With last year’s Palme d’Or winner, Dheepan, hitting select theaters last weekend and Mad Max: Fury Road winning the most Oscars a few months ago, you’ll be forgiven if it feels like last year’s Cannes Film Festival just finished. Alas, the top shelf film festival of them all begins again tomorrow. Mad Max’s own George Miller, who at 71 years old is only two years older than the festival itself, will head the jury. Miller will be joined on the jury by former Cannes Best Actress winner, Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia), former Cannes Best Actor winner, Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt), and the criminally underrated Donald Sutherland (amongst a handful of other international film voices).
This year 21 films from 11 different countries will compete for the top prizes bestowed by Miller’s jury. Who’ll have that lovely day? Chris Cabin and I parsed through the 21 and came up with the 16 that we’re most excited about. Peruse them, put them on your radar, and be sure to check out the major out-of-competition titles that will also be opening. The festival kicks off May 11th and runs through the 22nd. And Collider will be there.
American Honey
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Sasha Lane, Riley Keough
Directed by: Andrea Arnold; entered for the U.K.
Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights) has been acute observer of the British lower classes and their desire for some mobility, and American Honey will mark her first venture stateside. Generally favoring a stable of unknown actors who will give natural performances (though Fish Tank’s Michael Fassbender did burst out in a major way during the year of that film’s release), American Honey is perhaps her starriest affair with Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough as hard-partying, law-bending guides to the expansive yet empty American Midwest for a British teenager (Sasha Lane). As LaBeouf further commits himself to international arthouse cinema, Arnold seems like a perfect fit for the once blockbuster star, as the director favors long, physical takes to connote the direction of her characters.
The synopsis (below) mentions a gang of older teenagers, which LaBeouf and Keough are a bit too old to play, and working with established stars might already bring a lack of naturalism on paper. But Arnold doesn’t work too much with paper. She works with an observing lens. And, when it comes to modern American boredom, is there a better American subject to point that lens at than LaBeouf? ~ Brian Formo
Star (Sasha Lane), a teenage girl from a troubled home, runs away with a traveling sales crew who drive across the American Midwest selling magazine subscriptions door to door. Finding her feet in this gang of teenagers, one of whom is Jake (Shia LaBeouf), she soon gets into the group's lifestyle of hard-partying nights, law-bending days, and young love.
Elle
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Anne Consigny, Charles Berling, Virginie Efira, Judith Magre, Alice Isaaz, Christian Berkel
Directed by: Paul Verhoeven; entered for France
Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Basic Instinct) the Dutch enfant-terrible-cum-Hollywood-subversive has blended sexual violence—rape and castration—with business violence for 40 years of cinema. From Turkish Orange through Hollow Man, he’s created parallels between the personal toll of one-on-one sexual violence with the unseen and pervasive assaults of consumer culture on our bodies and minds. Staging a video game executive (Isabelle Huppert), whom we can assume produces violent first person games, in a revenge scenario after surviving a brutal home invasion/assault, seems like a perfect fit for the director to continue these parallels.
The biggest question is how detached or involved Verhoeven will be with the assault in question. As rape becomes something that more characters have had to endure on popular television, the methods that the director chooses to stage both Huppert’s body and mind before and after the attack will certainly be under close scrutiny at the Croisette. Also of note, Verhoeven is teaming up with Jacques Audiard’s frequent cinematographer, Stephane Fontaine (A Prophet, Rust and Bone). ~ Brian Formo
Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) seems indestructible. Head of a leading video game company, she brings the same ruthless attitude to her love life as to business. Being attacked in her home by an unknown assailant changes Michèle's life forever. When she resolutely tracks the man down, they are both drawn into a curious and thrilling game—a game that may, at any moment, spiral out of control.
Graduation
Starring: Vlad Ivanov, Maria Dragus, Ioachim Ciobanu, Adrian Titieni
Directed by: Cristian Mungiu; entered for Romania
Alongside Cristi Puiu, Radu Muntean, and Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristian Mungiu helped formed the cornerstone of the Romanian New Wave. Porumboiu has already made his mark this year with the quietly radical The Treasure, and Mungiu will seemingly follow suit with this drama about the relationship between a father and daughter following the younger family member receiving a fellowship. The Dardenne Brothers have co-produced this one, which speaks highly of its quality, but one would need to look no further than Mungiu’s previous works to know why this is already a must-see.
In 2013, the filmmaker released Beyond the Hills, a searing, entrancing dramatic interpretation of a small, cultish religious community, and before that, he served as the writer and co-director of the ludicrously entertaining Tales from the Golden Age, one of the best anthology films to see release over the last few decades. And then, of course, there’s the lacerating, unforgettable 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days arguably the most poignant summation of the inherent evils of restricting the right to abortion in the history of the cinema. If Graduation has half of the dramatic oomph, narrative focus, and peerless imagery of these works, it will be well worth the three-year wait since Beyond the Hills. ~ Chris Cabin
Romeo (Vlad Ivanov), a physician living in a small mountain town in Transylvania, has raised his daughter Eliza (Maria Dragus) with the idea that once she turns 18, she will leave to study and live abroad. His plan is close to succeeding, Eliza has won a scholarship to study psychology in the UK. She just has to pass her final exams – a formality for such a good student. But on the day before her first written exam, Eliza is assaulted in an attack that could jeopardize her entire future.
The Handmaiden
Starring: Ha Jung-woo, Kim Min-hee, Jo Jin-woong, and Tae Ri Kim
Directed by: Park Chan-wook; entered for South Korea
Of the handful of genius filmmakers who have come out of South Korea over the last two decades, including heavy hitters like Bong Joon-ho, Lee Chang-don and Hong Sang-soo, Park Chan-wook has established himself as the preeminent authority on the causes and wild effects of mental and physical violence. You almost certainly have heard of Oldboy at this point, and if you haven’t, run don’t walk to your iTunes and buy it, or find the streaming service that is currently housing it. The Handmaiden marks his first feature-length work since his American debut, the astonishingly undervalued Stoker, and involves an incestuous love triangle between a pickpocket, posing as a handmaiden, and the family that employs her.
This is familiar territory for Chan-wook, who also helmed the lurid vampire thriller Thirst and the harrowing Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, but his style continues to expand and grow deeper in philosophical and emotional meaning with each picture. Both Thirst and Stoker were ambitiously, abstractly cut, as if the director were cutting into the narrative with the same relish that the characters attack concepts of traditionalism and societal pleasantries. You could expect some similarly bracing formal experiments in The Handmaiden, but then Chan-wook has made it his business to subvert expectations at every turn. ~ Chris Cabin
1930s Korea, in the period of Japanese occupation, a new girl (Sookee) is hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress (Hideko) who lives a secluded life on a large countryside estate with her domineering Uncle (Kouzuki). But the maid has a secret. She is a pickpocket recruited by a swindler posing as a Japanese Count to help him seduce the Lady to elope with him, rob her of her fortune, and lock her up in a madhouse. The plan seems to proceed according to plan until Sookee and Hideko discover some unexpected emotions.
It's Only the End of the world
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel, Gaspard Ulliel, Lea Seydoux, Nathalie Baye
Directed by: Xavier Dolan; entered for Canada and France
Before Xavier Dolan (Mommy) makes his long-awaited English-language debut with The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, the French-Canadian auteur dropped down in France to stage his starriest melodrama yet. Assembling a who’s who of French cinema, Dolan’s first film set outside of Canada features Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel, Lea Seydoux and Nathalie Baye (in the Dolan matriarch role), but will be led by Gaspard Ulliel, who was last seen by stateside cineastes as Yves Saint Laurent in the experimental biopic Saint Laurent.
Like a millennial Pedro Almodovar, Dolan has been a great creator of original roles for fully-defined women, and it’s exciting to see what he can do with Cotillard and Seydoux, here. ~ Brian Formo
After 12 years of absence, a writer (Gaspard Ulliel) goes back to his hometown, planning on announcing his upcoming death to his family. As resentment soon rewrites the course of the afternoon, fits and feuds unfold, fuelled by loneliness and doubt, while all attempts of empathy are sabotaged by people's incapacity to listen and love.
Julieta
Starring: Adriana Ugarte, Inma Cuesta, Michelle Jenner, Rossy de Palma, Emma Suarez, Daniel Grao, Dario Grandinetti, Nathalie Poza
Directed by: Pedro Almodovar; entered for Spain
It’s the new Almodovar. I shouldn’t really have to say more than that but, well, okay. Arguably the most influential Spanish director since Luis freaking Buñuel, Pedro Almodovar focuses his latest melodrama around the tension between the past and the present, societal responsibility and personal desire, the tortures of life and the essential enigma of death. Julieta involves the titular mother, played by both Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte, at different times, who attempts to reconnect with her daughter, Antia, after the death of Antia's father and Julieta's first husband.
The trajectory of the narrative is almost never what makes Almodovar’s films so entrancing. In masterworks like The Skin I Live In, Bad Education, Talk to Her, and All About My Mother, Almodovar alluringly conjures ghosts of desire, boldly physical sexuality, and emotions writ large in color and delirious, delightful performances. Even when Almodovar’s scripts don’t quite come together, he remains one of the most intoxicating visual artists working in film today, and Julieta looks to continue that tradition of the distinctly untraditional. ~ Chris Cabin
Julieta (Emma Suarez and Adriana Ugarte) lives in Madrid with her daughter Antía. They both suffer in silence over the loss of Xoan, Antía’s father and Julieta’s husband. But at times grief doesn’t bring people closer, it drives them apart. When Antía turns eighteen she abandons her mother, without a word of explanation. Julieta looks for her in every possible way, but all she discovers is how little she knows of her daughter.
The Last Face
Starring: Javier Bardem, Charlize Theron, Adele Exarchopoulos, Jared Harris, Jean Reno
Directed by: Sean Penn; entered for U.S.A.
It’s been nine years since the last time two-time Academy Award-winning actor Sean Penn got behind the camera (Into the Wild), and this romance set against the inner workings of international foreign aid is certainly within the outspoken activist’s wheelhouse. The cast is intriguing from top to bottom. The heavy lifting that Penn has to do is make us care about the lengths of hiding an affair that the couple at the heart of the story (Javier Bardem and Charlize Theron) must endure, while they are surrounded by and aiding people whose country is being ripped apart. With the backdrop of social justive, The Last Face appears that it would be more akin to Into the Wild than Penn's outlaw films, The Indian Runner, The Pledge, and The Crossing Guard. ~ Brian Formo
The Last Face centers around a love affair between Dr. Miguel Leon (Javier Bardem), a relief-aid doctor, and Dr. Wren Petersen (Charlize Theron), the director of an international aid organization.
Set against the devastating backdrop of war-torn Liberia, Miguel and Wren must find a way to keep their relationship alive in extraordinarily difficult conditions battling their mutual passion for the value of life matched by the intensity of their diametrically opposed opinions on how best to solve the conflict that surrounds them.
Loving
Starring: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Marton Csokas, Nick Kroll, Michael Shannon
Directed by: Jeff Nichols; entered for U.S.A.
Fresh off his big budget (for Jeff Nichols’ standards) original sci-fi, Midnight Special, Nichols has returned to an intimate character study in Loving. The film marks the American auteur’s (Mud, Take Shelter) first film based on a true story. Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga play the Virginia couple who were jailed and separated for their illegal interracial marriage in the 1960s. After valiantly failing to create another world with Special, Nichols’ keen eye for small-town America is welcome.
Whether Nichols uses the not-so-long-ago 60’s-setting to parallel the 21st century’s redefinition of marriage and racial inequality, or favors a stirring, singular love story, will definitely be of interest. Of all the films at Cannes, Loving appears to be the one that most screams Oscar positioning for both the actors and the writer-director involved. Expect to hear if Edgerton, Negga and Nichols will kick off the 2017 award season a la Carol and Mad Max: Fury Road last year, or if Loving is more akin to last year’s Sea of Trees, which has yet to have emerged from the forest. ~ Brian Formo
Loving celebrates the real-life courage and commitment of an interracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), who married and then spent the next nine years fighting for the right to live as a family in their hometown. Their civil rights case, Loving v. Virginia, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1967 reaffirmed the very foundation of the right to marry – making their love story an inspiration to couples everywhere.
The Neon Demon
Starring: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Christina Hendricks, Bella Heathcote, Keanu Reeves
Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn; entered for U.S.A., France, and Denmark
After hearing the infamous Cannes boos and calls of misogyny for his last film, Only God Forgives, Nicolas Winding Refn has used his first female writers (Mary Laws and Polly Stenham), first female cinematographer (Natasha Braier), and first predominantly female cast for The Neon Demon. We’ve seen a stylish trailer, and we’ve seen many lovely images. Soon we’ll get to see if the Drive director’s descent into the bloody world of fashion is simply eye candy or delicious. With the young rail-thin cast and electro soundtrack (from Cliff Martinez) there appear to be some shades of Suspiria at play. And we’re perhaps most eager to hear how this one plays out. ~ Brian Formo
When aspiring model Jesse moves to Los Angeles, her youth and vitality are devoured by a group of beauty-obsessed women who will use any means necessary to get what she has in The Neon Demon, the new horror thriller from Nicolas Winding Refn.
Paterson
Starring: Adam Driver, Golshiteh Farahani, Luis Da Silva Jr., Kara Hayward, Jared Gilman
Directed by: Jim Jarmusch; entered for U.S.A.
What else can one say about Jim Jarmusch, America’s preeminent existential, international jester? Between 1980 and 2010, the man is responsible for at least seven of the best American films to be produced in those decades, from Dead Man and Down by Law to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Broken Flowers. Three years ago, he produced the most progressively minded vampire film in years with Only Lovers Left Alive, which starred Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as bloodsuckers who divide their time between a gorgeously decorated Tangiers apartment and a two-story Detroit home that doubles as a museum of rock & roll.
Paterson pairs him with the invaluable Adam Driver, who plays the titular New Jersey bus driver who comes home every night to his wife, played by Golshifteh Farahani, best known for Asghar Farhadi’s bewitching About Elly. Beyond their relationship and intimate doings, little is known about the narrative, but Jarmusch’s film tend to be made up of moments and conversations, quiet gestures and unhinged dancing, visual experiences and roiling internal conflict. To see him work with Driver, one of the most expressive actors working today, is reason enough to keep this on your to-watch list.
Paterson (Adam Driver) is a bus driver in the city of Paterson, New Jersey – they share the name. Every day, Paterson adheres to a simple routine: he drives his daily route, observing the city as it drifts across his windshield and overhearing fragments of conversation swirling around him; he writes poetry into a notebook; he walks his dog; he stops in a bar and drinks exactly one beer; he goes home to his wife, Laura (Golshiteh Farahani). By contrast, Laura´s world is ever changing. New dreams come to her almost daily.
Paterson loves Laura and she loves him. He supports her newfound ambitions; she champions his gift for poetry. The film quietly observes the triumphs and defeats of daily life, along with the poetry evident in its smallest details.
Personal Shopper
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Nora Von Waldstätten, Anders Danielsen Lie
Directed by: Olivier Assayas; entered for France
Olivier Assays’ last film premiered at Cannes, Clouds of Sils Maria, and announced to the world that Kristen Stewart—removed from Twilight and tabloids—is a supremely talented actress. Yes, people still snicker that she’s the only American actress to ever win a Cesar (the French Oscar), but eventually that sound will be drowned out by what many of us already know: Stewart is taking great roles and performing them with assured aplomb. Assayas has cast Stewart again as an assistant to a celebrity, but this time she’s the top-to-bottom star who’s not holding her own against Juliette Binoche, but a ghost.
Assayas is a hit and miss director, but he hits more often than he misses, I consider Sils Maria to be up there with his career highs of Carlos, Summer Hours and (perhaps most akin to) Irma Vep. We’re here for the K-Stew revolution (and also to see what he’s given Oslo, August 31’s standout, Anders Danielsen Lie). ~ Brian Formo
Maureen (Kristen Stewart), mid-20s, has a job she hates: seeing to the wardrobe of a media celebrity. She couldn’t find anything better to pay for her stay in Paris. And wait. Wait for a sign from the spirit of her twin brother, who died a few months earlier. Until then, her life will stay on hold.
The Salesman
Starring: Taraneh Alidoosti, Shahab Hosseini, Babak Karimi, and Mina Sadati
Directed by: Asghar Farhadi; entered for Iran
The last few years have allowed us to get quite familiar with the films of Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian maestro who has refracted the political discord of his home country in deceptively simple episodes of familial strife. Just this year, his 2006 feature, Fireworks Wednesday, finally got a proper release stateside, and his rapturous 2009 drama, About Elly, didn’t arrive here until about a year ago. Both of those works are essential political allegories, but you probably know him best for A Separation, his endlessly devastating study of a married couple whose lives are shredded and frayed by Iran’s wildly misogynistic and crudely austere legal restrictions against women. His last film, The Past, similarly dealt with the tangled emotions that come about in the fallout of such legal repressions, and his new film, The Salesman, similarly focuses on a young married couple whose lives are ruptured by the happenings in the life of the former renter of their Tehran apartment.
Regardless of where its thematic concepts ultimately land, it will almost certainly be another alluring addition to the cinematic oeuvre of a nation whose most prominent filmmakers, including Farhadi, Jafar Panahi, and Abbas Kiarastomi, are some of the most audacious and formidable directors currently at work anywhere. ~ Chris Cabin
Forced out of their apartment due to dangerous works on a neighboring building, Emad and Rana move into a new flat in the center of Tehran. An incident linked to the previous tenant will dramatically change the young couple’s life.
Sieranevada
Starring: Mimi Branescu, Pera Kurtela, Andi Vasluianu, Bogdan Dumitrache, and Ioana Craciunescu
Directed by: Cristi Puiu; entered for Romania
The family reunion drama has yielded less and less meaningful works over the last few years, as anyone who suffered through This is Where I Leave You or the miserable adaptation of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County can attest. If anyone can turn the tide though, its Cristi Puiu, the mordant Romanian director behind 2011’s beguiling Aurora and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the masterwork that announced the still-thriving Romanian New Wave. Puiu’s new film deals with a group of family members, played by the likes of Mimi Branescu, Pera Kurtela, and Bogdan Dutrache, who reunite on the anniversary of the death of the family’s patriarch, and one might very well expect some cold shoulders considering the timbre of Aurora. Though where his last film only unveiled its dramatic pulp in miniscule dollops, Sieranevada seems to be centered on a concept that promises regular discord and purges of pent-up hostility. If we’ve learned anything about this director, however, it’s that he never does exactly what you’re expecting. ~ Chris Cabin
Three days after the terrorist attack on the offices of Parisian weekly Charlie Hebdo
and forty days after the death of his father, Lary (Mimi Branescu), a doctor in his forties is about to spend the Saturday at a family gathering to commemorate the deceased.
But the occasion does not go according to expectations. Forced to confront his fears and his past, to rethink the place he holds within the family, Lary finds himself constraint to tell his version of the truth.
Slack Bay
Starring: Fabrice Luchini, Juliette Binoche, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
Directed by: Bruno Dumont; entered for France and Germany
Bruno Dumont has been around for a while. Back in the 1990s, he built a reputation as France’s premiere helmer of striking dramas and coal-dark comedies with The Life of Jesus and Humanite, two of my personal favorite films of the decade. And then just last year, he molded his magnum opus, Lil Quinquin, an epic consideration of rural French society in the time of fear of migrants and refugees and televised singing competitions. Striking when his iron happens to be white-hot, Dumont will now follow-up that masterpiece with Slack Bay, a similarly pitch-black comedy that takes a series of horrid deaths as its focus, and yielding something like a master-class in class warfare.
Slack Bay reunites Dumont with the brilliant Juliette Binoche, who starred in his excellent 2013 drama, Camille Claudel, 1915, and also brings in Fabrice Luchini and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, two high-ranking members of French acting royalty. Paired with Dumont’s continuing, immensely fruitful collaboration with DP Guillaume Deffontaines, Slack Bay already promises to rank high amongst this year’s helping of foreign fare. ~ Chris Cabin
Summer 1910. Several tourists have vanished on the beaches of the Channel Coast. Infamous inspectors Machin and Malfoy soon gather that these mysterious disappearances take place in Slack Bay. There lives a community of fishermen. Among them evolves a curious family, the Brufort, lead by the father "The Eternal", who rules as best as he can on his prankster bunch of sons, especially the impetuous Ma Loute. Towering high above the bay stands the Van Peteghems' mansion. Every summer, this degenerate bourgeois family stagnates in the villa, not without mingling during their leisure hours with the local people. As starts a peculiar love story between Ma Loute and the young and mischievous Billie Van Peteghem, confusion and mystification will descend on both families, shaking their foundations.
Toni Erdmann
Starring: Sandra Hüller, Peter Simonischek
Directed by: Maren Ade; entered for Germany
Maren Ade’s second feature, Everybody Else, was one of the most honest breakup films ever made. Ade was able to find that absurd relationship off-kilter balance when affection and annoyance are possible reactions to every life scenario. You never know which reaction you’re going to get, you never know which partner you're going to get.
Likewise, we don’t know what we’ll get for Ade’s follow-up. But both the synopsis (below) and image (of a man in an ape suit stumbling upon his nude daughter) promise that a relationship will be challenged through eccentricity. ~ Brian Formo
Practical joker Winfried disguises himself as flashy “Toni Erdmann” to get busy Ines’ attention and change her corporate lifestyle. The father-daughter challenge reaches absurd proportions until Ines begins to see that her eccentric father deserves a place in her life…
Unknown Girl
Starring: Adele Haenel, Jeremie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Fabrizio Rongione, and Thomas Doret
Directed by: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, entered for Belgium
La Promesse. Rosetta. The Son. L’Enfant. Lorna’s Silence. The Kid with a Bike. Two Days, One Night. If you’ve been paying attention to world cinema at all over the last few decades, these titles are quite familiar, and they speak to the impossibly influential, gripping vision that the Dardenne Brothers have extolled over the years. Their last two films have saw them collaborating with more mainstream French performers—Marion Cotillard in Two Days and Cecile De France in Bike—and their latest joint, about a doctor who begins investigating the identity of a patient who died after refusing medical help, sees them teaming with Adele Haenel (House of Pleasures). Beyond the lead actress, however, the brothers have cast their frequent collaborators Olivier Gourmet and Jeremie Renier in key roles, along with Fabrizio Rongione, the husband in Two Days, One Night, and Thomas Dorset, the titular youngster in The Kid with a Bike.
Like any of their masterworks, expect their uniquely subtle brand of leftist politics to be embedded in ever inflection of the plot, but not so much that the visceral thrill of the film’s dramatic pulse is interrupted or overrun in any way. ~ Chris Cabin
One evening, after closing her practice for the day, Jenny, a young doctor, hears the doorbell ring but doesn't answer it. The next day, the police inform her that an unidentified young woman has been found dead close by.
The Remainder of the Cannes 2016 Competitive Lineup
- Aquarius — directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho; entered for Brazil
- From the Land of the Moon — directed by Nicole Garcia; entered for France
- Ma Rosa — directed by Brilliante Mendoza; entered for The Philippines
- Moi, Daniel Blake — directed by Ken Loach; entered for the U.K.
- Staying Vertical — directed by Alain Guiraudie; entered for France
Out of Competition Titles
If you’ve gone through this list and are like, why’s it so stuffy? Isn’t this the festival where Mad Max: Fury Road debuted its awesomeness? And where Inside Out first revealed its emotional core? Yes, this is the one. Outside of the Palme discussion, the Croisette revels in mainstream quality. And this year looks to be no exception. The festival will kick off with Woody Allen’s newest, Café Society, an old-timey Hollywood comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Steve Carell. Additional special screening debuts include Steven Spielberg’s summer adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved The BFG, Shane Black’s newest private detective bromance of circumstance, The Nice Guys, Mel Gibson’s leading man return to vengeance, Blood Father and Jodie Foster’s Money Monster—which features George Clooney as a TV financial advisor who’s taken hostage and Julia Roberts as the showrunner who tries to keep things under control. ~ Brian Formo