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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Donald Sutherland was an irreplaceable aristocrat of cinema

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The late actor was a commanding and versatile presence on the big screen, perfecting everything from villainy to sensuality in films such as Don’t Look Now and Klute

Donald Sutherland was an utterly unique actor and irreplacable star: possessed of a distinctive leonine handsomeness that the white beard of his latter years only made more majestic: watchful, cerebral, charismatic, with a refinement to his screen acting technique comparable perhaps only to Paul Scofield and his Canadian background (together with his early stage training and experience in England and Scotland) gave his American roles a certain touch of Anglo-international class. Sutherland was commanding and exacting, he gave each of his roles and films something special: he addressed his co-stars and the camera itself from a position of strength.

Even playing a weak or absurd character, as he did starring as the preposterous womaniser in Federico Fellini’s Casanova in 1976, finally reduced to the job of a librarian in a German count’s castle, brooding grotesquely over the phantoms of past lovers, Sutherland was still strong, still mesmeric, his intelligent face still sympathetic as Casanova, even though resembling a non-priapic gargoyle. For Bertolucci in his Italian epic 1900, he played an actual fascist, the gruesomely named Attila, and though certainly very far from sympathetic, he played the role with a sickeningly twinkle-eyed dynamism.

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