While much of the attention and conversation on the French riviera is around the buzzy films competing for the prestigious Palme d’Or, often some of the beset films of the festival can be found in the Un Certain Regard section. Here are some of our favorites so far:
“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” (dir. Rungano Nyoni)
Driving home from a fancy dress party in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across her uncle’s body on an empty Zambian road. As the funeral unfolds, the dark secrets of her middle-class family — and of the man they mourn — begin to surface.
There’s a sick joke at the heart of Rungano Nyoni’s sophomore feature, and she knows exactly how to land it. A woman finds a dead man and nobody seems to care, least of all her. What unfolds is a funeral you can’t look away from — absurdist, stinging, and unexpectedly funny in the way that only the most painful truths tend to be. Nyoni doesn’t hold your hand through any of it. She just pulls you into the rituals and silences of a family that has perfected the art of looking away, until the young women in its orbit decide they’re done doing that. Molasses-dark comedy wrapped around something that burns.
“My Sunshine” (dir. Hiroshi Okuyama)
On the snow-covered island of Hokkaido, a shy boy with a stutter falls under the spell of a figure skating prodigy and her quietly guarded coach. A tentative trio forms on the ice as winter begins its slow retreat.
Some films whisper. Hiroshi Okuyama’s gentle coming-of-age drama is barely above a breath — shot in hazy, overexposed light that makes the whole thing feel like a half-remembered childhood afternoon. The two young leads carry years of unspoken feeling in their faces, communicating more in a glance across an ice rink than most films manage in a whole monologue. It feels like a memory — the kind you’re not quite sure is real. Sweet and soft and quietly uplifting in a way that sneaks up on you. Not because it shook you. Because it held you.
“Flow“ (dir. Gints Zilbalodis)
After a catastrophic flood swallows the world, a solitary black cat finds reluctant refuge on a drifting sailboat alongside a capybara, a lemur, a dog, and a great bird. No humans. No dialogue. Just survival, and something that starts to feel like trust.
Not a single word is spoken in Gints Zilbalodis’ extraordinary second feature, and honestly? It doesn’t need one. Built entirely in open-source software by a Latvian director still in his twenties, Flow moves like water — fluid, alive, impossible to hold still. It has the visual grammar of a dream and the emotional pull of something far older and more primal. Watching that cat inch toward its fellow survivors, sharing fish, learning to steer, you feel something loosen in your chest. Cinema doesn’t always need language. Sometimes it just needs a cat on a boat at the end of the world.
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Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter and Letterboxd. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.
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Hey, I’m Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven’t yet seen represented. I’m also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.
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