Cannes 2014: A Girl At My Door by July Jung

Before the review itself, I just wanted to point out how the magic and glamour of Cannes are to be found at any hour of the day. A Girl At My Door, presented in the Un Certain Regard sidebar selection in a single morning screening, saw its star Bae Doona casually turn up in a limo as we were all waiting to go in, shining all the megawatts of a movie star despite the grey weather, and I can vouch that she looks just as effortlessly stunning in person as she does on screen.

A Girl At My Door is the first film of July Jung, and follows police officer Lee Young-nam (Bae Doona) as she relocates to a small city for reasons at first unknown to the audience, a new environment she struggles to fit in with, having to put up with misogyny and unfriendly locals. She soon becomes close to a young girl who is the subject of family abuse, and takes her under her protective wing. But skeletons from her own past are threatening to emerge...

Cannes 2014: Still The Water by Naomi Kawase

Japanese director Naomi Kawase has had such an unusual career so far. She has been celebrated by the Cannes Film Festival right from the beginning, being awarded the Camera d'or (best first film award) in 1997 for Suzaku. Ten years later she won the Grand Jury Prize (the runner-up prize) for The Mourning Forest. Yet none of her films have met any kind of commercial success and even in Japan she is considered a bit of an outcast, as she lives away from Tokyo and does not belong to the industry. And she is back this year, with the very frank admission that she is here solely to win the Palme d'Or, with Still The Water that she describes as her masterpiece, having prompted some uncharitable comments on social medias as a result (although I suspect some of her comments got lost in translation).

Cannes 2014 : It Follows by David Robert Mitchell

A particularly interesting horror film took the Cannes Film Festival by storm this year, It Follows, which showed at La Semaine De La Critique, a sidebar selection showcasing first and second feature films. It comes from an unexpected source: David Robert Mitchell. the director of The Myth Of The American Sleepover who here takes a radically new direction for his second film.

It Follows opens with a rather traditional prologue, which sees a hysterical young woman trying to flee an unseen presence, only to be brutally murdered. The film then skips to Jay (Maika Monroe) who goes on a date she'll never forget for all the wrong reasons. After a romantic evening followed by a few hours of passion, her date reveals that he has exposed her to a ghostly and nightmarish curse, with the only way to get rid of it being to "pass it on" to somebody else through intercourse.

Cannes 2014: Saint Laurent By Bertrand Bonello

I was actually dubious about Saint Laurent, having been scarred by the terrible Yves Saint Laurent which came out a mere few months ago in the UK, a flat and dull, show-and-tell hagiography that had all the flaws of the biopic genre. Interestingly, Bertrand Bonello, director of Saint Laurent, mentions that other project in the press kit, and explains that since he knew the competing project would be a more traditional biography and was to come out earlier, it was actually doing him a favour and freeing him from many narrative constraints. Since the audience would be more familiar with key elements in the designer's life as well as the important people in his life, he decided to chop off his script to avoid being redundant, ending up with a film that is a lot more radical and abstract as a result.

Cannes 2014 Day 4: Westerns, Tourists & Queues

Turist

In what was about to become a pleasant routine, I woke up at the crack of dawn for the first press screening of the day at 830am, the one from which Twitter impressions are anxiously expected. There is something rather surreal about finding yourself in the biggest cinema in the world so early in the morning, but this is the kind of life I could get used to! Then I strolled into the screening of a film I knew nothing about, Turist, before the press screening of Maps To The Stars. Or that was the plan anyway...

Cannes 2014 Day 3: Saint Laurent, Les Combattants & It Follows

As ever with Cannes, a day of contrast, with a film about Yves Saint Laurent, a survivalist French rom-com and an indie horror, as I worked my way alongside the Croisette from the Official Competition in the Palais to Director's Fortnight to Semaine de la Critique.

Cannes 2014 Day 2: Ryan Reynolds, Mathieu Amalric And Nuri Bilge Ceylan

After the amuse-bouche of yesterday came my first full day in Cannes. I must say, with the glorious weather, the seemingly smaller queues for screenings combined with the ease of access my press pass is giving me, the festival is proving to be a completely stress-free experience so far! So on this day, expectations were high. A new film by Atom Egoyan, a Simenon adaptation and a late introduction for me to a director I have been keen to discover, Nuri Bilge Ceylan.