Cannes film festival: Threading together three stories from distinct eras of Spanish life, this narrative triptych is superlatively acted and beautifully shot

The Black Ball is a narrative triptych about the lives of three different Spanish men at various times: a meditation derived from Lorca about the secret history of gay men’s sexuality, which has been erased, excluded or denied – sexuality transfigured into a mysterious, restorative poetry of the soul. In Lorca’s words, “only mystery keeps us alive” and in fact the small regret I have about this superlatively acted and beautifully shot film is that once the connection between the three narrative strands is explained, some of the mystery and poetry is lost.

In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes) is a young man of a good family in Granada, who applies for membership of the elite “Casino” club but is turned down on the grounds of his rumoured homosexuality, blackballed in an oppressively elaborate ceremony presided over by politicians and clergymen, in which the white and black balls are solemnly rolled down a special chute. In 1939, Sebastián (played by the actor and musician Álvaro Lafuente Calvo) finds himself chaotically enlisted into the pro-Franco nationalist army during the civil war and falls in love with the wounded Republican prisoner-of-war that he is supposed to be guarding. This is Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), an actor and footballer with Atlético Madrid, an impossibly handsome, captivatingly vulnerable man whose bandages ooze blood like the tears of a miraculous statue.

Cannes film festival: Swann Arlaud is excellent as Henri Marre, the director’s great-grandfather, as he finagles his way into a job at the Vichy ministry of labour

This, oddly, is the second film in the Cannes competition about the Nazi occupation of France, and it is more interesting than László Nemes’s rather mainstream drama Moulin – a complex, ambiguous study of national humiliation from writer-director Emmanuel Marre. He has created an absorbingly intimate, novelistically detailed procedural about the day-to-day, moment-by-moment lives of the Vichy administrators after the fall of France, mostly shot conventionally, sometimes jolting into an anachronistic dreamlike scenario on video.

It is centred on the director’s own great-grandfather Henri Marre, who held a minor but important post in the Vichy ministry of labour. The film is in fact unsparing of this conceited, petty, but weirdly sensitive and vulnerable man: Swann Arlaud plays him as a sociopathic mixture of haughty idealist, salon intellectual and conman predator, a man who doesn’t really believe in anything but his own survival and has only the vaguest idea about what such survival could mean.

Cannes film festival: Sachs’ film about an HIV-positive actor in the homophobic Reagan-era 80s is well-intended, but Malek’s mannered performance is hard to love

This film from writer-director Ira Sachs gives us premium-strength, undiluted Rami Malek – but I have to say that his overripe performance and self-conscious mannerisms here are perhaps even more oppressively insistent for being conveyed relatively quietly in spoken dialogue. And not quietly at all in the singing scenes. Malek is a performer whose style is as distinctive as those of John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum. But it works best with a light touch in the direction and material. Things never really come together here.

The Man I Love is a film about gay culture in 1980s New York, at the height of the reactionary homophobia of Reagan’s America, with HIV-positive men coming to terms with their condition and with the callous bigotry of the political zeitgeist. In one hospital scene, we see the authorities’ icily unsympathetic attitude. Malek plays Jimmy George, a much admired and charismatic actor and performance artist in New York who has just emerged from a three-week stay in hospital after a life-threatening HIV-related crisis. Now he is starring in a new stage piece based on André Brassard’s 1974 film Once Upon a Time in the East, playing the stormy and defiant Hélène, who sings with a band.

‘Europe must never be subjected to Trump’ says Spanish film-maker at a Cannes press conference for his new film, Bitter Christmas

Pedro Almodóvar has argued that film-makers have a “moral duty” to speak up about politics or they will enable the kind of stifling of free speech taking place in the US, warning that “Europe must never be subjected to Trump”.

Speaking at the Cannes premiere of his new film Bitter Christmas, the veteran Spanish director was responding to questions about previous comments in which he had remarked on a lack of protests at the Oscars earlier this year.

Cannes film festival: Clio Barnard’s absorbing tale depicts five friends who grew up together in Birmingham but now face divided destinies

With warmth and heartfelt passion, and a quintet of outstanding performances from young actors shot in looming closeup for so much of the time, Clio Barnard has created an absorbing and moving social-realist picture. It’s a film whose mix of poignancy, defiance and contaminated euphoria stayed with me hours after the closing credits.

It is about five young people from Birmingham who grew up together, reaching the end of their 20s, sensing a looming crisis and on the verge of a tragedy that is mysteriously growing from within their own increasing disparity. It is adapted by screenwriter Enda Walsh from the novel of the same name by Kieran Goddard, the statically rendered pentaptych of five consciousnesses in Goddard’s book being transformed into a fraught and dynamic home town drama with a sense memory of Fellini’s I Vitelloni.

The first-time director admitted he wore a beret to channel ‘old school’ auteurs at Cannes – though mimicry can only take you so far

It happened, as most of the best fashion moments do these days, at Cannes. I’m not talking about Demi Moore wearing a pink bow the size of a dog, or Jane Fonda sparkling in Gucci to the point of blindness, but John Travolta, of all people, who appeared at the festival this week to debut a new film and a new look, the centrepiece of which was a beret.

He actually had three in rotation, in black, brown and cream. On the seafront boulevard La Croisette, he paired them with wire-frame spectacles and a beard that appeared to have been applied with a felt-tip pen. A beret, beard and specs you say? Hardly a radical glow up for a 72-year-old celebrity. But that didn’t stop images of Travolta from going viral, sparking some lively online conversations comparing him to – in no order – a barista, a Bond villain and a character from Guess Who?.

There’s nothing wrong with film-makers leaving their comfort zone but the Japanese director’s latest effort just doesn’t work

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film is a bafflingly unsatisfying and unconvincing muddle of ideas and moods; it is a futurist fable of AI-humanoid robot children, unpersuasively performed in a returning keynote of bland serenity. It is perhaps comparable to Kore-eda’s 2009 film Air Doll, a more adult story of man whose sex doll secretly comes to life.

Otone (Haruka Ayasi) – an architect who appears to work from home, with no office scenes or colleagues visible – is an educated woman married to down-to-earth Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto), a carpenter who likes beer and playing baseball. Two years previously, their seven-year-old son, Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki), was killed by a hit-and-run driver who has never been caught. They are approached by a company called REbirth, whose offices are huge and white with creepy logos and designs, like all sinister corporations in the movies, although the question of whether REbirth is supposed to be sinister is one of the film’s many unanswered questions.

Cannes film festival: The great Russian director’s first film for almost a decade is tremendous drama following the ill-deeds of a mini-oligarch who comes up with a toxic new way to feed Russia’s war machine

Life during wartime is the theme of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film. It is set in provincial Russia, a portrait of a nation paralysed with disillusionment and fear, slowly coming to terms with, or retreating into collective denial about, the terrible mistake in Ukraine. It’s an inspired variation on Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle from 1969, mixed with Gogol’s Dead Souls and the 14 sacrifices required for the Minotaur in Greek myth. It is also a noir thriller of infidelity and vengeful murder, lent a new meaning by the context of deadly cynicism and political bad faith, a world in which powerful people, gloomy with self-hate, have made covering up misdeeds their way of life.

There is a telling early scene in which the male lead, mini-oligarch businessman Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), goes out for an expensive restaurant meal with his boorish plutocrat friends and their spouses and girlfriends, including Gleb’s elegant, beautiful wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) who is almost catatonic with unhappiness. One girlfriend there tells a racy joke about a guy applying for a job on an adult movie, despite having a tiny penis unlike all the other well endowed applicants – because, he says, “all films need anti-heroes”. Minotaur is full of anti-heroes.

Cannes film festival: Refn’s film eludes definition as it moves through time and space, from doomy reality to strange dream worlds populated by quasi-Lynchian characters

The title’s first word should probably be “His”. Nicolas Winding Refn has returned to Cannes with a bizarre new fantasia moodscape, a midnight movie of fear and dreamy disquiet, meaning … what, exactly? The setting of the film – a twist on the 60s pulp shocker of the same title by Norman J Warren – morphs and shapeshifts from place to place, with the antilogical procedure of a dream, from a supposedly real outer world to the inner space of hallucination and memory. It starts in a giant, empty hotel (whose colossal Stygian corridors are not unlike those in Refn’s Only God Forgives) in the middle of a digitally rendered dystopian city, wreathed in the kind of mist that tends to conceal a serial killer, and people here are frightened of someone called the “Leather Man”.

We move to the fictional action of a movie the hotel’s inhabitants are (possibly) planning to make, or perhaps to the world of their fears and imaginings, their ideas occasioned by this ostensible realist premise. And then we move to a situation from the past in US-occupied postwar Japan, where a haunted GI is looking for his daughter. This is a story populated by quasi-Lynchian characters and gargoyles with strange nicknames – the whole imagined landscape, lit by Refn’s throbbingly neon purples, reds and blues, looks like a nightclub in hell. And yet it is less violent and explicit than his earlier adventures. The pace is doomy, sepulchral and slow; like Refn’s TV series Too Old to Die Young, it moves at the pace of a zombie which has been shot but still keeps on shuffling forward. Or perhaps it is more like that of a sleepwalker who walks and talks slowly, but has a clearer idea of what is happening than those who are, in a more banal sense, awake.

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 come to associate with him, and without revelation or mystery. Ultimately, the film does not compellingly deliver a blazing truth about its various relationships – but neither does it intriguingly withhold any such truth from us.

Sebastian Stan plays a Romanian guy called Mihai, married to a Norwegian woman called Lisbet (Renate Reinsve); they have to come to live in the beautiful, remote village of Lisbet’s birth because Mihai, a qualified software engineer, can get an IT job and there is a strong church community thereabouts which is a great attraction as Mihai and Lisbet are fundamentalist conservative Christians who are very strict. They are given a warm welcome by their (non-Christian) neighbours, who are the school’s headteacher and his wife.

The film begins on a disquieting, ambiguous moment: Mihai has clearly just delivered a punishment of some sort to their teenage daughter who is now required to give him a penitent hug. The school’s staff notice that the children have marks and bruises. They are gently but pointedly questioned and (perhaps) incriminate their parents because they are not sufficiently proficient in any language other than Romanian. Perhaps the language issue also contributes to the calamitous statement Mihai then gives to the police with no lawyer present.

With lightning speed, the children are taken into provisional care pending a hearing and criminal trial. Things are complicated by a growing concern about their neighbours’ elderly disabled father and about Mihai and Lisbet’s daughter forming a close relationship with their neighbours’ rebellious teen daughter.

There is something undoubtedly ingenious in the way Mungiu invites the audience to sympathise with the children, and side against this ice-cold patriarch – and then almost side with the patriarch against the blandly smug, supercilious officers of a system weighted against them.

Liberal prejudice against them as Christians or as Romanians arguably plays its part. But the facts of the matter do not seem to be in doubt: Mihai concedes he smacks or slaps the children occasionally – quite normal in the robust world of Romania. But don’t those bruises and marks show something worse than that? The matter is not resolved in court or in the film and then we have a strangely inert and suspense-free finale at the ferry terminal which reveals that the relationship between the teen girls Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) is something else the film has not sufficiently told or not told us about. Mungiu’s technique will always be interesting but this is a disappointment.

• Fjord screened at the Cannes film festival

Cannes film festival: A man is terrified to wake up in Seydoux’s body in this metempsychotic mystery film about gender identity

Arthur Harari’s film is adapted from a graphic novel he wrote with his brother Lucas called The Case of David Zimmerman. It is a doomy, murky and intriguing supernatural noir mystery, hardly visible within the dark toxic cloud of its own strangeness, populated by people bearing stricken expressions of misery and fear. There are some genuinely uncanny and disquieting moments. Maybe it is a parable for the crisis of gender identity – or just identity, and everyone’s occasional experience of the profound, unreconcilable unknowability of our own bodies. There is also something of the mood of Blow-Up, or Basil Dearden’s Brit pulp chiller The Man Who Haunted Himself, or indeed David Robert Mitchell’s modern classic It Follows. But this one, sadly, is flawed by that perennial problem of how to end a story with a great premise.

Niels Schneider plays David Zimmerman, a photographer in his late 30s documenting the way in which his home town has changed over the past century – a project inherited from his photographer dad. (He has an old photo of them both seated on the pavement, apparently mimicking Chaplin and the Kid.) David is overworked, dishevelled and depressed, but is just about persuaded to go along to a raucous New Year’s Eve party where he is stunned to glimpse a woman staring at him, played by Léa Seydoux, whom he realises he photographed a few months’ previously.

Cannes film festival: Na Hong-jin’s melee of running, chasing and shouting at the angry invaders is uproarious fun, mixing digital work with old-school spectacle

Some uproarious rock’n’roll moviemaking from Korean director Na Hong-jin, a sci-fi action thriller mixing digital work with old-school analogue entertainment values, serving up a spectacle with cheeky touches of Spielberg, Walter Hill and one other director and movie franchise that it would be unsporting to specify at this stage.

We are in the remote and sleepy retirees’ town of Hope in South Korea near the demilitarised zone (DMZ), where people already constitutionally used to the possibility of war and bloodshed, are astonished to hear of a farm animal killed and mangled – though not for food – by an unidentified beast.

His extraordinary Auschwitz film won every award going. Now the Hungarian director is back with new drama Orphan, as well as a Jean Moulin biopic at Cannes. He talks about resurgent global prejudice – and refusing to be lectured by the film industry ‘overclass’

We’ve been talking for less than five minutes when I spot the swastika. It’s just above the head of László Nemes, one of Europe’s most acclaimed directors, as he sits in the suite of a London hotel, talking about Orphan, his intensely personal new film that dwells on – among other things – the impact of the Holocaust on the generations that followed. It’s an ancient, Hindu swastika, part of a decorative wall-hanging – but still.

I’m halfway through a question when I notice it. Nemes laughs; of course, he’d seen it immediately. “I wanted to point that out to you,” he says. “It is so funny. Before leaving this room, I will take pictures.” Mind you, he’s had worse. “When I was at the San Sebastián film festival with Son of Saul, they put me in the Mel Gibson room.”

Australian actor says there are still ‘10 women and 75 men’ on film sets a decade after the gender equality movement dominated conversations

Cate Blanchett has lamented that the #MeToo movement “got killed very quickly” in Hollywood, while speaking at the Cannes film festival.

In a wide-ranging, staged conversation on Sunday, Blanchett lamented that the tide of #MeToo has been turned in Hollywood, where she has been outspoken about gender equality.

Associated Press contributed to this report

Cannes film festival: Performer is as good as ever but her actor character is thinly conceived in a fundamentally implausible depiction of how to grapple with alcoholism

It’s always a pleasure to see that funny, smart performer Adèle Exarchopoulos in Cannes – after all, she made Cannes history by being jointly awarded the Palme d’Or for the 2013 film Blue Is the Warmest Colour, sharing the big prize itself with the director Abdellatif Kechiche and her co-star Léa Seydoux. Exarchopoulos has her moments in this film from Jeanne Herry, in which she plays an actor struggling with a drinking problem. The scenes in which we see her up on stage, boisterously performing in a touring theatre for schoolkids, are genuinely great. But really this is a very glib and unsatisfying drama, whose essential naivety becomes apparent when the lead character is forced to confront the crisis in her life.

Exarchopoulos plays a young actor called Garance; she adores Arletty’s character of the same name in Marcel Carné’s movie classic Les Enfants du Paradis. At the moment, she has an assistant stage manager position in a prestigious Paris repertory company, believing herself to be on the verge of getting some serious speaking parts when the next season’s casting is announced. But she is instead relegated to the touring schools company, where her undoubted talents are compromised by partying extremely hard every night and waking up with a terrible hangover every morning.

Cannes film festival: Barnaby Thompson’s documentary on the great British director is an exhilarating delve into the ebb and flow of Lean’s peerless career and sometimes complex personal life – with a grand cast of talking heads

Barnaby Thompson’s thoroughly exhilarating and enjoyable documentary about movie director David Lean is proof of the old maxim – fortune favours the bold. Lean’s career feels like more than ever like a dashing military adventure; like Napoleon or the young Winston Churchill in Sudan or, indeed, TE Lawrence in his greatest film, Lawrence of Arabia. It involved brilliantly improvising strategy in hostile terrain and imperiously imposing his command over troops who had to be subdued by force of will, as well as a mastery of the theatre involved in leadership, displaying an almost hammy sense of one’s own skill in oratory and the eroticism of giving orders.

Watching this documentary, you can appreciate how Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence is in many ways a comic, absurd figure – dressed up in borrowed and culturally appropriated Arab robes – but one that no one would dare mock. Perhaps Lean, in his director’s robes, could see what his subordinates wouldn’t, or couldn’t; he could see his own faults, and suffer from impostor syndrome and secret doubts. The movie repeatedly tells us that he could be impossibly bad-tempered and dictatorial on set – but there is no film or audio record of this, just Lean himself in various interviews being endlessly charming and self-deprecating. (Although I suspect that patrician accent perhaps reverted a little, at times, to something a bit rougher under duress.)

Actor otherwise has ‘no comment’ on Girls creator’s claims about his on-set behaviour as he speaks at Cannes film festival

For weeks, Adam Driver has avoided commenting on allegations made about his on-set behaviour by Lena Dunham in her hit new memoir, Famesick.

But at a press conference for Paper Tiger at the Cannes film festival on Sunday, the actor briefly broke his silence when asked by the Guardian about Dunham’s account. “I have no comment on any of that – I’m saving it all for my book,” he responded, provoking laughter in the room.

Cannes film festival: The Marriage Story stars team up with Miles Teller for this sombre and impressive story of shady dealings in 80s New York

With this muscular, heartfelt and sombre new picture set in 1980s New York, James Gray again resurrects the spirit of Elia Kazan in a blue-collar tragedy of fraternal loyalty and betrayal; a movie about men and their horror of appearing weak and failing to protect their families. Paper Tiger has that distinctive Gray colour palette: a perpetual late-afternoon autumn of subdued ochres, reds and browns. And there are his keynote family supper scenes, the characteristic presence of the Russian community in New York, and the potent, tribal codes of the NYPD: part mob, part trade union, part masonic clan whose membership responsibilities and perks go on well after retirement.

Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller give weighted, intelligent performances at the film’s centre: all three characters, in their different ways, have Springsteenian hungry hearts. Teller is Irwin Pearl, a modest, working-class guy who is a qualified engineer in Queens, doing well at his trade but still concerned about paying for his teen sons’ – Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Benjamin (Roman Engel) – college education. He’s married to Hester, played with forthright authority by Johansson, sporting frizzy hair and glasses that make her look like one of the Golden Girls.

Cannes film festival: The Son of Saul director’s dramatisation of Jean Moulin’s torture by Klaus Barbie both benefits and suffers from its mainstream approach

László Nemes made his Cannes debut 11 years ago with the terrifying, Oscar-winning Holocaust drama Son of Saul, and followed that up with Sunset, his elegant, mysterious drama of pre-first world war Budapest. His next film, Orphan, released in the UK last week, was a comparably enigmatic film set in post-second world war Hungary. But his new film in the Cannes competition is a basically pretty conventionally acted, conventionally directed, conventionally conceived wartime movie shot in the sepia-subdued colours of an old photograph, all about French resistance heroism and French resistance leader Jean Moulin, who went down in history for refusing to talk under torture.

The overall effect isn’t really like Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows; maybe closer to the 70s BBC TV show Secret Army. Nemes’s final scene is even rather sentimentally stirring, though the director then tries to cancel this sugary moment with a final premonition of the death camps. At all events, he undoubtedly brings impeccable craftsmanship, and the performances and production design are strong.

Film-maker and longtime Corbyn ally says ‘poor behaviour’ squandered chance to unite the left in fight against far right

Ken Loach has accused Your Party of squandering an opportunity to unite the left in the fight against the far right after the upstart socialist movement founded by the former Labour figures Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana became mired in infighting.

“There was great hope when Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana joined forces; 800,000 people expressed interest – that’s three times the size of a political party,” he said. “But I’m afraid some of the behaviours were very poor and they lost a historic opportunity.”