Cannes at Home: From Linklater to Ducournau
Friday, May 23, 2025 at 1:30PM 
Between an Oscar, a Silver Bear, and THE SECRET AGENT's sterling reviews, Brazilian cinema is having a moment.
The 2025 Cannes Film Festival is almost over, so I've got to get going with this miniseries. After the directors already discussed in parts one and two, it was Richard Linklater's turn to present his latest creation. Nouvelle Vague purports to tell the making of Godard's Breathless, paying homage to the vanguard's aesthetic in a fashion some have compared to Michel Hazanavicius' Oscar-winning pastiche. Lynne Ramsay proved polarizing, as usual, with her Die, My Love, a literary adaptation that's gotten critics raving about Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. But the best-reviewed title of this batch has to be Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent, a period thriller of epic proportions with Wagner Moura in the leading role. Then there's Tarik Saleh's supposedly underwhelming Eagles of the Republic and Julia Ducournau's follow-up to her Palme d'Or victory. The AIDS crisis allegory Alpha divided audiences and disappointed many of the director's fans, but that's to be expected with such a provocateur.
For this chapter of Cannes at Home, I invite you to revisit Linklater's Waking Life, Ramsay's Morvern Callar, Mendonça's Aquarius, Saleh's Cairo Conspiracy, and Ducournau's Titane…