‘Kubi’ Review: Takeshi Kitano Stages A Blood-Soaked Samurai Epic [Cannes]

British rock band Royal Blood couldn’t stomach their lukewarm reception at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend.

It would be nice to think that desires are nothing more than preferences, springing organically from a fixed identity and unaffected by outside circumstances such as personal history and societal norms. The reality is, of course, much thornier, and trying to disentangle the many different factors influencing our tastes and longings can quickly cause a lot of suffering.

Chinese author Yu Hua is no stranger to Cannes. The famed postmodernist writer’s work first graced the silver screens of the Palais back in 1994 with director Zhang Yimou’s masterclass adaptation of his seminal novel, “To Live.” A searing portrait of a single family’s struggle through China’s mid-century upheaval and the Cultural Revolution, “To Live” would go on to win the festival’s coveted Grand Prix award, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and the Best Actor Award.

The official synopsis for Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days” is one of those rare occasions when a tightly-described premise encapsulates the immensity of a film: a janitor in Japan drives between jobs listening to rock music. In this case, the janitor is Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), an older man whose job is cleaning Tokyo’s elegantly designed public toilets.

In 2008, Kléber Mendonça Filho released “Crítico,” a documentary building upon his years of experience as a film critic to weave a rich chronicling of cinephilia that gathered over 70 critics and filmmakers to discuss cinema in all of its joys and contradictions. Fifteen years later and following great acclaim as a fiction feature director, Filho returns to documentary to investigate some of the themes he first prodded upon in his debut with “Pictures of Ghosts.” READ MORE: 2023 Cannes Film Festival: 21 Must-See Movies To Watch  As with Godard and Paris, Fellini and Rome, Scorsese, and New York, Filho is a filmmaker whose craft is deeply intertwined with his love of a city, in this case, the Pernambuco capital of Recife, in the north-east of Brazil.

Having previously won the Palme d’Or in 2001 for “The Son’s Room” and premiered the majority of his films in competition, Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti has been a mainstay at the Cannes Film Festival for several decades.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer The upper deck at France’s Hotel Du-Cap-Eden-Roc offers a stunning coastal view of nearby city Cannes, the kind that Jay Gatsby would covet to peep Daisy Buchanan. On Tuesday, at one of the hottest parties at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, that view belonged to Graydon Carter. Standing alone with a female companion, the creator of the digital publication Air Mail and iconic former editor of Vanity Fair observed not a long-lost love but a cliffside full of movie stars, auteur directors and Hollywood power players. Carter’s Air Mail co-hosted an evening celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Warner Bros. Pictures, the latter represented by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and his top content lieutenants. Leonardo DiCaprio, Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Lily-Rose Depp, Sam Levinson, Jason Statham and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Rebel Wilson and more turned up to toast cinema and each other.

In “Terrestrial Verses,” the first collaboration between co-directors Alireza Khatami and Ali Asgari that was met with applause throughout the entirety of its premiere screening in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, observes life under Iranian theocracy through the mundane experiences of 12 ordinary people across various ages that are bookended by a prologue and epilogue. As we watch them navigate complex situations related to social repression, the swift 77-minute runtime never misses a beat.

Warwick Thornton is no stranger to La Croisette. His debut feature, “Samson and Delilah,” won the Camera d’Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, where his latest feature, “The New Boy,” just had its premiere.  READ MORE: 2023 Cannes Film Festival: 21 Must-See Movies To Watch “The New Boy” never gives its protagonist, the titular New Boy, a name.

In the early ’90s, Japan’s Takeshi “Beat” Kitano was on a roll, with a superb string of nuanced crime movies that stood in stark contrast to the good-vs.-evil bullet operas that were coming out of Hong Kong at the time. Kitano’s darkly funny cynicism (who else could have made Violent Cop?) made him stand out by miles, but it soon became his weakness, as became evident in the lean period after the success of Zatoichi in 2013. The experimental, semi-autobiographical trilogy that followed — Takeshis’, Glory to the Filmmaker and Achilles and the Tortoise — seemed to offer little more than self-sabotage, the work of a frustrated artist trying to take a blowtorch to his populist image without much thought for the future.

“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” people are advised more than once in Wes Anderson’s madly original 11th film, Asteroid City, which is both addictively stylized and, like this clever little quote, perhaps more than a tad obscure about what it’s ultimately driving at. Set entirely in a sort-of Monument Valley-adjacent desert setting in 1955 and populated by a fabulous ensemble cast, this Cannes Film Festival competition entry from Focus Features, which will open commercially in the U.S. on June 16, is a madly quirky surprise that oozes creativity at every turn. At the same time, however, it sometimes seems to be reaching for serious creative epiphanies that aren’t forthcoming and which foster puzzlement rather than insight.

Cults and eating disorders warp the mind much in the same way: they convince the individual that their behavior is special and vital, that everyone else can’t see themselves or the world clearly, and that any external opposition only proves the effectiveness and power of their behavior. In her grueling new film “Club Zero,” Austria’s most fearless button-pusher Jessica Hausner fuses the two into a trajectory of slow-moving, inexorable body horror as primly buttoned-up as the lemon-lime polo shirt uniforms selected by her costume-designer sister Tanja.

An English lieutenant, an American cowboy, and a mixed-race Chilean sheepherder venture into the inhospitable limits of the Tierra de Fuego region at the southernmost tip of the South American continent—the ends of the Earth, some might call it. Under the orders of their employer, landowner José Menéndez (the always masterful Alfredo Castro), the trio’s mission is to savagely murder as many Indigenous people as they encounter in their path.  READ MORE: 2023 Cannes Film Festival: 21 Must-See Movies To Watch Set in 1901, “The Settlers” (Los Colonos), a scorching Western on Chile’s blood-soaked national myth, takes aspects from the official text-book history and probes at their conveniently sanitized interpretations of how they shaped the country’s future.

There is no dialogue. There are no humans.

Michel Gondry’s new film “The Book of Solutions,” playing in Directors’ Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, centers on the torturous life of being a creative filmmaker and begins at the heart of the matter: Marcc(Pierre Niney) is in a meeting with the producers of his new film, and they are unhappy with what he has delivered them. They’re ending the shoot, putting a new editor in charge to salvage what is already there, and his producing partner of many years finally turns his back on him.

Of King Henry VIII’s six wives, his final marriage to Catherine Parr is perhaps the most ignored. The others are rife with tragedy: there are the two he detested the most that he bent the will of God to legalize divorce; there’s Jane Seymour, who died soon after giving birth to an heir; and most notoriously of all, there are the wives he beheaded.

Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” playing in Competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, begins with an interview between a writer and a student interested in her work. It’s a lighthearted, almost flirty discussion where double entendres are part of a seemingly harmless game.

In 2013, filmmaker Anthony Chen’s first feature, “Ilo Ilo,” won the coveted Caméra d’Or at Cannes. Centered around the inseparable bond between a 10-year-old Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny, Chen’s full-length debut deployed a specific lens — a family weathering the 1997 Asian financial crisis — to tell a universal story exploring the nooks and crannies of our shared humanity.

“Eureka” seems somewhat deceitfully simple: a man called Murphy (Viggo Mortensen) searches for his abducted daughter with the help of the mysterious El Coronel (Chiara Mastroianni), even if he has to shoot everyone who stands in his way.

There’s trouble in the paradise of Savannah, Georgia, where the skeins of Spanish moss-draped over corridors of trees wave in the gentle coastal zephyrs with each night’s picture-perfect sunset. Spouses Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) have opened their palatial home for a backyard BBQ; he’s manning the grill, and she’s darting about trying to make everything just right, each well aware of their role to play.