, in the most magical way, took a toll on me. I felt it every day.”

Director Zachary Wigon says Monroe’s particular screen quality was exactly what drew him to casting her. “One of the interesting things about Maika is her incredible ability to have a restrained, contained intensity on screen,” he told Variety. “There’s this sense with her screen persona that there’s something very intense going on behind her eyes, in her head, that you’re not able to track. Instinctively, I felt it would be compelling to cast her as a serial killer, because we’re so curious about what’s going on in their head.”

Winifred, Wigon explains, is a character defined by a brutal paradox. “She will never belong — and she will never stop wanting to belong,” he said of the governess who is always an outsider desperate to be an insider. That tension, he suggests, is at the heart of everything.

A ‘Demented’ Vision — and a Bumpy Road to Get Here

The film is Wigon’s third feature, following his 2014 debut The Heart Machine and the claustrophobic 2022 two-hander Sanctuary, which starred Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley. It was actually Qualley who was originally attached to lead Victorian Psycho — she’d even been publicly working on her British accent in preparation for the role. Then, just days before production was set to begin in early 2025, she had to exit the project. Monroe stepped in, the film shot in Ireland, and the rest is Cannes history.

The screenplay was adapted by Virginia Feito from her own 2025 novel of the same name — Feito is also known for her debut Mrs. March — and Wigon says discovering her unpublished manuscript was what pulled him into the project in the first place. “What really struck me was every page was filled with this incredible intensity and anger,” he said. “The novel changed forms a little bit from that early draft that I read to what she ended up publishing. But the anger and the intensity of it was so acute that the experience was like being gripped on every page. At the same time, it was really funny. I’d never read anything like it before.”

That tonal mix — horror, black comedy, empathy, outrage — is intentional. Wigon’s word for the film is “demented.” “It’s a big tent,” he said. “Demented encompasses scary, but also funny and outrageous.” Getting the audience to root for a murderous protagonist, he says, comes down to keeping them locked inside her subjectivity: “Even if you are not rooting for them, when you recognize how aberrant and awful their behavior is, if you’re connected to their subjectivity, you understand why, to some degree, they feel the way they feel.”

The film has already been rated R by the MPA for strong bloody violence and brief sexual material — which tracks with everything the teaser is selling.

Alongside Monroe, the cast includes Thomasin McKenzie as a nursemaid at Ensor House who befriends the new governess, Ruth Wilson, Jason Isaacs, Jacobi Jupe, Amy De Bhrun, and Evie Templeton as Miss Drusilla Pounds — described as “the picture of a young lady-in-the-making, but inwardly, she carries an intensity and darkness beyond her years.” The film is produced by Dan Kagan, Liz Siegal, and Sebastien Raybaud — the same producing team behind Longlegs — alongside Wigon, with Bleecker Street handling U.S. distribution.

Victorian Psycho arrives in American theaters this fall. If the teaser is any indication, Winifred Notty is going to be living rent-free in a lot of heads between now and then.

The post Maika Monroe Is Terrifying in Victorian Psycho Teaser appeared first on Cream.

• Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
• The film adapts Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel, set during 16th-century Japan’s Azuchi-Momoyama period
• Stars Masahiro Motoki and Masaki Suda, who previously worked with Kurosawa on 2024 thriller Cloud
• Janus Films will release the film in U.S. theaters
• Critics are divided — some call it a mesmerizing epic, others find it plodding but worthwhile

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has never been easy to pin down — the Japanese auteur behind unsettling modern thrillers like Cure and Cloud has now planted himself firmly in feudal Japan, and the result is one of the more intriguing films to come out of Cannes 2026. The Samurai and the Prisoner, an adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel, is part murder mystery, part political chess match, and part deeply human story about what it costs to lead — and what it means to be truly free.

It’s a genuine curveball from a filmmaker whose work has always carried the chill of the contemporary world. But Kurosawa doesn’t abandon his instincts here — he just dresses them in a kimono.

A Castle Under Siege, and the Mysteries Within Its Walls

The story begins in winter of 1578, inside Arioka Castle, where Lord Araki Murashige — played with conflicted charisma by Masahiro Motoki — has made the fateful decision to rebel against the powerful warlord Oda Nobunaga. The castle is surrounded. Defection is spreading. And then people start dying in ways that don’t make sense.

A boy killed by an arrow that passes through a crack in a door and then vanishes. A decapitated head that goes missing in spring. A prized tea kettle stolen in summer. A man struck by lightning at the exact moment he’s about to reveal a secret in autumn. Each death carries the whiff of divine punishment — and each one rattles Murashige, a man who has recently and very deliberately rejected the old samurai code, instructing his retainers “do not die for me.”

Unable to explain what he’s seeing, Murashige keeps doing the one thing that makes no sense by any measure of feudal protocol: walking down to the dungeon to talk to his prisoner.

That prisoner is Kuroda Kanbei, played by Masaki Suda in a reunion with Kurosawa after their collaboration on Cloud. Kanbei arrived at the castle as Nobunaga’s envoy, expecting to be executed when his peace overtures failed. Instead he’s been locked away — a move that is simultaneously an act of mercy and a calculated propaganda play, since Nobunaga will assume that a living Kanbei must have switched sides. It’s the kind of double-edged decision that defines Murashige at every turn.

Locked in darkness, Kanbei becomes something Murashige never expected: the only person he can really talk to. Their conversations, which begin as cold tactical briefings and slowly become something warmer and more destabilizing, form the emotional spine of the film. As one critic put it, you start to sense that Murashige doesn’t have anyone else he can truly confide in — and when that’s pointed out to him, “he rejects this a bit too strongly.”

What the Critics Are Saying

Cannes critics came out of the film with notably different reactions — which, honestly, feels appropriate for a movie this layered.

The Wrap called it “remarkable, restrained and ultimately riveting,” praising Kurosawa’s ability to merge the procedural and the profound, and drawing a comparison to the best parts of a Knives Out film transplanted into feudal Japan. The review singled out the way Kurosawa shoots the film — “in each mesmerizing move of the camera or precisely-framed shot, he draws us in closer and closer” — and noted that despite its nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime, the film “feels like it’s constantly hurtling onwards.”

Variety was equally warm, praising the film’s “absorbing, clean-lined” approach and calling it “a satisfyingly linked series of rousing whodunnits” that doubles as “a trenchant, often rather moving, exploration of the nature of true leadership.” DP Yasuyuki Sasaki’s camerawork gets a specific shoutout — particularly the dungeon sequences, “lit by shafts of light that slice through the cracks in the walls like laser beams.”

IndieWire was the most measured, acknowledging the film’s thematic richness while finding the plotting “tedious” and the first three mysteries amounting to “a mild shrug.” The review drew an interesting parallel between Kurosawa and his own protagonist — suggesting the director, hired to faithfully adapt the novel, may have felt as constrained as Kanbei in his dungeon, his particular genius both an asset and a liability. Still, IndieWire conceded that the film “gains a curious strength” in its final stretch, and that its closing grace note — a leader who finds that opting out of the future might be the only way to change it — is pure vintage Kurosawa.

The film’s four-chapter seasonal structure and its contained, almost abstract castle setting give it the feel of prestige television at times — a comparison Variety raises directly, noting that in the era of Shogun, that’s not necessarily a knock. The cast is large and well-differentiated, though fans should be warned: as the seasons pass, the ranks thin considerably. Kochi Yamato, who broke out as the unsettling Walking Man in the 2025 videogame adaptation Exit 8, appears here — and viewers are advised not to get too attached.

Kurosawa in a New Register

What’s striking about The Samurai and the Prisoner is how fully Kurosawa commits to the classical form of the jidaigeki — the traditional Japanese period drama — without letting it swallow him whole. This isn’t a deconstruction. There’s none of the eerie, reality-bending experimentation of his horror work. It’s a straight-faced, handsomely mounted historical drama that just happens to be made by one of cinema’s most restless minds.

And yet his fingerprints are everywhere. The Buddhist phrase invoked repeatedly throughout the film — “advance to paradise, retreat into hell” — is a theme Kurosawa has circled his entire career, the idea that the worst outcomes often come from pressing forward rather than questioning why we’re moving at all. Here, he gives his protagonist the rare chance to consider a different path. Murashige, shaped by a year of conversations with the man he imprisoned, begins to understand that loyalty can be forged through surrender as much as through victory.

It’s a quiet, unusual kind of heroism for a samurai epic. But then, this is a quiet, unusual kind of samurai epic.

The Samurai and the Prisoner premiered at Cannes and will be released in U.S. theaters by Janus Films. No release date has been announced yet.

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• Pedro Almodóvar declared “Europe must never be subjected to Trump” at his Cannes press conference, drawing loud applause from international press
• The director wore a “Free Palestine” pin and called speaking out a “moral duty” for all artists
• His comments came amid a growing controversy over Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada threatening to blacklist artists who signed an anti-Bolloré petition
• Over 600 industry figures, including Juliette Binoche, signed the petition warning of a “fascist takeover” of French film
• Almodóvar’s new film Bitter Christmas received a standing ovation at its Cannes world premiere

Pedro Almodóvar didn’t come to Cannes to stay quiet. At Wednesday’s press conference for his new film Bitter Christmas, the Oscar-winning Spanish director brought a room full of international journalists to their feet with a declaration that’s already echoing well beyond the Croisette: “Europe must never be subjected to Trump!”

The applause was immediate and thunderous.

Almodóvar was responding to a question about two converging crises — the political climate in the U.S. under Trump, and a very French controversy involving Canal+, the country’s premier pay-TV channel. He was wearing a “Free Palestine” pin as he spoke.

“I don’t want to judge anyone, but I think artists have to speak out about the situation in which they live in contemporary society. It’s a moral duty,” he said. “Silence and fear is a symptom that things are going badly. It’s a serious sign democracy is crumbling. On the contrary, creators must speak out… the worst thing that could happen would be to remain silent or to be censored. We have a moral obligation to speak out.”

He went further, urging fellow artists to “act as a shield against this madness” — and specifically named Netanyahu alongside Trump as targets of that resistance. “We need to turn against Netanyahu. In Europe, we have laws, there are certain limits.”

The Canal+ Controversy Fueling the Fire

The Canal+ situation has been a slow-burning crisis that finally ignited at this year’s festival. On opening day, May 12, more than 600 members of the French film industry — including Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel, Cannes contenders Arthur Harari and Bertrand Mandico, and Anatomy of a Fall actor Swann Arlaud — signed an open letter published in the newspaper Libération. The letter warned that right-wing media mogul Vincent Bolloré’s growing stranglehold over French entertainment — he owns Canal+, its production arm Studiocanal, and is now in the process of acquiring UGC, France’s third-largest cinema chain — risked becoming a “fascist takeover of the collective imagination.”

The response from Canal+ was swift and chilling. CEO Maxime Saada announced at a Cannes producers’ brunch that the network would essentially refuse to work with anyone who’d signed the petition. “I don’t want to work with people who call us crypto-fascists,” Saada said. It’s the kind of statement that turns an industry dispute into something that feels much larger — and it’s why audiences at this year’s Cannes have been booing the Canal+ logo before screenings, every single day.

The parallel to what’s happening in the U.S. is hard to miss. Bolloré’s consolidation of French film — from production to distribution to exhibition — mirrors the kind of media concentration playing out stateside with David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance deal and the ongoing Warner Bros. Discovery situation. One crisis on each side of the Atlantic, the same underlying anxiety about who gets to control the stories we tell.

Almodóvar Has Been Saying This for a While

Wednesday’s press conference wasn’t a sudden breaking point for Almodóvar — it was the latest in a string of increasingly direct statements. Ahead of the festival, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was struck by how muted this year’s Oscars felt politically. “It was quite notable watching the Oscar telecast where there were not many protests against the war or against Trump,” he said. “The only real example I can remember came from a European, a friend of mine, Javier Bardem, who did directly say, ‘Free Palestine.'”

“People are obviously very frightened,” he continued. “The U.S. is not a democracy right now. Some people say it’s maybe an imperfect democracy, but I really don’t think the U.S. is a democracy right now. The heartbreaking and ironic thing is that democracy has given rise, through the proper, right voting mechanism, to this kind of totalitarian regime. And it’s both a paradox and it’s also incredibly sad.”

When the LA Times asked whether he worries that speaking out could hurt his career, his answer was immediate: “Not at all.” He credited both his nationality and his position outside Hollywood for giving him the freedom to be direct. “In a generalized Spanish sense, here we’re not afraid to call things for what they are,” he said. “It’s easier for me to be clear” because he works outside the American industry’s orbit.

He’s been consistent. Back in 2025, while accepting the Chaplin Award at Lincoln Center in New York, he described America as “ruled by a narcissistic authority, who doesn’t respect human rights” — and later said Trump would be remembered as a “catastrophe.”

A New Film, and a New Direction

Bitter Christmas, which received a standing ovation — reports clocked it at somewhere between six and seven minutes — at its world premiere Tuesday night, is Almodóvar’s eighth film in competition at Cannes. It tells two parallel stories: one following a successful writer-director named Raúl Rossetti (Leonardo Sbaraglia) who’s hit a wall creatively, and another set 22 years earlier involving a filmmaker named Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), who’s abandoned features for advertising after a string of flops. The two timelines may or may not be connected.

For Almodóvar, it’s also something of a turning point. “I want to discover a universe that’s different from my own. I would like to change direction and paths,” he said at the press conference. “This is the last film about myself.”

He’s won at Cannes before — best director for All About My Mother in 1999, best screenplay for Volver in 2006. Whether Bitter Christmas adds to that tally remains to be seen. But right now, it’s his voice off-screen that has the festival talking.

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• Andy Garcia’s neo-noir film Diamond earned a 9-minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night
• The film — which Garcia wrote, directed, stars in, and co-composed the score for — has been nearly 20 years in the making
• The ensemble cast includes Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman, Brendan Fraser, Vicky Krieps, and Rosemarie DeWitt
• It marks Garcia’s first appearance at Cannes since Ocean’s Thirteen premiered on the Croisette back in 2007
• The film plays Out of Competition in the Official Selection and was shot across 52 Los Angeles locations in just 25 days

Andy Garcia got his Cannes moment — and it was a long time coming. His passion project Diamond received a thunderous standing ovation Tuesday night in the festival’s Grand Salle Lumière, with the crowd keeping the applause going for a full nine minutes. Co-stars Vicky Krieps and Rosemarie DeWitt were by his side for the premiere, while the film’s sprawling ensemble — Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman, Brendan Fraser, Demián Bichir, and Danny Huston — did not make the trip to the Croisette.

“As you might know this has been a 20-year journey and I couldn’t think of a more sacred place than to be than here… to share this very personal journey with the Festival de Cannes,” Garcia told the audience after the screening. “We all grew up with a dream and could tell you and share with young people out there who have dreams that there is no great obstacle that can’t be overcome. Follow your dream. Keep falling forward. As my father would say never take a step backward not even to gain momentum. I am blessed to be here with you all this evening. Thank you.”

The origin story of Diamond is almost as cinematic as the film itself. Garcia first landed on the idea while helping his daughter Daniella with a homework assignment — she had to write a short story in the style of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Something clicked. Two decades later, that kernel of a homework exercise has become a full-blown love letter to Los Angeles and an homage to the great noir films of Hollywood’s golden age.

What ‘Diamond’ Is Actually About

Garcia plays Joe Diamond, a fedora-wearing private detective who looks and talks like he walked straight off a 1940s movie set — except he’s operating in present-day L.A. The film opens with Diamond in full noir mode: the trench coat, the aging office, the world-weary secretary (LaTanya Richardson Jackson). Then he steps outside, and a Waymo autonomous car rolls past. That’s the joke, and the film commits to it brilliantly.

Diamond is hired by a wealthy widow, Sharon Cobbs (Krieps, playing the classic femme fatale), after her husband turns up dead under mysterious circumstances. His uncanny powers of observation — the kind that leave the LAPD baffled — kick in as he moves through a dreamlike version of Los Angeles, crossing paths with a colorful cast of characters: a well-connected bartender named Jimbo (Murray, serving martinis and insider knowledge), a darkly funny coroner with a passion for Chinese food (Hoffman), a slippery gardener (Bichir), and a mystery woman named Angel (DeWitt, described as genuinely touching in the role).

Brendan Fraser plays Diamond’s legal eagle contact “Danny Boy” McVicar, while Danny Huston appears as a character named Bruce Tannenbaum — a quietly sly bit of casting, given that Huston is the son of John Huston, who directed the 1942 noir classic The Maltese Falcon. Garcia clearly knew what he was doing there.

The production shot across 52 locations in Los Angeles in just 25 days on an indie budget, hitting iconic spots including the Bradbury Building and the Paramour Estate. Production designer Clay A. Griffith, cinematographer Tim Suhrstedt, and costume designer Deborah L. Scott worked together to give the city a suspended-in-time quality — the L.A. of noir mythology, still somehow standing. Garcia also co-composed the score alongside jazz legend Arturo Sandoval, an homage in its own right to what Jerry Goldsmith created for Chinatown.

A Third Act Behind the Camera

Diamond is Garcia’s third feature as director, following the 1993 documentary Cachao… Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos and 2005’s The Lost City. It’s a side of him that doesn’t always get its due — most audiences still know him as Michael Corleone’s illegitimate nephew in The Godfather Part III, or as the charming Danny Ocean sidekick Rusty’s straight-man foil in the Ocean’s trilogy. (His last Cannes appearance was, in fact, for Ocean’s Thirteen in 2007.)

But Diamond is something more personal. Garcia plays Joe Diamond as a three-dimensional man haunted by a traumatic past, not just a one-note genre gag. The film earns its heart, and the casting — assembled with the help of veteran casting director Cathy Sandrich and, by Garcia’s own admission, a few favors — gives it the weight of something that actually meant something to the people who made it.

Produced by Garcia alongside Frank Mancuso Jr., Paul Soriano, and Jai Stefan, the film runs 1 hour and 58 minutes. CAA Media Finance is handling North American sales, with The Veterans managing international. It plays Out of Competition in the Official Selection, alongside Quentin Dupieux’s Full Phil (with Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart) and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell.

Garcia’s daughter — the one who unknowingly started all this with a homework assignment two decades ago — has a role in the film. The full circle of it is hard to miss.

The post Andy Garcia’s ‘Diamond’ Gets 9-Minute Ovation at Cannes appeared first on Cream.

• Pedro Almodóvar received a 6.5-minute standing ovation at the Cannes international premiere of Bitter Christmas
• The film is Almodóvar’s eighth in competition at Cannes — a festival record — but the Palme d’Or has still eluded him
• A simultaneous press screening in the Bazin theater was evacuated after an elderly attendee collapsed about 15 minutes in
• Critics are divided: some call it a fascinating act of self-interrogation, others find it emotionally remote despite its craft
• Almodóvar told Deadline he spent four years writing the script and hinted he may make another English-language film

Pedro Almodóvar brought the Cannes crowd to its feet Tuesday night. The Spanish auteur’s Bitter Christmas earned a 6.5-minute standing ovation at its international premiere in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, with the director attending alongside leads Bárbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia and the full ensemble cast. It wasn’t the 17-minute marathon that greeted The Room Next Door at Venice — but the Cannes crowd made their affection clear, cheering Almodóvar all the way out of the theater after he addressed them directly.

“I always enjoy the warm reception Cannes gives me from the moment I enter the cinema,” Almodóvar told the audience, adding that he would miss it when he could no longer attend. That drew another fresh wave of applause.

It’s his eighth film in competition here — a festival record — cementing a relationship with Cannes that stretches back decades. He won best director for All About My Mother in 1999, best screenplay for Volver in 2006, and Antonio Banderas took best actor for Pain and Glory in 2019. The Palme d’Or, somehow, has never come.

What ‘Bitter Christmas’ Is Actually About

Bitter Christmas — which opened in Spain in March to positive reviews before making its Croisette debut — is, in the simplest terms, a Russian nesting doll of a movie. It begins in 2004, following Elsa (Lennie), a cult filmmaker turned advertising director plagued by migraines and panic attacks, who travels to the volcanic island of Lanzarote with her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) after the death of her mother. Her devoted younger boyfriend Bonifacio, played by Patrick Criado, is a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper — and yes, we get the full routine, set to Grace Jones.

Then the film pulls back to reveal that Elsa’s entire story is a screenplay being written by Raúl Rossetti (Sbaraglia), an esteemed auteur in 2026 who carries Almodóvar’s bearing and silvery hairdo, and who has been creatively running on fumes. Raúl lives in an airy villa beside a Hockney-esque swimming pool, supported by his younger partner Santi (Quim Gutiérrez) and his indispensable assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). As the film progresses, the boundary between Raúl’s fiction and his reality begins to dissolve — and by the end, it becomes clear that Raúl is Almodóvar’s own alter ego, with Elsa functioning as an alter ego once removed.

The ensemble also includes Milena Smit as Natalia, a young mother undone by grief, and a characteristically scene-stealing cameo from Rossy de Palma as the madrileña social butterfly Gabriela — “like an Auntie Mame,” as one reviewer put it — who pauses a fabulous party long enough to give Elsa her stash of heavy-duty painkillers. The movie takes its title from a Chavela Vargas ranchera, and the late Mexican singer’s music appears twice, including a raspy late-career performance of “La Llorona” that several critics singled out as the film’s most ravishing sequence.

The Scene Everyone’s Talking About

The film’s emotional climax arrives in a pair of ferocious confrontations between Raúl and Mónica, after she reads his script and returns furious — both at his use of a friend’s suicide attempt as dramatic material, and at his broader obliviousness to the people around him. In one moment that got a laugh at the Cannes screening, she suggests he cut the problematic section entirely, call it a minor work, and sell it to Netflix. “I ask for your advice,” Raúl shoots back, “and you tell me to make a TV movie!”

Sánchez-Gijón is being singled out for her work in these scenes — fierce, unsparing, and clearly speaking for the director himself. Almodóvar confirmed as much in an interview with Deadline. “Monica’s character is a reflection of the ways in which I may question myself,” he said. “As Monica is challenging him, yes, she’s challenging me as a director. And I found the experience of displaying that both liberating and amusing because it did become a process of criticizing myself.”

He was equally candid about the ethics of autofiction — the film’s central preoccupation. “Sometimes a writer doesn’t think of the way precisely that they’re going to hurt the people around them, because at the end of the day, they don’t think about the hurt, they think about the idea, and that becomes a dangerous thing,” he said. “And so at a certain level, my screenwriter is kind of also the villain in the film.”

The script itself, he revealed, has been brewing for about four years — adapted from a short story he wrote years earlier that originally just followed Elsa, her firefighter boyfriend, and their trip to Lanzarote. The character of Mónica, who ends up driving the entire third act, wasn’t part of the original at all. “She was not part of the story previously. She came to me,” Almodóvar said.

The Press Screening That Had to Stop

While Almodóvar was receiving his ovation in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, things took a more alarming turn across the Palais. About 15 minutes into the simultaneous press screening in the Bazin theater — ironically, during a hospital sequence — an elderly attendee collapsed in their seat. Loud yelps were heard, the person’s eyes were closed, and those nearby surrounded them as the film kept running. The ushers then cleared the entire theater.

The festival confirmed the incident in a statement: “The screening was immediately interrupted, and the theater evacuated to allow emergency services to assist them. The person was conscious and responsive before being transported to the hospital for further medical care. Once the intervention was completed, the screening resumed from the beginning of the film.”

Eyewitnesses on social media described hearing a loud scream and reported that the person appeared to suffer some kind of seizure. One attendee told Deadline the response felt disorganized: “It was a muddle and it seemed as though the festival didn’t have any protocol in place for such an emergency.”

Where Critics Land

The reviews have been warm but measured — the consensus being that this is unmistakably Almodóvar, and unmistakably minor Almodóvar. The craft is beyond dispute: Alberto Iglesias’ score, Antxón Gómez’s production design (not a single apartment in the film you wouldn’t want to live in), Pau Esteve Birba’s cinematography — particularly a bird’s-eye shot of Elsa and Patricia lying on white towels against Lanzarote’s black volcanic sand, wearing red and black — all land with the director’s signature visual intensity. Hot pink, as one critic put it, has never burned hotter.

Where critics diverge is on emotional access. Some find the film’s layers of self-critique genuinely thrilling — “a difficult but virtuoso piece of auto-fiction,” in The Wrap’s assessment. Others feel the double-proxy structure keeps the audience at arm’s length, that Almodóvar is working things out in his own head rather than inviting viewers to share the experience. The Hollywood Reporter noted that while Pain and Glory stung with “startling vulnerability and poignancy,” Bitter Christmas “stays somewhat at a distance for the audience, compelling but seldom affecting.”

Deadline’s review landed somewhere in the middle, comparing it favorably to the idea that even minor Fellini and minor Bergman is a gift — a line that, tellingly, Almodóvar put into Mónica’s mouth in the film itself.

Bitter Christmas is produced by Agustín Almodóvar for El Deseo. Sony Pictures Classics handles North American distribution, Warner Bros. releases in Spain and Mexico, and Curzon covers the U.K. and Ireland. The film has grossed around $3 million domestically in Spain since its March opening — more than The Room Next Door and Parallel Mothers managed, though well short of Pain and Glory.

As for whether he’ll return to English-language filmmaking, Almodóvar left the door open. “I would like to work again with Tilda and Julianne,” he said, referring to Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. “So, perhaps in the future there will be another movie in English.”

For now, though, he’s back in Spanish — and back on the Croisette, where the crowd still cheers him all the way out the door.

The post Almodóvar Gets 6.5-Min Ovation for ‘Bitter Christmas’ at Cannes appeared first on Cream.

• Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur received a ten-minute standing ovation at its Cannes 2026 world premiere
• The film is Zvyagintsev’s first in nine years, following a near-fatal COVID illness that left him temporarily paralyzed
• An adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 thriller, it’s set in 2022 Russia and serves as a searing indictment of Putin’s war against Ukraine
• Shot entirely in Latvia, the film stars Dmitriy Mazurov and Iris Lebedeva, with MUBI acquiring rights for North America, the UK, and beyond
• Critics are calling it one of the strongest films of Zvyagintsev’s career and a frontrunner for Cannes prizes

Andrey Zvyagintsev is back — and Cannes knows it. The Russian auteur’s Minotaur received a heartfelt ten-minute standing ovation at its world premiere in Competition at the 2026 festival, one of the longest of the event so far, and the critical response has been just as emphatic. After a nine-year absence from cinema and a brush with death that few people fully recover from, Zvyagintsev has returned with what many are already calling the defining film about Russia’s war against Ukraine — and he never once uses that word.

That’s part of what makes Minotaur so quietly devastating. Russia calls it a “special military operation,” and so does everyone in this film. The war hums in the background — on laptop screens quickly clicked away from, on propaganda billboards celebrating fallen “heroes,” in the faces of men on the street missing limbs — before it slowly, relentlessly moves to the center of everything.

A Crime Thriller Wearing Russia’s Soul

On the surface, Minotaur is an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 melodrama La femme infidèle — the same source material Adrian Lyne turned into the glossy erotic thriller Unfaithful with Diane Lane in 2002. A jealous husband. A restless wife. A situation that escalates, badly. It’s a story we know. What Zvyagintsev and co-writer Simon Lyashenko have done is strip it down to its bones and rebuild it inside the rotting architecture of Putin’s Russia in autumn 2022, finding in a domestic betrayal the exact same logic — entitlement, intimidation, denial — that drives a nation to invade its neighbor.

Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov), CEO of a shipping company, lives in a sprawling modernist home on the wooded outskirts of an unnamed Russian city — all tall windows and no curtains, the kind of house where you can watch people eat dinner in silence from the street. His wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) has been unreachable for months, her otherwise drawn face lighting up only when a text arrives from someone she’s not supposed to be texting. Their teenage son Seryosha (Boris Kudrin) is quietly absorbing everything. When Gleb’s parenting advice to the boy involves grabbing him by the lapels and demonstrating how to physically intimidate a bully — “whoever starts a fight loses for being stupid,” he says, words that will echo back at him — it’s played almost as dark comedy. Almost.

Gleb, it turns out, already knows about the affair. He just tends to let things lie. But the year is 2022, and the town’s mayor (Vladimir Friedman) has just summoned him to submit a list of 14 male employees for military “recruiters” — men who will be shipped to the front with barely any equipment or protection. That detail alone, were the film made inside Russia, could land the filmmakers in prison. The fact that Zvyagintsev put it in anyway tells you everything about where he is now, and what he’s willing to say.

The Personal and the Political, Inseparable

One of the film’s most striking sequences involves Gleb driving with suspicious cargo in his car, stopping at a railway crossing to let a train pass. The train isn’t carrying passengers. It’s tanks. Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman — Zvyagintsev’s longtime DP, who has shot every one of his films — superimposes the reflection of those tanks onto Gleb’s face through the windshield. The political has invaded the personal. Then, in the film’s long, uncomfortably detailed cleanup sequence following a sudden act of violence, the logic reverses: the personal invades the political. Russia, the film suggests, has always been thorough in its silencing — it just calls it sanitation.

Krichman shoots Minotaur with the same meticulous widescreen command he brought to Leviathan and Loveless, though the visual register here is harder, colder. There’s less overt beauty and more desolation — concrete streets, half-empty office suites, housing estates so eerily unpopulated that, as Variety noted, you feel you could practically commit a murder in broad daylight. Latvia fills in for Russia with uncomfortable persuasiveness, conveying both the country’s aggressive vastness and its eerie depopulation, by people either fleeing or being called to battle.

The film runs 141 minutes and doesn’t waste a frame of them. A throwaway restaurant comment about the last time Gleb cleaned his own house becomes a plot thread. Photographs of characters at younger, happier ages become clues and totems simultaneously. A 20-minute mid-film sequence is described by The Hollywood Reporter as “gruesome, comical and crucial.” Nothing is accidental, not even the background figures glimpsed on the street with missing limbs — survivors, perhaps, of Chechnya, Georgia, or Donbass.

Lebedeva Is the Film’s Electric Heart

If Mazurov is the film’s rugged, morally compromised center — and he’s excellent, lending Gleb a dry physical comedy at his most desperate moments — Iris Lebedeva is its most volatile and alive presence. Critics have compared her less to a Chabrol heroine than to someone from Antonioni: a forcefield of ennui wrapped in an elegant trenchcoat, her face transformed only by the private thrill of her secret. She makes her way several times a week to her lover Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), a 33-year-old photographer living in the kind of rundown social housing estate that a woman of her wealth would ordinarily never enter. It’s somewhere to feel something.

Her longest outburst in the film — drunk, abandoned, raging at her husband and son for ordering margherita pizza again, “Order something else for once! I can’t stand this!” — lands somewhere between absurdity and heartbreak. And then there’s the moment, late in the film, when she turns to Gleb and asks, simply: “Where’s me?” She expects no answer. She gets none.

Variety called her “the film’s most electric, volatile presence.” IndieWire said she feels “astonishing” and “cut out of Antonioni.” It’s the kind of performance that tends to stay in a jury’s mind.

A Filmmaker Returned From the Edge

The backstory behind Minotaur is almost as dramatic as the film itself. Zvyagintsev, now 62 and living in exile in France, contracted COVID in 2020 and spent time in a coma before being left temporarily unable to move. He was still recovering when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 — the same month in which his film is set. He has said publicly that he decided while he was ill that he would not return to Russia while it pursued a war that shamed him. He has not.

The film was shot entirely in Latvia and is officially a French-German-Latvian co-production, with MK2 Films handling international sales. MUBI has acquired Minotaur for North America, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, and Latin America, with a release expected later this year. Zvyagintsev has been reunited with most of his regular collaborators — Krichman, production designers Masha Slavina and Andrey Ponkratov, and composers Evgeni and Sasha Galperine — all of whom, notably, now also live abroad.

The Cannes pedigree is formidable. Loveless won the Jury Prize here in 2017. Leviathan took Best Screenplay in 2014. Elena earned the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize in 2011. Given that track record, expectations were already high before a single frame screened. The ten-minute ovation, and the reviews that followed, suggest those expectations were met.

Deadline’s Stephanie Bunbury called it “a great piece of work.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “grippy-as-a-live-squid.” IndieWire wrote: “Andrey Zvyagintsev, welcome back. We missed you, and we need you.”

The film ends, as Zvyagintsev films tend to, without comfort or resolution. Two detectives, presented with hard evidence that could break their case wide open, shrug it off. “Why do we bother?” one asks. “F-k if I know,” says the other. “Let’s have lunch.” And then there is a final image — characters floating above clouds, high above everything — that offers the appearance of escape while making clear, with quiet devastation, that things are about to get worse than anyone thought possible.

The post Zvyagintsev’s ‘Minotaur’ Stuns Cannes With 10-Minute Ovation appeared first on Cream.

• ‘Ben’Imana’ is the first Rwandan film ever to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, competing in Un Certain Regard.
• Director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo spent over a decade developing the film, which explores justice and forgiveness after the 1994 Tutsi genocide.
• The film was mentored into existence by filmmakers Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) and legendary Ethiopian director Haile Gerima.
• Most of the cast are non-professional actors — survivors and community members whose real stories shaped the film.
• ‘Ben’Imana’ is currently seeking U.S. distribution after its Cannes premiere.

Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo didn’t set out to make history. She set out to make an honest film about her community — about what it means to forgive, and what happens when you can’t. The fact that Ben’Imana became the first Rwandan film to ever screen at the Cannes Film Festival, competing in Un Certain Regard, feels like a byproduct of that honesty rather than any grand design. And after more than a decade in development, Dusabejambo is taking it all in stride.

“I feel relieved,” she said ahead of the premiere, with what was described as a relaxed smile. “This is a real joy and relief, especially when you’ve worked on a project for as long as I have. I’ve had time to really get prepared for this moment.”

That preparation shows in every frame. Ben’Imana is a remarkable debut — patient, formally inventive, and emotionally devastating in the way that only deeply researched, deeply personal filmmaking can be. Set in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 2012, the film unfolds nearly two decades after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group, when extremist Hutu militias killed hundreds of thousands of people — in some communities, roughly half the population overnight. The Rwandan government has since established community-led courts across the country, and the film opens on one of these outdoor trials: a man named Karangwa pleading guilty to murdering the siblings of Vénéranda, a middle-aged woman who stands before the people’s court and calmly, with almost no visible emotion, declares that she forgives him.

The court rules in his favor. And Vénéranda’s sister, Suzanne, is furious.

“She has no right to forgive on behalf of our family,” Suzanne declares — and with that, Ben’Imana announces exactly what kind of film it is. Not a story of tidy reconciliation, but one that asks whether forgiveness can be demanded, distributed, or even meaningful when it comes at someone else’s insistence.

A Story That Lives in Its Contradictions

Vénéranda, played with extraordinary restraint by Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi, is the film’s moral center — and its central contradiction. She leads community testimonial sessions for women preparing to testify, part of a national reconciliation program called “Rwanditude.” The sessions are designed as safe spaces: attendees can cry, shout, stay silent. “We carry wounds which are not of interest to the public or the judges,” Vénéranda tells them in one session. “So no need to overexpose ourselves again.”

And yet, at home, she’s rigid and unforgiving in ways that quietly indict her public grace. When her late-teenage daughter, Tina, turns up unexpectedly pregnant by a young man named Richard — implied to be Hutu, though his family is never connected to the massacres — Vénéranda’s composure cracks. The film’s closest thing to a darkly comic beat is the near-immediate cut between Vénéranda preaching that “forgiveness is the key” and then disparaging Richard to her daughter on the walk home from church.

Dusabejambo doesn’t judge Vénéranda for this. She understands her. That’s what makes it land so hard.

The testimonial sessions themselves generate some of the film’s most gripping sequences — spaces where disparate people attempt to reconcile their individual scars from something they each experienced entirely differently. One of the program’s most complex presences is Madeleine, the mother of men who carried out killings. She attends as part of the program’s push to encourage forgiveness between victims and perpetrators’ families. A single line she delivers — “My babies were like the others” — is among the film’s most quietly devastating moments.

Another standout figure is Victoire, a woman who keeps her face cloaked at all times and who, at home, still prepares food for her long-dead children. They were killed by her own brothers and father. She is present in the sessions but never speaks in the group — opting instead for private conversations with Vénéranda. Through her, and through Madeleine, Dusabejambo and co-writer Delphine Agut explore how wounds travel beyond those who were physically present during the atrocities — how they seep into the next generation, shape silences, become ghosts.

“Darling, why should I remember ghosts?” Suzanne tells Tina at one point, deflecting a question about her niece’s father, of whom the family has no photo. It’s a line that cuts two ways: a survivor’s self-protection, and an unintentional cruelty toward the young woman left to carry unanswered questions into her future.

How a Mathematician Became Rwanda’s Most Important Filmmaker

Dusabejambo was born and raised in Kigali and, in her early twenties, was on track for a career in electronics and telecommunications — not cinema. The pivot came through a series of encounters that feel almost fated in retrospect.

Lee Isaac Chung — who would go on to direct Minari — was living in Rwanda in the early 2000s while his wife worked as a counselor in Kigali. During that time, he began developing and shooting his debut feature, Munyurangabo (2007), in Dusabejambo’s own neighborhood. She had free time and wandered onto the set. The two stayed in contact, and years later, after she’d completed her maths qualification and was heading toward a telecom job, Chung sent her a link to a short film script competition hosted by the Tribeca Film Festival.

She submitted. She won. And then she tried to hand the directing off to someone else.

“I thought someone else could direct it,” she recalled. “But Isaac insisted that I make the film. He said the world needed more women making films. That’s how I got started.” Chung traveled to Rwanda to give her the basics. “I had never looked into a camera,” she said. “I started from scratch with Isaac.”

After a few years on the festival circuit with short films, she began developing Ben’Imana. That’s when Haile Gerima entered the picture. The legendary Ethiopian director behind Sankofa and Teza happened to be sitting in the back of a pitching session where Dusabejambo was presenting the project — and getting demolished by the feedback.

“I got all the bad feedback one can get, so I was sitting down trying to decide whether I would continue or not,” she said. “Then Haile came up to me and said, ‘Oh, sister, I didn’t hear anything you said because you were speaking in French, but go home and send me your script in English.'”

She didn’t know who he was. She looked him up, took him up on the offer, and received a complete DVD collection of his work in return. For five years after that, Gerima invited her annually to his filmmaking workshop in Luxembourg. “He’s very tough and often gives you comments you don’t want to hear,” she said. “But I learned so much, not only about filmmaking but about myself and Rwanda.”

That influence is visible in the film’s structure — or rather, its deliberate resistance to conventional structure. Ben’Imana unravels slowly and from multiple angles, more interested in accumulating emotional truth than in hitting narrative marks. Like Gerima’s best work, it has very little patience for the idea that a story about profound human experience should move at anyone else’s pace.

A Truly African Production

Dusabejambo has been labeled a “self-taught filmmaker” in various press materials — a description she pushes back on firmly. But she is deeply proud of what Ben’Imana represents structurally, beyond her own journey. The film is a co-production between Rwanda, Gabon, France, Norway, and the Ivory Coast, with mk2 handling international sales. It’s also one of the first titles funded by Rwanda’s new state-backed Film Fund — a process Dusabejambo describes as genuinely independent.

“The Fund is completely independent. I submitted like everyone else, and we got the money. There were no strings attached,” she said. The funding allowed her to hire a large local crew, many of whom were heading departments on a major production for the first time. The director of photography is Egyptian; his second assistant is from Gabon.

“We just need more financing from home so we can work without having to apply for foreign funding,” she said. “We can do this ourselves.”

Much of the cast, similarly, came from within the community the film depicts. Dusabejambo spent roughly a decade researching the film, listening to survivors and hearing confessions from perpetrators. In the beginning, she kept crying. Then she noticed that the women telling her these stories weren’t. “They’re not crying when they’re telling me this,” she realized. “Why am I crying?” That shift — from outsider emotion to insider understanding — became the film’s foundation.

She ultimately cast many of those women, despite their having no acting experience. “They bring in something that is real,” she said. Her role as director in those scenes was less about performance and more about language: “I was also trying to find their language: How do they talk about themselves? How do they talk about this history without being too reductive?”

The result is a film that knows exactly what it is — and what it refuses to be. Ben’Imana doesn’t offer the comfort of easy resolution. Forgiveness, as one speaker in Vénéranda’s sessions puts it, is not something we carry around in bags to hand out on demand. But the weight of what we suppress, the film suggests, can become heavier than anything we might say out loud.

Ben’Imana is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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