The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 20, 2016 Reviews Shot in grainy black-and-white 16mm, the adorable The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki is a rare example of a sports drama where matters of the heart are of greater importance than matters of...
The Red Turtle – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 20, 2016 Reviews The Red Turtle, a collaboration between veteran short film animator Michael Dudok de Wit and animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli, is a simple fable of deep spirituality. With its simple hand-drawn style and...
The Last Face – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 20, 2016 Reviews A promising cast - and presumably some noble intentions - are completely squandered by Sean Penn is his atrociously mishandled, inadvertently hilarious and often offensive The Last Face. When a script is...
Captain Fantastic – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 19, 2016 Reviews Wearing its heart not so much on its sleeve as hanging off the end of it, Captain Fantastic is a triumph of pure sincerity and heartfelt good vibes. Rather “zany” and chock full of the now-staple...
The Stopover (Voir Du Pays) – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 19, 2016 Reviews The Stopover’s compelling setup – a group of soldiers returning from a tour of Afghanistan staying in a five-star Cypriot hotel for “decompression” – makes for a scintillating investigation into...
Ma’ Rosa – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 19, 2016 Reviews Filipino auteur Brillante Mendoza’s gritty and authentic formal approach on Ma’ Rosa gives us a flavourful and palpable sense of place and community – though the same can’t be said of his characters,...
Inversion (Varoonegi) – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 19, 2016 Reviews There's something rather uncinematic about a phone call. They can be used in interesting and dynamic ways, but when much of a film consists of the lead character answering (and sometimes ignoring) her...
The Unknown Girl (La Fille Inconnue) – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 19, 2016 Reviews The Dardenne brothers’ take on a detective story is highly introverted and moves with a quiet confidence befitting of its heroine – however it lets itself down with an underwhelming resolution and the...
After the Storm – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 18, 2016 Reviews Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda strikes gold yet again with this superlative and poetic portrait of another fractured family unit. Nobody paints for us the highs and lows of familial interaction quite...
Julieta – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 17, 2016 Reviews About as Almodóvarian as it gets, this adaptation of a trio of Alice Munro stories brings every facet of the Spanish auteur's unmistakeable heightened and melodramatic style. The formula that constitutes...
Apprentice – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 16, 2016 Reviews Sparse and morbid, Apprentice is not the easiest watch, but the questions it raises about morality and mortality make it a gut-wrenching polemic about capital punishment. While the script is a little...
Hell Or High Water – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 16, 2016 Reviews Despite the high watermark set by Starred Up, David Mackenzie betters himself once again with the immensely gratifying western Hell or High Water, a genre hybrid with a rich streak of melancholy but no...
The Transfiguration – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 15, 2016 Reviews This first-time feature from writer-director Michael O'Shea is both self- and genre-aware - though repeatedly acknowledging its superior forebears in the vampire genre does not equate to doing anything...
American Honey – Cannes 2016 Review Nick Evan-Cook May 15, 2016 Reviews Andrea Arnold once again confirms herself as one of - if not the - best British filmmakers working today with her sprawling odyssey of the disenfranchised, American Honey. Formally not so much a...
Top 10 Most Exciting Cannes Competition Films 2016 Calum Baker May 11, 2016 Analysis, Features, Top 10 Regular ORWAV readers will know how much we love the Cannes Film Festival. We're even returning this year, to cover even more exciting ground than 2015 - and 2015 was pretty exciting. Dheepan won the Palme...