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 …

For an event that generates so much excitement and carries with it such potential for surprise, it’s remarkable how – year after year – the experience of being at the Cannes Film Festival always feels exactly the same. Even though this is my 20th consecutive visit to the festival, I still can’t quite fully recall the impact it has when one actually arrives – the dramatic change in the routine and structure of the day, the surges of enthusiasm and …

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray ventures outside the Cannes Competition line-up – although not very far outside, with round ups of two films from the prestigious Un Certain Regard strand…

Having now caught two films playing in the main Competition, it feels like time to get to grips with something else. Un Certain Regard is probably best viewed as the Competition’s hipper younger sister. Run at the Salle Debussy, next door to where the Competition plays in the Lumière, it was started …

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray gives her thoughts on François Ozon’s Competition entry, Jeune et Jolie

You’re usually guaranteed a certain amount of nudity in any given Cannes line up, and we’re off to a great start so far, with the first two Competition films I’ve seen featuring a bound and stripped man having his penis set on fire in Heli, and extensive frolicking from a headstrong underage prostitute in Jeune et Jolie. The latter is the easier to like – the mixture …

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray catches a late night screening of Amat Escalante’s Heli…

The first film I see in Competition at Cannes this year (aside from The Great Gatsby, which opened the festival but doesn’t count as it screened out of competition – my review here) is also from the youngest director in Competition. 34 year old Mexican director Amat Escalante has been slowly but surely climbing the ladder of the international film festival circuit for a while now. In 2003, …