‘Tiger Stripes’ Review: Zesty Malaysian Coming-Of-Age Tale Of Emancipation Intelligently Remixes Metaphors [Cannes]

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Sumerian has acquired the North American rights to brutal coming-of-age story “Mascot,” which had its world premiere in January at Slamdance, and its international premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam the same month. Sumerian is planning a limited theatrical release this year under the English title “Fortunate Son.” The pickup marks the second acquisition for Sumerian’s new film and streaming division, which launched this year. Sumerian founder Ash Avildsen said the film is “a dark, brutally authentic and beautifully shot independent film centered around troubled youth in unorthodox households. It will undoubtedly strike a nerve with audiences who appreciate gritty arthouse drama, as it did with me.”

When it was first announced, “I’m A Virgo” was described as a coming-of-age tale about a 13-foot-tall young Black man finally going outside his home and integrating into the larger world. That alone is an interesting story.

What has fallen flat at Pixar? This is the innovative animation studio that pushed all before it in the first decade of this millennium, that invented a way of turning the plastic finish of digital animation to its advantage in the towering Toy Story, that was prepared to start a film with a 20-minute scene with no dialogue in Wall-E – and revealed that kids didn’t care – and that would make an adventure film with a hero aged 78 years young in UP!. Kids didn’t care about that either, as it turned out, because Carl Fredricksen was a grumpy-gramps adventurer who also didn’t care what others thought of him. Pixar always had something new up its collective artistic sleeve. And yet here they are, coming out with a film as dull-witted and syrupy as Elemental. 

Todd Gilchrist editor There are few fears more universal than one of a monster under the bed or in our closet, and few filmmaking techniques more viscerally effective than the jump scare. These tropes collide — effectively, if without much originality — in “The Boogeyman,” a loose adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 short story of the same name. Featuring an eponymous threat seemingly drafted from the same biological blueprint as the extraterrestrials in their breakthrough film “A Quiet Place,” writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods graft the psychological and thematic shorthand of unresolved trauma onto a creature feature, while director Rob Savage (“Dashcam”) papers over the seams between the two with copious style and a bold, clear-eyed lead performance coaxed from “Yellowjackets” star Sophie Thatcher.

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.

With the Cannes Film Festival heading towards its conclusion on Saturday, the first awards are starting to trickle out. Sidebar Critics’ Week, which is devoted to first and second features, closed this evening, honoring Amanda Nell Eu’s debut Tiger Stripes with its Grand Prize. (Scroll down for the full list of winners).

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent “Tiger Stripes,” the debut feature of Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu, won the Grand Prize at Cannes’ Critics Week, the Cannes sidebar dedicated to first or second films. The prize was awarded by a jury presided over by Audrey Diwan, the Venice prizewinning director of “Happening.” The French Touch Jury Award went to Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s “It’s Raining in the House,” a film about adolescence, while the Revelation prize from the Louis Roederer Foundation was handed out to Jovan Ginic, the actor of Vladimir Perisic’s “Lost Country.”  The SACD prize, meanwhile, went to “Le Ravissement” by Iris Kaltenbäck.

For three decades, filmmaker Takeshi Kitano was fixated on a period of Japanese history, in which Lord Oda Nobunaga was inexplicably betrayed by one of his closest allies, Akechi Mitsuhide, in an ambush at Honno-ji Temple. The reasons behind Mitsuhide’s deception are unknown, but Kitano dedicated years to concocting his own theories, going so far as to pen a novel imagining the events that led to the incident.  Adapted from his own book, “Kubi” is an outrageously exhilarating update of the samurai epic, dialing up the blood and guts and sprinkling in the sick humor to match.

Alison Herman TV Critic A popular reading of superhero mania holds that it’s our era’s substitute for shared mythology; instead of Zeus shooting lightning bolts from Mount Olympus, we have Cyclops shooting beams from his eyeballs. So it’s fitting that the coming-of-age tale “American Born Chinese” streams on Disney+, the service that’s a one-stop shop for all things Marvel; Destin Daniel Cretton of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” the first Marvel film to star an Asian American hero, even directs the pilot. But “American Born Chinese” flips the script: rather than use superheroes for modern-day mythmaking, it infuses centuries-old myths into genres (action, bildungsroman) now dominated by superheroes.

French director Justine Triet returns to Competition with a cerebral smash that might finally bring the Best Actress award that its star, Sandra Hüller, was cruelly denied in 2016 when Maren Ade’s festival hit Toni Erdmann lost out in every category. That film wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and the formidably forensic Anatomy of a Fall might not be either, but Hüller’s screen magnetism cannot be denied. Between this and her role as “Queen of Auschwitz” in Jonathan Glazer’s equally brilliant Zone of Interest, Hüller has Cannes in the palm of her hand. Whether she will also get a Palme in her hand is up to the jury.

Holly Jones Spain’s Festival de Málaga, through its industry arm Mafiz (Málaga Festival Industry Zone), heads to the Cannes Marché du Film with five works-in-progress from burgeoning Andalusian talent. “The Malaga Festival wants to support the completion of these works and make their international distribution viable,” commented Malaga head of industry, Annabelle Aramburu. This year, as Cannes more broadly celebrates Spain, the event curates two titles that tackle its tumultuous history and one which takes audiences on an unconventional road trip questioning the biological clock alongside narratives that dissect the minutiae of new forms of co-existing and the baffling concept of destiny.

God, what a terrible thing it is to be a teenage girl. A body once free to roam and run and be transformed by the unforgivable rush of hormones, cunning little tricksters pumped through blood in a mad rush to reach the anti-climatic cusp of adulthood.

Recently split from his co-worker girlfriend, Vincent (Karim Leklou) is having a bad day at the office. First, a young intern batters him over the head with a laptop, and then Yves from accounting stabs him savagely with a pen. And after a meeting with human resources, the poor guy is left with the curious feeling that, somehow, he deserved it. Even his shrink, who has a print of J.M.W. Turner’s ironic masterpiece “The Fighting Temeraire” on his wall, thinks so, planting further seeds of doubt in Vincent’s mind. “I think you’re looking for attention from those who attack you,” he decides.

“Why’s the world so tough? It’s like walking through meat in high heels.” This line comes from Alan Clarke’s 1987 TV movie Road, an adaptation of Jim Cartwright’s stage play, and it goes some way towards explaining the visceral and sensory experience that is Molly Manning Walker’s quite exceptional debut How to Have Sex.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Amanda Nell Eu’s “Tiger Stripes,” which had its premiere this week in Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week, is being celebrated as a punchy female-driven debut feature and as the first film by a Malaysian woman director in any section Cannes. The story focuses on a small group of 11 or 12-year-old girls. When one of the friends enters puberty she finds her body changing in unexpected ways. Relations with her friends and family start morphing too. Eu’s finished film straddles the metaphorical drama and body horror genres. “Tiger Stripes” is also a triumph for the now highly-developed global network of project markets, talent development programs, script and production workshops (often labelled as ‘labs’) and grant schemes. These are intended to encourage diversity and nurture film-making talent in countries where that is a rarity or where commercial films crowd out more experimental art-house titles.

th century Empress Sissi. Though Rosalie is a nobody in a small French village, her story resonates similarly – a woman claiming her agency, demanding her right to be seen and exist in a world made rigid by received ideas. But the world pushes back.

Cannes Film Festival in as many days, Catherine Corsini’s “Homecoming” is vastly more interesting than that other film maudit, “Jeanne du Barry,” though the pair make for worthy foils.While Maïwenn’s stuffy historical epic drew protests on the Croisette due to the extracurricular activities of its stars, Corsini’s windswept jaunt very nearly didn’t make the trip – the title was omitted from the competition when news of irresponsible on-set practices broke just before the selection was announced. That the lack of oversight involved a minor seemed to seal the project’s fate before a subsequent investigation and the absence of any formal complaints put the title back on track.

It’s a measure of the state we’re in today that Thomas Cailley’s follow-up to his 2014 debut Love at First Fight could be described as a metaphor for just about anything you like. It takes the surreal premise of Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 Cannes hit The Lobster and, through a peculiar kind of cinematic alchemy, makes a surprisingly credible family drama out of it. Its overarching themes of love and tolerance go a long way, and it’s by no means a stretch to see a bunch of current hot-button topics — the world refugee crisis, climate change and trans rights to name but three — refracted through Cailley’s lens.

Japan’s most prolific and successful contemporary filmmaker, Hirokazu Kore-Eda, is back in a favorite place, Cannes, for the unveiling of his latest effort, a return to his Japanese storytelling roots and a good one at that. For his seventh film in the main Cannes competition and his ninth overall (counting two that appeared in Un Certain Regard), Monster represents the first movie since his 1995 debut feature Mabofosi that the director has not had a screenplay credit on — this film being written by Sakamoto Yuji — but clearly with its humanist family-centered themes is right in this master craftsman’s wheelhouse.

The great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar is a rabid fan of the western genre but until now had never made one, and also has only dabbled in directing any english language film with the exception of the 2020 short, The Human Voice that starred Tilda Swinton. His latest movie is also a short, just 31 minutes, but he finally got to do his western in english, and it is a nice homage to the form and those great directors who made it that way, one it is safe to say could only have come from this master of cinema, and a true cineaste himself. Almodovar brought the finished product to its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival today and, if flattered by the attention, the ghosts of John Ford, Howard Hawks, John Sturges, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh , and Sam Peckinpah may be surprised at the twist in Strange Way Of Life that this 73 year old fanboy has given it.