The relentless rain means that it’s increasingly hard to distinguish the ocean from the Croisette here at Cannes, but on the screen at least everything is buoyant. Three Film4 productions – Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant, Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film and Paul Wright’s For Those in Peril – have filled us with home-team pride, the trio of filmmakers all festival first-timers whose distinctive films guarantee that their presence here will be strongly felt. Looking further afield, …

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray catches up with George MacKay, star of Kevin Macdonald’s highly anticipated How I Live Now, and Paul Wright’s For Those In Peril, which premiered in Critics Week at Cannes 2013.

For Those in Peril George MacKay

I arrived to interview George MacKay feeling like a half-drowned shipwreck victim, having run through a mighty deluge along the Croisette from the Palais, where I’ve just caught the underwhelming Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) at the 8.30am screening. …

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray finds a lot to like about Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ninth feature…

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father Like Son is, like Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, a Competition film whose basic plot sounds like a soap opera shock twist: a couple discover that their son is not their son – he was switched at the hospital with another boy at birth. The couple in question are a fairly repressed upwardly mobile pair, he (pop star Masahuru Fukuyama) more so than she …

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray gives her thoughts on Asghar Farhadi’s The Past

My third Competition film seems the most likely Palme d’Or contender so far: Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, his much-anticipated French-language follow up to critical favourite A Separation. It proves to be an impressive picture that verges on melodrama – in a good way.

The key ingredients – a divorced couple under the same roof, stroppy kids, a disgruntled teenager, a new lover, an affair, a wife in a …