Cannes presented a range of notable films despite fewer Hollywood stars. Jane Schoenbrun’s work centers on slashers and sexual liberation, while Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi create an ode to Federico García Lorca’s legacy. Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord stars Sebastian Stan as a conservative evangelical patriarch and Renate Reinsve as a married partner; the family relocates from Romania to Norway, but child protective services become involved after a teacher notices bruises on a child. Paweł Pawlikowski’s black-and-white drama runs 82 minutes and features Sandra Hüller as Erika Mann, traveling across recently divided Germany to receive the Goethe Award from both West and East Germans, offering a focused view of a country confronting its Nazi past.
"Sebastian Stan makes an unexpected turn as a conservative evangelical patriarch in this new film from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days director Cristian Mungiu. It's unexpected not just because he performs half the role in Romanian, but because he leans into the character's brusque unlikability. Fjord is a squirmy drama in which Stan and Renate Reinsve play a married couple who move with their five children from Romania to Norway to be closer to Reinsve's mother, only to draw the interest of child protective services when a teacher at school spots bruises on one of the kids."
"Mungiu, always brilliant at depicting what it's like to run up against a perverse and indifferent system, achieves something intentionally, provocatively uncomfortable here. In a year rife with two-and-a-half hour epics, Paweł Pawlikowski's 1949-set black-and-white drama stands out for running just 82 minutes, and for being nearly perfect. At its core is an incredible Sandra Hüller as Erika Mann, who accompanies her famous father Thomas (Hanns Zischler) on a trip across a recently divided Germany to receive the same Goethe Award from both the West and East Germans."
"It's a deliberate narrow aperture from which to look at this immense moment in history, when the country was trying to contend with what it did by either wallowing in denial about collaborating with the Nazis or throwing the past away entirely in pursuit of an already fracturing"
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