‘Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’ Review: A Spiritual Wander Through Rural Vietnam Makes For a Transfixing Debut

Adam Lambert kicked off Pride Month with a new anthem that should go on repeat for the next 30 days!

David Beckham says Manchester City will never be able to match Manchester United's treble win as the Reds will always be remembered as the first time to achieve the feat.

A visit to one of Scotland’s museums or galleries can be a great way to keep the kids, as well as the rest of the family, entertained.

Britain's Got Talent saw Viggo Venn crowned winner during Sunday night's epic final.

A 'gross negligence manslaughter' probe has been launched following the death of a newborn baby.

Rihanna is stepping out for the night!

A love like no other! Halle Berry and Van Hunt’s relationship continues to heat up after nearly three years together.

This Morning viewers will welcome a "naturally apprehensive" Holly Willoughby back to the sofa on Monday morning. In light of the ongoing Phillip Schofield scandal - the 61 year old recently issued a number of public statements, confirming both his immediate exit as presenter and an "on-off" affair with a young colleague - the last few weeks will have been stressful for all involved with This Morning. Having enjoyed an early half-term family holiday in Portugal, it's now time for Holly, 42, to return to the screen alongside her new co-presenter Josie Gibson.

Channing Tatum is opening up about fatherhood.

Zara Tindall and husband Mike Tindall were all smiles as they posed with Love Island star Amy Hart at the Derby Festival. Zara - Queen Elizabeth II 's granddaughter - is known for her love of horse-racing, and has firmly established herself on the British equestrian scene. The 42 year old was spotted enjoying herself alongside husband Mike, 44, at Epsom Downs Racecourse, which hosts the popular and prestigious annual event.

Guy Lodge Film Critic By the brazenly esoteric standards of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, his last feature “Jauja” was virtually a concession to the mainstream. A lushly shot 19th-century historical drama led by Viggo Mortensen, it was — until a typically disorienting coda — close to linear in its colonialist-quest narrative, even as it moved in slow, ever-widening circles, and duly became Alonso’s most widely released film to date. Nine years later (the longest gap yet in a career taken at his own pace), Alonso’s follow-up “Eureka” playfully appears to mock whatever tentative gestures “Jauja” made toward accessibility: A glisteningly opaque meditation on Indigenous living that refracts viewers’ interpretations as it repeatedly switches gear, focus, locus and story, it’s a film built to frustrate those who don’t succumb to its oneiric spell, not that it especially imparts its secrets to those who do.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In “La Chimera,” the ancient past nestles mere inches below the surface of the present, eventually breaking above ground and disrupting, if not the space-time continuum, the more mundane order of things. The borders between life and death feel similarly frictious and permeable, as if we could merely visit one from the other, as easily as sleeping and waking. Arthur (Josh O’Connor), the wandering Brit at the center of Alice Rohrwacher’s marvelously supple and sinuous new film, is accustomed to such limbo states. So are admirers of Rohrwacher’s filmmaking, which, in this eccentric, romantic tale of competing grave-robbers in Central Italy, touches the transcendental without diving into the outright fabulism of 2018’s “Happy as Lazzaro.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic Before you ask, yes, Lou Reed’s rock standard “Perfect Day” does indeed make an appearance in Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days”: on the protagonist’s stereo as suitably ideal sunlight pours into his small, neat Tokyo apartment, before swarming the soundtrack as we head out into the city on a calm weekend afternoon. If that sounds a little obvious, basic even, said protagonist Hirayama — a mellow, soft-spoken toilet cleaner beautifully played by Kōji Yakusho — would probably agree with a shrug. He’s into simple pleasures, not deep cuts. His solitary life is built around the things that make him happy and the work that keeps him solvent. He’s not inclined to wonder what other people make of it. Wenders’ film, in turn, is sincere and unassuming, and owns its sentimentality with good humor.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s 11 years since Anurag Kashyap’s electrifying five-hour crime opus “Gangs of Wasseypur” jolted Cannes audiences, triggering renewed global interest in Indian genre cinema and vaulting Kashyap to auteur status with several subsequent films granted A-list festival premiere status — even if none quite matched his breakout feature for ambition or execution. Following a run of lower-profile potboilers in a range of genres that saw him through the pandemic era, Kashyap’s elaborately conceived, brashly violent policier “Kennedy” aims to return him to the art-pulp elite, starting with an obliging premiere slot in Cannes’ Midnight section. The result is a declarative but somewhat disappointing return to underworld territory. Enlivened by some propulsive action, a hip-hop-inflected song score and a combative streak of anti-institutional protest — in a COVID-era context that proves one of the script’s more interesting specifics — “Kennedy” is ultimately weighed down by hit-or-miss performances and convoluted plotting that isn’t always ahead of its own twists. Internationally, the film is likely too lurid for crossover arthouse interest, though it would be a good fit for major streaming platforms.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the rose-gray light of dawn, Juliette Binoche strides through a verdant kitchen garden, wearing a straw hat as wide and undulating as an ocean wave. She plucks a majestically large, gnarled celeriac from the earth and sniffs it deeply and fondly, as if inhaling mythical ambrosia, and takes it back to the house. This is how Tràn Anh Hùng’s “The Pot au Feu” opens, which is to say on a note of sensory reverence and a hint of kitsch, in knowing thrall to one of the less pretty vegetables in nature’s cornucopia. There are people — this critic included — who will watch this scene and immediately sense with a hungry tingle that the film to come has been made expressly for their palate, and there is everyone else. “The Pot au Feu” is not for everyone else, and that’s just fine.

Guy Lodge Film Critic On the mean streets of Casablanca dartingly navigated in “Hounds,” all life is shown to be casually disposable; an actual human body, however, is another matter. Taking place over one sleepless night of mounting misfortune in the Moroccan metropolis, writer-director Kamal Lazraq’s first feature is a trim, unsparing crime tale that pits social desperation against a nagging spiritual conscience. Its gig-economy gangsters may follow almost any grisly orders for a quick buck, but are equally bound to Muslim creeds and customs, glumly shrugging off any disparity between these two authorities. Following an impoverished father-son duo as an ostensibly rote criminal errand goes bloodily awry, the film is briskly told and humidly atmospheric, though a little tonal variation wouldn’t have gone amiss amid an overriding air of hardscrabble, stomach-knotted discomfort. As its central crisis deepens and darkens, Lazraq’s script keeps teasing a gear-shift into mordant farce to which it never quite commits, leaving both the characters and the drama a bit stymied. Still, this is a notably punchy debut, both visceral and confidently cavalier in its depiction of everyday underworld brutality, with a sharp, streetlit sense of place — and just enough genre-film vigor to hook distributor interest after its Un Certain Regard premiere at Cannes.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Anyone seeking to describe “How to Have Sex” for potential American viewers is liable to land on the term “spring break” in the process: It is, after all, a story about hard-partying teenagers heading to a sunny coastal resort for several nights of boozy, horny, wholly unsupervised antics. Yet the teens here are British, the destination one of those grisly Mediterranean club hubs geared entirely toward British tourists, and the partying so distinctly British in its aims and etiquette that the translation hardly applies. The vacation presented here is as much like a quintessential spring break as Molly Manning Walker’s fresh, head-turning debut debut feature is like Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” — superficially similar in its pile-driving social chaos and eye-searing fluorescent visuals, but with a very different, damaged heart beating underneath it all.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The new boy doesn’t get a name, and he doesn’t give one. Arriving at an isolated orphanage in rural South Australia in the early 1940s, he’s taken in with brisk kindness by the two nuns who oversee the place, but privileges like names are for children a little further along in their understanding and acceptance of this establishment’s firm Christian principles: Until he’s ready for baptism, the shirtless, mostly wordless Aboriginal newcomer will be acknowledged but not identified. It’s a limbo state that evocatively represents the tension between Australia’s Indigenous population and even the most notionally inclusive of their colonizers; in Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable “The New Boy,” spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Does everyone have to be a hero?” The question comes from thirtysomething art teacher Samet (Deni̇z Celi̇loğlu), burst out in frustration in the heat of an intense argument with his fellow educator and would-be girlfriend Nuray (Merve Di̇zdar), as they disagree over just how, or how much, any individual is obliged to contribute to society. It’s a familiar cry from a male protagonist in a film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, even if it hasn’t ever been worded quite so directly: “About Dry Grasses,” his long, languid but slowly captivating ninth feature, is merely his latest work to examine man’s right, for better or worse, to be selfish, to be an anti-hero, to crave attention and isolation all at once, and to talk about it all night long.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The story template of “Homecoming” is a standard one: Years after an unexplained trauma, a family returns to the place they once called home, where hidden truths come to light and bitter conflicts arise over the course of one seemingly idyllic summer. Yet for all the secrets and lies that shape the narrative of Catherine Corsini’s straightforwardly told but consistently intriguing new film, its most interesting tensions often emerge from things its characters already know, even if they haven’t acknowledged them out loud. For Black single parent Khédidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna), arriving at the Corsican birthplace of her children after 15 years away, disinterring a buried past throws her maternal insecurities into sharp relief; for her teenage daughters Jessica (Suzy Bemba) and Farah (Esther Gohourou), what revelations the trip yields only underline their respective senses of not-belonging in their own small family.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Appealing a conviction for two murders he insists he didn’t commit — while candidly, even proudly, admitting to multiple armed robbery charges — French activist turned criminal Pierre Goldman refuses to call any witnesses in his defense. “I’m innocent because I’m innocent,” he says flatly, rejecting the idea that testaments to his character and conduct have anything to do with it, and professing himself “disgusted” by courtroom pomp and theatricality. Except Goldman knows the power of fiery rhetorical speechifying when it suits him: In “The Goldman Case,” Cédric Kahn’s formally restrained but ultimately electrifying dramatization of a trial that gripped and divided France in 1976, that canny inconsistency is but one unexpected fold in a courtroom drama that finds equal intrigue in legal order and human chaos.