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Entries in Na Hong-jin (2)

Thursday
May212026

Cannes at Home: A Polarizing Pandemonium

by Cláudio Alves

Adèle Exarchopoulos won a César for Jeanne Herry's ALL YOUR FACES. Will her new collaboration with the director, presently at Cannes, produce similar results?

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is drawing to a close, so I should probably hurry up with this corresponding Cannes at Home program. In the past few days, a number of titles have come and gone on the Croisette, most of them eliciting wildly divisive reactions. Nobody seems to agree on the merits of Na Hong-jin’s Hope, and Arthur Harari’s The Unknown has proven similarly polarizing. While some bet on Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord for the Palme, others are decrying it as a minor work, if not an outright failure. Elisa is a fan, for instance, but TFE’s old friend Nick Davis is a naysayer. In the middle of all this, László Némes’ historical Moulin and Jeanne Herry’s Garance have mostly slipped by under the radar, drawing little attention while also sparing themselves the lacerating putdowns their bolder, more ambitious competition has inspired in film critics and audiences alike.

For this lightning round of Cannes at Home, let’s run this gamut of filmmakers in capsule form. Their films are Nemes’ handsome Sunset, Herry’s actorly All Your Faces, Na’s go-for-broke bonkers The Wailing, Harari’s portrait of Onoda, and Mungiu’s first foray into the intolerance that can emerge in European communities beset by the arrival of outsiders, R.M.N...

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Tuesday
May192026

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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