Cannes Film Festival 2019 – all our coverage

Cannes Film Festival 2019: the awards, reaction and our reviews of the winners

Social conflagration is this year’s key note, with Parasite winning the Palme d’Or, a runner-up prize for Atlantics and shared third prizes for Bacurau and Les Misérables. Introduced by Nick James.

What should have won the 2019 Cannes Palme d’Or?

It wasn’t to be the second year a female director won Cannes’s top prize, but our contributors certainly fancied it as much as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Isabel Stevens introduces thoughts from ten of our contributors.
Saturday 25 May 2019

Not a shot wasted: the best short films at Cannes 2019

Vasilis Kekatos’s The Distance Between Us and the Sky won the top prize, but there were many more micro-miracles in competition at this year’s festival, reports Jake Cunningham.
Wednesday 29 May 2019

Genre and disorder at Cannes 2019: a midway round-up

Halfway through this year’s festival, B-movie upgrades and distillations of societal collapse have run riot, with Mati Diop’s Atlantics and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire likely candidates for awards, says Nick James.
Monday 20 May 2019

Cannes 2019: the Posters d’Or

A vibrant slate of posters tease what looks to be an exciting and varied selection of new films, with Agnès Varda as this year’s fresh take on the Cannes ‘cover girl’, says Isabel Stevens.
Monday 20 May 2019

Directing Directors’ Fortnight: Paolo Moretti on his first time programming Cannes’s Quinzaine

In his first year in the role, the seventh artistic director of the festival’s parallel indie programme discusses the pressures of continuity, change and gender parity with James Lattimer.
Thursday 16 May 2019

Cannes 2019 begins

Arise, this year’s surprises, says Nick James.
Tuesday 14 May 2019

Parasite first look: Bong Joon-ho builds a wicked bridge over the class divide

Bong Joon-ho fuses home-invasion thrills with a searing critique of social inequality in this rip-roaring con-family comedy, says Isabel Stevens.
Thursday 23 May 2019

Portrait of a Lady on Fire first look: Céline Sciamma conjures an oasis of female freedom

Sciamma’s rapturous costume romance finds a halcyon space without men for its artist and her subject to look and love their own way, says Isabel Stevens.
Tuesday 21 May 2019

Atlantics first look: Mati Diop’s paranormal take on the migration crisis

The Senegalese filmmaker’s feature debut blends the supernatural into an uneven but tenderly ethereal tale of injustice, exodus and abandonment in a dystopian modern-day Dakar, writes Beth Webb.
Friday 17 May 2019

The Lighthouse first look: Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson raise their own tempest at sea

Robert Eggers follows his New England ghost story The Witch with a superbly sulphurous maritime two-hander that channels the word and spirit of Herman Melville, says Jonathan Romney.
Sunday 19 May 2019

The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmao first look: the odyssey of a fractured family from Brazil

Karim Aïnouz makes a triumphant return to feature films with this transcendent ‘tropical melodrama’ about the enduring bond between two not-so distant sisters, writes Geoff Andrew.
Saturday 25 May 2019

Rocketman review: an out and proud Elton John musical biopic

Dexter Fletcher’s take on the rock ’n’ roll history of Reginald Dwight is kinetic, poignant and, above all, refreshingly open and celebratory about its gay protagonist’s sex life, writes Rebecca Harrison.
Friday 17 May 2019

Pain and Glory first look: Pedro Almodóvar’s self-portrait of the artist as addict

The director is in introspective mood with his latest, as Antonio Banderas plays a film director at the end of his career looking back on his life with the help of the occasional high, writes Nick James.
Friday 17 May 2019

Les Misérables first look: a tense tour of a Paris commune still in crisis

The violently divided society of Victor Hugo’s novel persists in local Ladj Ly’s scintillating feature debut, which follows a police investigation into a riot in a Montfermeil banlieu, writes Katherine McLaughlin.
Tuesday 21 May 2019

First Love first look: Miike Takashi pits yakuza against triads in a gonzo frenzy

Cartoonish ultraviolence and even cartoons break out in the Japanese director’s 103rd movie, a blood-soaked tale of a madcap scheme gone dangerously awry, writes Michael Leader.
Thursday 23 May 2019

The Cordillera of Dreams first look: a portrait of Chile carved in rock

In this poetic documentary, filmmaker Patricio Guzmán mediates on the past and future of his home country via the mountains that close it off from the rest of the world, writes Jonathan Romney.
Wednesday 22 May 2019

Sorry We Missed You first look: Ken Loach delivers a stirring drama on the gig economy

Loach does what he does best in this persuasive, affecting drama about a couple ground down by zero-hours contracts, where humour and honesty keep sentimentality at bay, says Geoff Andrew.
Friday 17 May 2019

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood first look: Tarantino’s barefoot elegy to an era at sundown is his ripest delight

Freely interweaving his own inventions with myths and legends from Hollywood’s late golden years, Quentin Tarantino delivers one of the most exuberantly sharp-witted meta-movies we’ve seen – until, until… Jessica Kiang minds her spoilers.
Wednesday 22 May 2019

Lux Æterna first look: Gaspar Noé builds a meta-movie bonfire

In Noé’s blitziest blitzkrieg yet, Beatrice Dallé and Charlotte Gainsbourg play an embattled film director and her star preparing a witch-burning scene. Then Noé unleashes a proper meltdown, writes Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Thursday 23 May 2019

Diego Maradona review: Asif Kapadia brings us a touch of god

The team behind Amy and Senna brings their own sure hands to this compendious bird’s-eye documentary portrait of the Argentina and Napoli football legend, writes Lou Thomas.
Wednesday 22 May 2019

The Wild Goose Lake first look: Diao Yinan spins a dazzling neon neo-noir

Flashbacks, a frenetic pace and striking set pieces combine to make this near-abstract crime movie an exhilarating if skin-deep experience, writes James Lattimer.
Tuesday 21 May 2019

Zombi Child first look: a post-colonial boarding-school voodoo horror

Bertrand Bonello shuffles privilege and oppression in this brooding high-concept horror experiment that shadows the study of a Haitian teenager at an elite modern-day Parisian girls’ school with a zombie wandering his 1960s homeland, writes Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Sunday 26 May 2019

The Halt first look: Lav Diaz dreams a cataclysm for his country

The sage of slow cinema holds up a mirror to the present-day Philippines, envisaging a darkly despotic future in this potent if uneven sci-fi epic, finds Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Friday 24 May 2019

Family Romance, LLC review: Werner Herzog explores a deeply personal Japanese service

In Japan, the rent-a-family business offers everything from a cure for loneliness to a coverup for a secret shame. Herzog meets the man who replaces absent or disappointing relatives in this sensitive new drama, writes Katherine McLaughlin.
Wednesday 29 May 2019

Frankie first look: Ira Sachs rambles through all the family variations under the sun

Swapping New York for big-sky Portugal where Isabelle Huppert’s film star gathers her clan, Ira Sachs weaves a tapestry of relationships and experiences that aims for something timeless, writes Michael Leader.
Friday 24 May 2019

Too Old to Die Young first look: Nicolas Winding Refn depopulates the small screen

The Danish dean of neo-noir shifts down a gear or three with an excursion in slow TV that etches Los Angeles’s human absences. To judge by two episodes at Cannes, it’s not a pulse-racing prospect, finds Rebecca Harrison.
Saturday 18 May 2019

Little Joe first look: a heady lab-of-horrors mystery

Emily Beecham bio-engineers happy flowers that set her world askew in Jessica Hausner’s richly enigmatic fantasia, says Geoff Andrew.
Saturday 18 May 2019

Fire Will Come first look: Oliver Laxe charts a path to paradise that ends in hell

Laxe paints an immersive portrait of the Galician countryside, in which the mystery and beauty of the landscape dwarfs the inner turmoil of those who occupy it, writes James Lattimer.
Wednesday 29 May 2019

Oh Mercy! first look: police and poverty vie in a sombre French noir

Arnaud Desplechin looks into the past and out from the shadows in this dour new detective story, weaving a web of mystery and misery which doesn’t quite connect all the dots, finds Elisabet Cabeza.
Thursday 30 May 2019

Young Ahmed review: the Dardennes ponder the riddle of radicalisation

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne aren’t on their surest ground with this depiction of a young man swayed by Islamic fundamentalism; but as minor works go, it still packs some surprises, writes Caspar Salmon.
Wednesday 22 May 2019

The Dead Don’t Die first look: Jarmuschians assemble for the ultimate dead-end comedy

Jim Jarmusch’s maximal stock company overruns the American heartland for an end-times zombie genre burlesque that finds nowhere to go, says Michael Leader.
Wednesday 15 May 2019

Red 11 first look: Robert Rodriguez goes lo with a tongue-in-cheek instructional horror

Robert Rodriguez revisits his ultra-low-budget roots in down and dirty filmmaking with a knockabout horror-thriller set in a medical research facility, writes John Bleasdale.
Sunday 26 May 2019

The Traitor first look: Marco Bellocchio’s murky tale of a mafia informant

This true story of Italian gangster Tommaso Buscetta, and how he broke the code of silence, is both too generically familiar and too complex, especially for non-Italian audiences, writes John Bleasdale.
Thursday 30 May 2019

I Lost My Body review: the touching tale of a manus on a mission

O body, where art thou? A French animation about a dismembered hand won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes. Imagine if The Thing from The Addams Family had its own action franchise, says Isabel Stevens.
Thursday 23 May 2019

Beanpole first look: life, and beauty, persist after the siege of Leningrad

Kantemir Balagov’s extraordinary second film depicts the febrile friendship of two nursing women in a WWII Soviet hospice with impressive rigour and poetry, writes Caspar Salmon.
Tuesday 21 May 2019

Bull first look: a bucking portrait of a rodeoing odd couple

Cannes short film winner Annie Silvestein impresses with her feature debut, an understated but potent portrait of Amber Havard’s teen tearaway and Rob Morgan’s worn rodeo star on the outer fringes of Houston, Texas, writes Rebecca Harrison.
Thursday 16 May 2019

Deerskin first look: Jean Dujardin seeks one jacket to rule them all

Quentin Dupieux pulls off an unlikely but deftly oddball comedy about a man over the edge, and determined to document it, says Caspar Salmon.
Friday 17 May 2019

The Orphanage first look: Quodrat comes of age in late Soviet-era Afghanistan

The Soviet occupation collapses and the Mujahideen arise as teenage Quodrat and his fellow street kids flourish in a state-run orphanage in the second part of Shahrbanoo Sadat’s planned five-part history of her country, writes John Bleasdale.
Saturday 25 May 2019

Ghost Tropic first look: a long walk home through a nocturnal city of kindness

Writer-director Bas Devos tracks a cleaner’s journey home through Brussels on foot in this sensitive portrait of the city’s night owls, writes Ben Driscoll.
Thursday 30 May 2019

And Then We Danced first look: Georgian dance drills and furtive feelings

Levan Akin’s sensuous drama conjures the glint of gay desire amidst the lithe but forbidding orthodoxies of a Georgian dance ensemble, says Ella Kemp.
Sunday 19 May 2019

The Unknown Saint first look: a lean, timeless desert caper

Alaa Eddine Aljem’s deadpan debut plants an empty shrine over loot buried in the sands of southern Morocco, and watches a community of sun-beaten oddballs pay reverence, finds John Bleasdale.
Sunday 19 May 2019

Tenzo first look: Tomita Katsuya’s radical hybrid hour

In this short portrait of two monks in present-day Japan, the self-funded Japanese filmmaker reimagines how we engage with fiction and nonfiction, gently eroding the importance of that distinction, says Catherine Bray.
Monday 3 June 2019

Litigante review: Franco Lolli puts motherhood on trial

The Colombian filmmaker’s follow-up to Gente de Bien is a vivid family drama that pits mother-daughter lawyers against each other, as both seek professional and personal justice. Ela Bittencourt bears witness. 
Tuesday 28 May 2019

For the Money first look: a satirical swing at the commercial side of creativity

Alejo Moguillansky explores the economics of entertainment through the antics of a struggling Argentine theatre troupe, relishing in the joy of the art and the passion of the artist, writes Ela Bittencourt. 
Friday 31 May 2019

Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo first look: a downer on the dance floor

With its interminable leering shots of underdressed teens and degenerate sexual politics stretched across three-and-a-half hours of nightclub action, Abdellatif Kechiche’s series ‘interlude’ is a despair-inducing grind, writes John Bleasdale.
Thursday 30 May 2019

The Whistlers review: Corneliu Porumboiu’s Canary Islands crime caper sings flat

Absconding from his melancholic-minimalist comfort zone, the Romanian talent surfaces in La Gomera with his fallen Police, Adjective anti-hero for a series of somersaulting film noir variations that leave character and narrative engagement in the dust, says Giovanni Marchini Camia.
Sunday 26 May 2019

Joan of Arc first look: Bruno Dumont makes a trial of it

This am-dram retell of the saint’s court case finds the director on his most testingly dismal form, says Nick James.
Saturday 18 May 2019

A Hidden Life first look: Terrence Malick floats over the storm clouds of war

Terrence Malick reprises his worst tics – and adds some new ones – with this trite rehearsal of the life and death of World War II Austrian anti-fascist objector Franz Jägerstätter, finds Nick James.
Sunday 19 May 2019