‘Witches of the Orient’ Review: Colorful, Thoughtful, Cinematic Essay on a Legendary Volleyball Team

There are more and more cases of athletes testing positive for coronavirus ahead of the Olympics in Tokyo.

Celtic, with the Japanese forward set to sign on at Parkhead. It was announced early on Friday morning that Vissel Kobe had come to an agreement to sell the 26-year-old, with Ange Postecoglou raiding the J League market he knows so well.

The eclectic veteran French director Jacques Audiard shifts gears yet again (his last feature was 2018’s unusual western, The Sisters Brothers) with Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades), an adaptation of stories by the American comic book writer and artist Adrian Tomine.

Arnaud Desplechin returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Deception (Tromperie), a self-indulgent Philip Roth adaptation that’s only marginally better than 2017’s derided Ismael’s Ghosts. One of the late Roth’s most openly personal novels, it details a string of affairs conducted by Jewish-American writer “Philip,” here played by French actor Denis Podalydes, speaking French.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticIn kinky Cannes Film Festival sensation “Titane,” an accident survivor winds up with a metal plate in her head, wounds ooze blood as black as motor oil and a car show girl dramatically expands the definition of autoerotic climax, getting pregnant after making it in the back seat of a pimped-out Caddy … by herself.Proving that her cannibalism-themed feature debut, “Raw,” wasn’t merely an attention-grabbing stunt, French director Julia Ducournau returns to that

July 12th, 2021, Cannes – Reader, I ratatat out this missive in haste on my trusty Smith-Corona from the South of France, in the paltry hopes it may adequately convey my delight in viewing the latest cinematographic marvel from Mr. Wes Anderson, originally of Houston, Texas but more latterly resident of a nearby color-coded, symmetrical nebula almost entirely of his own design.

very Wes Andersonny? Heck, no.You wouldn’t expect anything less from “The French Dispatch,” which opened in the Main Competition section of the Cannes Film Festival on Monday.

If Wes Anderson hasn’t already been ordained as the king of twee, he certainly will be with The French Dispatch. There can never have been a film so entirely marked and dominated by preciously perfectionist compositions, arcane detail, meticulous camera moves, ornate décor, historical and design minutiae, styles of typography, precision diction, arch attitude, obsessive attention to cultural artifacts and loyalty to Oscar Wilde’s notion that art needn’t express anything other than itself.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticJournalists are the heroes in “The French Dispatch,” so expect film critics to be a little bit biased in their embrace of Wes Anderson’s latest. It flatters the field, after all, just not in the way that Pulitzer-centric mega-scoop sagas “All the President’s Men” or “Spotlight” may have done before.

Bella Hadid is enjoying a little down time during the 2021 Cannes Film Festival!

Of the many films playing at Cannes which have gained in resonance since the coming of the pandemic, “Zero F*cks Given” from French duo Julie Lecoustre, and Emmanuel Marre does not represent the creepiest, most alarming kind of coincidence — that description would better fit “Benedetta” from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven, which features an actual plague, face coverings and quarantine measures.

Since his 2008 debut film, Passion, Japanese director/writer Ryusuke Hamaguchi has been continuing to make an impact on the world cinema scene. His success at various festivals includes 2018, when he was first in competition in Cannes with Asako I & II, and earlier this year at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, where his Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize.

A sweeping social protest met with utter chaos in an emergency room—especially to the American festival-goer at Cannes, this brief sounds like an unpleasant evocation of 2020. And indeed, filmed in the immediate aftermath of the gilets jaunes protests in France, Catherine Corsini’s “The Divide” (“La fracture”) both reflects the past year and eerily foreshadows the true disaster in emergency rooms that followed the events of the film.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticLesbian couple Julie and Raphaëlle are on the brink of breaking up when the latter slips and smashes her elbow in “The Divide,” but if you zoom out, all of France seems to be at similar risk of shattering. The French title for “Replay” director Catherine Corsini’s 14th feature (her first to compete at Cannes since 2001), “La fracture,” does a better job of suggesting all the ways the country and her characters can’t be put back together again.

Midway through “The Worst Person in the World,” everything stops. Everyone in the streets of Oslo is frozen in an instant.

Jessica Kiang At a table in his house, Georges, an aging movie star with a reputation for uninsurable off-set shenanigans — played in a staggering coup of against-type casting by Gérard Depardieu — is running lines with his private security guard Aïssa (“Divines” breakout Déborah Lukumuena). While they rehearse, Georges cracks walnuts under heavy whomps from his meaty fist; Aïssa barely flicks a brow in response but her alarmed amusement is palpable.

Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made,” a family comedy that premiered on Disney+ last year that you almost certainly didn’t see. And for his follow-up to that film, the man with the least predictable career in Hollywood came up with “Stillwater,” a genre-agnostic semi-thriller that was greeted with cheers and applause at its well-received Cannes Film Festival premiere on Thursday.Neatly mirroring its director’s style and signature, “Stillwater” is nigh impossible to pin down, taking the broad

Beautifully upholstered and decked out with a starry cast, Everything Went Fine (Tout S’est Bien Passé) is the sort of comforting, thoroughly mainstream commercial film not often seen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.