Peter Howell 🖊

PARALLEL TALES: It’s always interesting to see Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi making a film outside his home country without the formal restraints of a strict moral code and an authoritarian government. But his return to France for an ensemble piece about a crabby and voyeuristic novelist (Isabelle Huppert), who spies on her neighbours for inspiration, leaves much to be desired in the drama department. Aiming for Hitchcock (and Kieślowski) but settling for humdrum, this overlong saga suffers from the lack of a ruthless editor. But there’s one great scene, where Huppert’s Sylvie argues with her agent, played by Catherine Deneuve, who pulls no punches. #Cannes2026

JOHN LENNON: THE LAST INTERVIEW: Steven Soderbergh turns tragedy into spoken-word art with a new doc at #Cannes. For Beatles fans and many other people, Dec. 8, 1980, is the saddest day in music history. It’s when a deranged fan fatally pumped four bullets into the back of John Lennon, outside of the New York home where the musician lived with his wife, artist Yoko Ono, and their five-year-old son, Sean. Just hours before his murder, Lennon and Ono spent nearly three hours talking to a radio crew from San Francisco, taping what would become John’s final public words. Soderbergh turns the complete audio-only interview into a free-floating montage — including hundreds of images and dozens of songs — that delves into the delighted mind of a pop culture legend who was clearly enjoying his final day. He was excited about “Double Fantasy,” his first new album in five years, and offered his quotable thoughts on everything from feminism to fatherhood, from disco to breakfast cereals, and letting slip the news he was planning to tour again, for his first time since the final Beatles tour in 1966. We never got the tour and sadly lost Lennon, but now there’s the best proof yet he died a happy and optimistic man. #Cannes2026

TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey fires up the crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival's annual #Cannes party. The big pitch for #TIFF51 is the launch of TIFF: The Market. #Cannes2026

TANGLES: Canadian🇨🇦 creativity and compassion times two at #Cannes as Vancouver cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s graphic novel about coping with Alzheimer’s disease is transformed into a crackerjack animated debut feature by fellow Vancouverite Leah Nelson. The difficult topic and mostly B&W lensing might suggest a darker tone than the film uses, but neither director/co-writer Nelson nor co-writer Leavitt want us to wallow in misery — especially with a richly comic voice cast that also includes Bryan Cranston, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Bowen Yang and producer Seth Rogen. Set in the late ’90s and transposed to the U.S., it follows queer cartoonist Sarah (Abbi Jacobson) as she navigates a new job and lover in San Francisco while her beloved mother Midge (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) struggles with rapidly advancing Alzheimer’s back home in smalltown Maine. Anyone familiar — and that’s many of us — with how a loved one’s cognitive decline ravages families will doubtless recognize and appreciate the emotional turbulence that’s expressed with truth and grace. “Tangles” is a Canuck triumph at #Cannes2026.

@CA_rotwang @Festival_Cannes You’re talking about the real Erika?

@peterhowellfilm @Festival_Cannes "who laments her father’s inability to love his own family, let alone the country of his birth." That's extremely ironic given the fact that she strongly opposed this journey and did not attend.

FATHERLAND: Germany, 1949. The war is over, but the rancour continues in a divided and shattered land while denial about its Nazi past accelerates. Into this maelstrom, and before the luminous B&W lens of Lukasz Zal, rides Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), the Nobel laureate and novelist, who naively believes he can instruct both the capitalist West and the communist East about the civilizing insights of Goethe. He’s accompanied by his daughter, Erika, played by the great Sandra Hüller, who knows the dangers and folly of this road trip and who laments her father’s inability to love his own family, let alone the country of his birth. Writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski observes history with wisdom, grace and caustic humour; it’s the best film I’ve seen so far at #Cannes2026.

BUTTERFLY JAM: Bug splatter. Oddball mob-adjacent drama, opener for #Cannes Quinzaine program, is billed as the first English-language feature by Circassian Russian filmmaker Kantemir Balagov (“Beanpole”). But it’s so incomprehensible and sloppily assembled, it’s like Balagov is speaking a lingo no one else uses. Barry Keoghan and Riley Keough are utterly wasted as kin running a popular diner for Circassian expats in New Jersey, which serves up such magical (i.e. highly unlikely) fare as jam made out of crushed butterflies. The extended family has also adopted a wild pelican they plan to gift to a soon-to-be-born baby. And so it goes, or rather doesn’t, rendered with shakycam that’s so obnoxious, it could be considered a form of assault. #Cannes2026