Synopsis

The past collides with our precarious present in Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary Occupied City. From the streets of Amsterdam, McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest, and a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city. What emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on memory, time, and where we’re headed.

Synopsis

Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner (Little Joe) returns to the director’s chair with a provocative thriller out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, Crimson Peak) stars as Ms. Novak, a nutrition teacher at an elite prep school whose dogma of “conscious eating” quickly devolves into cult-like conformity for a group of seven teens. By the time their parents realize how extreme this so-called “Club Zero” has become, it may be too late to break Ms. Novak’s spell over her students.

A mannered, impeccably constructed combination of dry satire and gross-out body horror, Club Zero takes aim at Instagram “wellness” culture and social conformity. A typically controversial statement from an iconoclastic director, it’s bound to be the one of the most talked-about films at this year’s Festival.

Synopsis

One night in his near-empty tower block in contemporary London, Adam (Andrew Scott) has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), which punctures the rhythm of his everyday life. As a relationship develops between them, Adam is preoccupied with memories of the past and finds himself drawn back to the suburban town where he grew up, and the childhood home where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), appear to be living — just as they were on the day they died, 30 years before.

Synopsis

Thirty-five-year-old window cleaner and single father John has dedicated his life to raising his son. Given only a few months to live, he traverses Belfast, visiting homes of the working class and wealthy alike. He has a singular goal: to find the perfect family to raise his toddler Michael. How can he carry out this impossible task? Inspired by true events in the UK, Nowhere Special is a tender tale of pure love, profound heartbreak, and parenthood.

Synopsis

Writer-director debbie tucker green daringly adapts her acclaimed stage work for the screen, a layered collection of scenes that give voice to the joys, struggles, triumphs, and defeats of the ongoing struggle for racial equality. Cinematic flourishes, from invigorating closeups and dynamic camera movement to riveting light design, give visual depth to the arresting dialogue. A blistering examination of racial injustice in the U.S. and U.K., ear for eye is a breathtaking work of anger, joy, and contemplation.