One thing some detractors of “The Souvenir” films may not get, or maybe they do and just don’t care, is that they purposely meander. Every mundane gesture or stilted silence in these two chapters seems to come straight from the personal experiences of its director Joanna Hogg. That may not be enough to convince some that these are a great set of movies, but, hey, at least those naysayers can understand what all the fuss is about and why critics are gushing non-stop over them.

Sean Penn’s “Flag Day” was met with jeers & cackles at last night’s press screening. What did I exactly witness? The editing was horrendous. The photographer ugly. The dialogue seventh-grade level. Penn used to be a decent filmmaker with his best movie being 2001’s “The Pledge”. What happened?

Juho Kuosmanen’s Cannes Competition entry “Compartment No.6” could have been a better fit for the sidebar of the festival, “Un Certain Regard.”

Wes Anderson has apparently scrapped scrapped his Cannes Film Festival press conference for “The French Dispatch” — set to premiere here at Cannes on Monday.

No surprise that Anglo-Saxon critics are mostly lukewarm when it comes to Paul Verhoeven’s “Benedetta.”

The only Cannes competition entry hailing from Africa, Chad-born director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds” tries to use its Central Africa setting to infuse fresh blood into a familiar genre.

Following his last two mediocre efforts, director Joachim Trier tries to go back and complete the trilogy which started with his two strongest films (“Reprise” and “Oslo, August 31st”).

Elusive video-essayist-turned-filmmaker Kogonada blew me away with his 2017 debut “Columbus.” In the hotly-anticipated “After Yang,” he teams up with A24 to adapt Alexander Weinstein’s short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang.”

Meanwhile, Nadav Lapid‘s Ahed’s Knee is a big whatever. It did make me wonder about the dynamic he had with his late mother — for whom this film is dedicated to. Otherwise, this is pretentious stuff and the kind of film that may be getting raved about at Cannes, but will quickly be forgotten about come it’s release date.

One thing I’ll say about this peculiar 74th edition of Cannes is that the mask-wearing seems more like a prop than of an actual sanitary benefit. You see people wearing them all around the Palais, but when the lights go down and the movie starts at least half the room pulls them off their faces.

Having stepped away from the camera following his 2018 Oscar win for “The Shape of Water”, Guillermo Del Toro returns this fall with an adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel.

I have just landed in the south of France, where the 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival has just opened with Leos Carax’s ambitious, exciting but shallow “Annette” (more on that one later). The usual standing ovation, this one five minutes, greeted the film and its cast which includes Adam Driver, and Marion Cotillard. Meanwhile, on the other side, at the DeBussy theatre, the film’s press screening was met with both boos and loud cheers.

Within the barrage of backstabbing and double-backstabbing in Steven Soderbergh’s “No Sudden Move” lies some kind of coherent movie.

75 critics have spoken.

Accuser Rose McGowan‘s credibility was already not very good before she accused Payne of being sexually inappropriate with her more than 30 years ago, so it would makes sense that Payne managed to escape that wrath.

We are past the halfway mark for the year and World of Reel is polling critics on their five to seven best films of 2021. Quality has been fairly scarce so far this year, but 75 critics managed to find at least five worthy titles to submit.