No Other Choice (Dir. Park Chan-wook), Chloe Pegg
A darkly comedic take on the rat race of the job market and the degradation of the unemployed, Park’s latest feature follows a veteran paper company employee driven to desperate measures after being laid off after 25 years. And the film is explosive, haunting, and hilarious. Scored impeccably, with fantastic performances all around (Ri-one, the adorable cello virtuoso daughter was a particular highlight), it masterfully explores masculinity, capitalism, and the depressive eventual obsolescence of a human workforce. A thrilling watch from beginning to end.
Wuthering Heights (Dir. Emerald Fennell), Jules Nati
Barely released and yet already slandered by the media, Wuthering Heights is not as bad as many – me included – expected it to be. Taken solely as a movie, it has great visuals, historically inaccurate but nonetheless stunning costumes, and an overall decent narrative rhythm. As an adaptation, though, it is unsalvageable. Two clearly not 17-year-old Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi act as fickle teenagers in a plot that is uselessly oversexualised. (One highlight: Heathcliff protecting Catherine’s eyes with his hands is the 2026 version of the 2005 Mr Darcy’s infamous hand flex.)
Nouvelle Vague (Dir. Richard Linklater), Khushi Jain
Linklater’s Cannes feature is a film about a film that changed films forever; it is about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, one of the first movies of the French New Wave. Guillaume Marbeck stars as the eccentric French director, never without his dark sunglasses and always with a sense of creative chaos. The film is nothing less than a labour of love, on top of being funny and charismatic. Will it be cinematic blasphemy to say that I enjoyed Linklater’s making-of more than Godard’s actual film?
