1. Toni Erdmann
Cannes is buzzing about Maren Ade’s surprising and audacious German comedy. This full-throttle crowd-pleaser bursts with humanity and unexpected over-the-top comic moments. Peter Simonischek gives a prize-worthy performance as a semi-retired music teacher who flies to Bucharest to reconnect with his daughter (Sandra Hüller, equally fine), a high-powered management consultant, bringing his playfully wild, be-wigged, fake-teeth-wearing alter ego, Toni Erdmann, with him. In a rare show of support, the film was twice greeted by spontaneous applause at the screening for nearly a thousand critics.
2. The Handmaiden
Park Chan-wook’s elegant double con is an erotically charged, striking-looking period piece. Inspired by Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith, the film reverses its POV midway through but still goes down like a delicious, peaty single malt.
A con man hires a young Korean pickpocket to help him in his scheme to marry a rich Japanese heiress by acting as her maid. But the relationship between the two women progresses incrementally through a series of intimate moments before blossoming into a classical romance.
3. Sieranevada
Shooting with an unmoving camera, Romanian director Cristi Puiu lets the dialogue carry this rich drama built around a feast held 40 days after the death of a family’s patriarch. The priest is late and the meal can’t start without his blessing, so there’s ample time to catch up with the characters’ lives. Their talk of old slights, conspiracy theories and Communism feels so natural, it’s as if the audience were crammed into the over-stuffed apartment.
4. Staying Vertical
In Alain Guiraudie’s surreal fairy tale about fatherhood, a film director works on a script while driving the back roads of southern France. He makes an unlikely, but loving single father to the baby he tries to raise after its mother walks out on him. Meanwhile his rampant sexuality leads him to pursue three other bucolic characters. Guiraudie pushes sexual boundaries to shocking effect at times, but his freewheeling approach to the turns life takes is never dull, especially when wolves are involved.
5. Paterson
Jim Jarmusch’s clever neo-minimalist film chronicles seven days in the life of a Paterson, New Jersey, bus driver (named Paterson), his happy marriage and daily routine.
Kylo Ren himself, Adam Driver, gets poetic in .
In this city of the poet William Carlos Williams, Paterson (Adam Driver, bringing sensitivity to the role) is also a poet. So is Jarmusch in his own refreshingly natural and observant way.
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