Before Letterboxd, and its proliferation of ratings easily displayed on your smartphone to gauge your friends and famous people’s opinions on any movie (With Honors, 1994? One mutal gave it 2.5/5), there was the Critics’ Grid. And, despite Letterboxd, and the insufferable four favourites trend, there is still the Critics’ Grid. In fact, it’s almost as if Letterboxd has inspired The Critics to make even more.
I’ve been on a couple myself: from the print daily at Karlovy Vary (no idea how that happened) to Poland’s Pelna Sala at Berlinale (am I big in Central Europe?). It’s a neat way to quickly gauge the mood — to anoint consensus.
But the huge question remains: how many grids do we need?
The biggest grid, of course, is Screen Daily. This is where esteemed Russian critic Anton Dolin, based in Latvia, is displayed as coming from the country “International”, joined by the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin (UK) and the recent Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Chang (USA) among others. Anora (Sean Baker) leads with 3.3/4.
In addition, there’s the Chinese Critics’ Grid. Ekko from Denmark. Ion Cinema’s grid. The International Cinephile Society’s grid. Film Francais. MundoCine. OutNow. Chaos Reign. And that’s just what I found in the last hour, with many publications trying a grid one year, before giving up the next.
A new initiative is Moireé, which “is a platform that showcases real-time ratings from a curated community of film critics at festivals worldwide.” Contrary to Screen Daily, which just covers competition, Moireé lets critics rate (in real-time, with frequents updates on the page) absolutely everything at the festival. Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour (no relation to Jeremy Clarkson) leads with 4.1. I guess the advantage here is that this doesn’t require a humble editor to update the page, giving you a better real-time update. I quite like the aesthetic here.
Maybe Moireé can allow all accredited press onto one grid, so the Cannes timeline is less cluttered by every publication and its dog publishing their own grid. It might also make newcomers without a grid (and I mean, even I got onto two grids) feel a little less lonely.
Anyway, my favourite place to find legit everyone’s opinions on the movies is the humbly-titled Cannes critics ratings — which compiles everything, but is mostly drawn from Letterboxd — but this year it appears the link isn’t working (at least for me). Still, judging from screenshots online, Anora is top. Check out our review, along with many others, below:
Sean Baker Does It Again with Anora
By Audrey Fox
In Sean Baker we trust.
The Tangerine (2015) and The Florida Project (2017) director has a knack for embracing characters who exist on the margins of society. Anora (2024) is no different. Featuring a genuine star-making turn from Mikey Madison (critics always throw that term around, but this time it’s true, we swear!), it effortlessly creates a sense of humanity, empathy and dignity that is so often denied characters like the beleaguered but determined Ani (Madison).
Ani – short for Anora, a name, along with her partial Uzbek heritage, that she purposefully sets aside – works as an exotic dancer at a club in New York City. She’s good at her job, able to attract clients with her personality and many other charms. And when her boss needs a girl who speaks Russian to attend to a table of high-rollers, Ani meets Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), a sweet Russian boy determined to party his way through America on Daddy’s dime.
Vanya is entranced by her, and it doesn’t take long for their casual business relationship to turn into more, culminating in Vanya spontaneously proposing in Vegas. It seems like all of Ani’s dreams are coming true, but there’s just one problem: what are Vanya’s oligarch parents going to think about all this? Well, they’re not too thrilled. And it remains to be seen if Vanya and Ani will have the strength to stand up to them.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Oh No, Canada
By Audrey Fox
As one of Hollywood’s elder statesmen rapidly reaching his retirement years, it’s no surprise that Paul Schrader’s latest movie would feature a certain amount of introspection, following a terminally ill filmmaker looking back on his life.
As he is being interviewed by two of his former students (Michael Imperioli and Victoria Hill) for a career-retrospective documentary, he’s forced to face the parts of his past he’d long since buried. It was no secret that Raymond Fife (played by Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi respectively) had originally come to Canada as a draft dodger, finding a new home there to escape the Vietnam War. But what – and who – had he left behind? Schrader builds Oh Canada as an examination of the power of memory, whether or not it can be relied upon and if its reliability even matters.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
The Substance Has Never Met a Real Woman
By Audrey Fox
The Substance’s (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) intention, it seems, is to use body horror to shine a light on the impossible beauty standards, self-hatred and fear of ageing that women are faced with every day. (As though any of us could possibly forget!) It actually ends up being openly hostile to women, with one-dimensional characters that emphasise only our pettiest, most self-centred qualities and a real sense of punishment that faces our beleaguered anti-heroes, obsessed with preserving their own beauty at any cost.
Aside from the sound design and impressive monster work — both of which are astonishing — there’s little to recommend in this gruesome and genuinely mean-spirited film.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Plastic Guns. A Perfect Shitpost.
By Jared Abbott
It comes as no surprise that Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Plastic Guns (2024) opens with a brutal shot of a dead woman on a morgue table being chopped open by two men as they flippantly talk about Netflix serial killer documentaries.
Meurisse’s previous film, Bloody Oranges (2021), was the darkest of dark comedies — a nasty little farce with a third act that erupts into unhinged madness as a young woman unleashes vengeance on her abductor by castrating him, heating his testicles in a microwave and serving them to him on a fork. Unlike Bloody Oranges, which saves the shocks for the last act, Plastic Guns goes for a massive “Fuck you” energy from the start. It’s hilarious.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Baby Works His Way Out of a Corner
By Jared Abbott
“Stop being a baby.”
From the outset, Marcelo Caetano’s Baby (2024) stacks the odds against itself with a whopping three examples of overused cinematic tropes. There’s the guy who gets out of jail and has to decide between a life of crime or a more honest path, the gay May-December coming-of-age romance and the use of the nickname Baby, symbolising its protagonist’s loss of innocence (think: Dirty Dancing [Emile Ardolino, 1987] or Baby Driver [Edgar Wright, 2017]). Despite all this familiarity, some uneven performances and minor tone problems, Caetano keeps things afloat.
While films like Buffalo 66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998) and Straight Time (Ulu Grosbard, 1978) start with a serious, sombre tone when the lead gets out of prison, Caetano opts for a lively ritual with the prison band playing a ceremonious march. It’s a playful and stylish way to introduce Wellington (João Pedro Mariano), fresh out of lockup but already in a jam: his parents have left town without leaving a forwarding address. Without an adult guardian, he’ll probably have to stay connected to the juvenile detention system. With only a hand-me-down jacket from a neighbour, he’s back on the streets.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move. Prodding the Parthenon.
Statues are static. They don’t move. But we do. Part of the contract of everyday urban life is that we are forced to keep looking at them; no matter whether we want to or not.
In Southern Europe — Rome, Plovdiv, Athens — monuments to antiquity are more pronounced than others. For Daphne Heretakis, the Parthenon, a dedication to Athena synonymous with Greece (and democracy itself), stains the skyline. But at the right depth of field, she can hold it in her fingers, observe it, prod it. Ask the deeper questions of these eternal monuments.
Only yesterday at a party, was I subjected to dispatches from a Roman holiday! Statues were the prevailing theme. Everywhere you turn in that city, the eternal city, you walk through the vestiges of a former (more powerful?) culture. The same can be said of Greece — which was once the birthplace of democracy, art, literature, philosophy, and now sadly evokes bankruptcy, revolution and unemployment. Yet, the statues remain; forbidding, beautiful, oddly melancholic…
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
The Other Way Around Is Repetitive. Meaningful. Beautiful. Repetitive.
Ale (Itsaso Arana) and Alex (Vito Sanz) are separating. But they’re good. The feeling was mutual. They want to have a party. The 22nd September. The last day of summer. As Ale’s dad always said, you should celebrate separations, not unions. They’re listening to his advice. They’re having a party. You should come. It’s like the opposite of marriage. It’s The Other Way Around (Jonás Trueba, 2024).
There is beauty and meaning in repetition.
There’s also frustration. Indignation. Impatience. Trueba endlessly dissects the comedy of remarriage — The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940), His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), etc, — here, finding pleasure and smarts in circular dialogue and quizzical narrative; analysing the ticks and traits of his characters in minuscule detail as they get ready for their grand Paltrow-Martin cosplay.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!