Cannes: "Hope" is Korea's Biggest Swing Yet Toward the Box Office Canon

by Elisa Giudici

There’s something genuinely startling about seeing the sprawling sci-fi epic Hope in Competition at Cannes. Not because genre films are unwelcome on the Croisette anymore; that battle has largely been wo. The surprise is that Na Hong-jin’s film embraces blockbuster language so wholeheartedly. This is not elevated horror masquerading as arthouse cinema, nor a restrained science-fiction allegory carefully calibrated for festival audiences. Hope is loud, enormous, messy, violent, and frequently exhilarating entertainment. It's a film with giant creatures, extended chase sequences, exploding buildings, machine guns, and a level of visual maximalism that feels almost aggressively unconcerned with prestige filmmaking etiquette...

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Cannes: Paweł Pawlikowski is Palmę-ready with "Fatherland"

by Elisa Giudici

Pawel Pawlikowski has always been a filmmaker of absence. Empty space, withheld emotion, silence so heavy it seems architectural: his cinema has long depended less on what characters say than on what lingers unresolved between them. Fatherland may be the purest expression of that sensibility, a film reduced to such an essential form that it almost appears to vanish while unfolding, only to return afterward with quiet, devastating force.

At first, it can seem unexpectedly modest by the standards of, say, Cold War. Fatherland is less sweeping, less immediately transporting. But the images begin resurfacing hours later. A corridor swallowed by shadow, a pause stretched slightly too long. A father and daughter speaking with perfect intelligence while emotionally disintegrating in front of one another. Pawlikowski has refined his cinema here into something severe and distilled, and the result is extraordinary...

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"Schmigadoon" and "Prince Faggot" lead the Dorian Theater Awards

by Nathaniel R

John McRae & Mihir Kumar starred in "Prince Faggot". Photo © Marc J Franklin

As many readers know a few members of Team Experience belong to GALECA the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics though most of us vote on the film and television side. I have the privilege of also being a voter in the society's Dorian Theater Awards, which celebrate both Broadway & Off Broadway productions. The nominations were announced this past week for the 2025-2026 theater season which wrapped up recently and will be a closed book once the Tony Awards are announced on June 7th. The Dorian winners will be announced on June 1st. The TV-to-Stage transfer Schmigadoon (9) led the Broadway shows and Prince Faggot (7) was the nomination leader for Off Broadway on the Dorian ballots. The latter is a truly riveting play which I actually went to twice (very rare for me with so much to see!). It had the distinction of landing a nomination in every category for which it was eligible.

From the press release: 

“From the radical reimaging of our world in Prince Faggot, to the tender themes of self-discovery in Schmigadoon!, it has been a wonderful season of queer storytelling on New York stages,” says GALECA’s theater wing co-chair Sam Eckmann. “In addition to the new LGBTQ stories that we fell in love with, we were proud to see previous Dorian Theater Award winners Cats: The Jellicle Ball and Titaníque find new, fabulous life on Broadway. Our stories are connecting with wider audiences and enduring on stages both large and small.”

After the jump let's talk the nominees and how they differ (or don't) from the Tony nominations...

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Cannes: With "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" Jane Schoenbrun doubles down on becoming a defining generational voice.

by Elisa Giudici

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA. MUBI

By the time Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma premiered at Cannes, Jane Schoenbrun had already become something close to a generational folk hero for younger cinephiles. You could feel it inside the Debussy theater before the lights even went down: critics squeezed onto theater steps, festival attendees treating an Un Certain Regard opener like the hottest ticket on the Croisette, audiences buzzing less about Cannes prestige than about what the filmmaker behind I Saw the TV Glow might do next. And honestly, the excitement makes sense. Few filmmakers right now understand how media obsession functions emotionally for millennials and Gen Z quite like Schoenbrun does. Their work isn’t simply nostalgic. It treats pop culture, horror movies, forgotten VHS relics, fandom rituals, and half-ironic internet cinephilia as part of the architecture of identity itself...

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Cannes: Four opening films, ranked.

by Elisa Giudici

IN WAVES

With Cannes now in full swing, let's rank the four opening titles from Un Certain Regard, Director's Fortnight, Critics Week, and Out of Competition.

4. In Waves by Phuong Mai Nguyen (France/Belgium) [Opening Film of Critics’ Week]
In Waves is probably the most polished and emotionally accessible of the festival's four openers, which, for my taste, also makes it the least exciting. The film follows AJ, a shy teenager obsessed with sketching and skating, whose world gradually expands after he becomes close to Kristen, the older sister of his best friend. Through her, AJ discovers surfing, which the film treats less as a sport than as a way of existing inside the world: a physical and emotional state where identity briefly feels stable, harmonious, almost suspended outside ordinary life...

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