Fjord review - Cristian Mungiu at sea with strange child abuse drama starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan

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Cannes film festival: The Palme laureate here makes a misstep with an odd, disquieting film that leaves too many issues unresolved Romanian director and Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu – the winner here in 2007 with his stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – comes to Cannes with an anticlimactic, underpowered movie which it seems to me could be part of an odd phenomenon at this year’s festival, detectable also in films here by Kantemir Balagov and Ryusuke Hamaguchi: auteurs making coproduction movies outside their home turf and mother tongue with big foreign stars, perhaps as a result of creative conversations at international film festivals with admirers from all over the world – and losing focus. Fjord is an odd film, bearing Mungiu’s signature, certainly, with enigmatic long shots and avoidance of closeups, and one very distinctive crowding of faces in a dinner-scene tableau. But the ostensible pain and trauma of its story is conveyed without the rewarding complexity that we have...
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Sasquatch Sunset review – Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg suit up for ingenious Bigfoot comedy

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Four mythical hairy creatures, communicating in grunts, inhabit what could be a post-apocalyptic world in the Zellner brothers’ witty and unnerving film

The Zellner brothers, David and Nathan, take their absurdism and futurism to the next level with a brilliant and radical comedy about the secret life of the legendary Sasquatch, AKA Bigfoot, creatures rumoured to be living in the North American wilderness. Sasquatch Sunset is a film to compare with Planet of the Apes, or Watership Down, or even the days of silent cinema. Nonverbal cinema anyway. It’s a plaintive, echoing wail of fear in that big empty forest where no one is around to hear a falling tree; fear of climate catastrophe, fear of the ongoing environmental destruction in which we don’t even fully know what’s getting destroyed; fear of humanity’s own extinction.

And as the movie begins, maybe humanity is already extinguished. We see four Sasquatch loping across a forest clearing: great, hairy, grunting, whooping, ape-like creatures: a female and three males, played without dialogue and in full prosthetic makeup by Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Nathan Zellner and Christophe Zajac-Denek. Two are in a couple and their sexual activity is observed impassively by the other two. One would-be dominant alpha appears to make a sexual move on another, having observed them in the midst of masturbatory self-discovery. He also bullies the others away from a blackberry bush he wants all for himself, on which he appears to get drunk and then hungover. Mushrooms are another dangerous stimulant. At moments of drama and stress they shriek and caper and clap their clenched fists together.

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