Milodino

John Hillcoat’s Lawless

Nick Cave-scripted prohibition era drama gets dunked in the drink by our critics at Cannes

Day five – live!

All the news, reviews, comment and buzz from the Croisette on day five of the Cannes film festival

4.57pm: Couple more reviews now online: the competition is heating up, that's for sure. Both Beyond the Hills and The Hunt (Jagten) get four stars from Peter; both directors – Cristian Mungiu and Thomas Vinterberg – have been a bit absent for different reasons, so it's good to see them back on such good form.

4.07pm: Just to catch up, here's some of the goodies that have come your way over the last 12 hours, but you might have missed.

The latest edition of the Guardian Film Show, direct from the Croisette. Lawless, it seems, gets bit of a kicking (except for its nice cardigans).

Last night's red carpet gallery: Lawless and The Sapphires were the big films with scarlet underfoot.

Jason Solomons has turned in the Cannes edition of his regular Trailer Trash column for the Observer.

Plus here's Jason's thoughts on the line-up so far.

Vanessa Thorpe has a look at the no-women-directors-in-Cannes issue, again for the Observer.

3.52pm: Hello everyone. Today's live blog is back with me after Catherine and Henry's sterling work - and again, it'll be on the truncated side unfortunately. Weekend working hours, sad to say.

Be that as it may, Cannes 2012 has been going off like a rocket all day, and in Peter's eyes at least, we have the first solid Palm d'Or contender, in Michael Haneke's Amour, which screened this morning.

Here's Peter's five star review.

And here's some more reactions on the thing called Twitter:

Haneke's AMOUR is as tender, beautiful and uncompromising as you've heard. Here's @AskDebruge's #Cannes review: bit.ly/KnPol7

— Justin Chang (@JustinCChang) May 20, 2012

Michael Haneke's AMOUR has been the best film in competition so far. Tender, compassionate and desperately sad. Chapeaux #cannes

— Charlotte Higgins (@chiggi) May 20, 2012

The five stars are out for Michael Haneke's AMOUR. Also my waterproof mascara.

— Kate Muir (@muirkate) May 20, 2012

Michael Haneke's Amour the best film at Cannes so far; a Cries & Whispers for the Dignitas generation. Rigorous, unsparing, superbly played

— Xan Brooks (@XanBrooks) May 20, 2012

Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt

Festen director Thomas Vinterberg makes a storming comeback with this superbly thrilling drama about a kindergarten teacher accused of wrongdoing

It is 14 years since Thomas Vinterberg burst into view with his excoriating family drama Festen, which launched the minimalist Dogme movement and became a much-talked-about cultural phenomenon on its own account. After that, he appeared to lose his touch, and his admirers wondered if he could recover that early mastery (although I was a fan of his 2010 film Submarino).

Well, Vinterberg really has come storming back with this new movie, easily his best since Festen, and a reminder of his superb gift for unsettling collective drama: it is forthright, powerful, composed and directed with clarity and overwhelming force, yet capable of great subtlety and nuance. The theme is admittedly familiar, and so is the implied analysis of what is going on, and yet Vinterberg endows it with such urgency and his superbly constructed script, co-written with Tobias Lindholm, is a screenplay masterclass, completely upending your expectations as how the climactic scene is going to play out.

The lead performance from Mads Mikkelsen is outstanding: he is Lucas, a teacher who's having to work temporarily as a kindergarten assistant due to a school closure, recently divorced, but with many good friends in a close-knit community, and a cheerful participant in all the local traditions, chiefly an annual deer hunt. But things go horribly wrong for Lucas when an accusation is made against him by a child, and the situation escalates out of control.

The Hunt has hints of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Von Trier's Dogville in its portrayal of group hysteria, with its remorseless anti-logic. But of course it returns to the themes of Festen: how family and community, supposedly the bulwarks against chaos and unhappiness, can turn in on themselves. Mikkelsen's performance is entirely convincing and all too plausible; and with him at its centre, The Hunt becomes an unbearably tense drama-thriller. A scene in a supermarket is gripping, and so is Lucas's appearance at the Christmas Eve church service, which can really only be watched through your fingers.

That hunt, and the weaponry used, call to mind Chekhov's dictum about what must happen to a gun which is produced in the first act: but actually, what happens is much more interesting and complex; Lucas's final encounter with his accuser, and the final moments of the film, really are gripping. The film is perhaps open to some plausibility niggles: would not Lucas have engaged a lawyer, or been advised to do so, at some stage? Well perhaps not. Someone in his situation might simply be too stunned to defend his interests, or he could suspect that any such action would be an admission of guilt.

There really isn't ounce of fat on this picture, and the cinematography by Charlotte Bruus Cristensen is ravishingly good. Mikkelsen, an actor still perhaps best known as the Bond villain in Casino Royale, shows just how excellent a performer he is.

Rating: 4/5

Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu has delivered a brilliant, scary portrayal of irrationality and fear in Europe's dark heart

We are way beyond the hills. For his new film in this year's Competition, the Romanian Palme D'Or winner Cristian Mungiu has given us a captivating tragi-comedy of sexual hysteria and material want. This long movie is played out in a kind of real time, a mysterious secular passion play; Mungiu apparently based the action on the reportage of the BBC World Service's Bucharest bureau chief Tatiana Niculescu Bran who wrote about a case in 2005, where a novice died after being subjected to an exorcism in Romania's Tanacu monastery: an irrational horror at the heart of 21st-century Europe.

Fictionalising this real case, Mungiu brings his distinctive dramatic language, his flair for creating group-tableaux photographed from a single, static camera position, his skill in portraying intimate, embattled female relationships, and his shrewd connoisseurship of officialdom's bland, harassed pomposities. In the final act, as the screw of fear is turned, the film seems to bear a weird resemblance to Lars Von Trier. Maybe this bizarre topic is such that the resemblance is inevitable.

Despite the exotic horror of its subject-matter, Beyond the Hills delivers a disturbing message about how we all construct our identities and sense of self to justify life-choices in which we may have had little choice. The action revolves around two young women, who knew each other in the grim orphanage where they brought up: pretty, moon-faced Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) and fierce, sharp-featured Alina (Cristina Flutur). Both forced to leave at 18, Alina went to Germany for work which is vaguely described as waitressing and Voichita was taken in at a stern monastery with no electricity and compelled to be a nun. Perhaps inevitably, Voichita is now conditioned to be a pious, submissive believer and Alina a tough, self-reliant non-believer. But they are still in love, and when Alina returns to Romania so that Voichita can help her with her documents, and maybe return to Germany with her, their relationship comes to a crisis.

Mungiu shows that Voichita could quite easily have taken the decision to abandon the way of faith and leave the country with Alina: and we discover that the German connection appears to have arisen from a certain sleazy individual from Germany who was permitted to take "photos" of the orphanage girls in return for gifts. Maybe the work in Germany that awaits the two women isn't exactly waitressing. But the papers were not in order, so their destinies are arbitrarily shifted another way: Alina comes to live in the orphanage, where Voichita infuriates her by talking about God all the time. Alina's disruptive, sexually threatening presence causes mayhem from almost the very beginning; she acts out her own frustration and self-sacrificially intuits Voichita's.

In the throes of violence and self-harm, Alina is taken to a hospital where a doctor appears to diagnose paranoid schizophrenia; but Alina is patently the only rational person in the monastery – a delusional madhouse presided over by an authoritarian priest (Valeriu Andriuta), a former power plant worker who turned to God after seeing an angel; he wants to deliver Alina from the evil that is inside her. And yet Mingiu's film shows that the secular agencies of the state are at least as culpable: no one wants to look after Alina, and this leaves only the priest and his exorcism.

Beyond the Hills is an agonising, mysterious movie — it is the first event at this year's festival which has come close to providing any controversy: there were whistles and jeers at the final blackout. But I found it enthralling, mysterious and intimately upsetting – a terrible demonstration of how poverty creates a space which irrational fear must fill.

Rating: 4/5

Michael Haneke’s Amour

Michael Haneke's new film, a study of the effects of ageing and dementia on a blissful married couple, is intelligent film-making of the highest order

Michael Haneke's new film in the Cannes competition is everything that could have been expected from him and more: a moving, terrifying and uncompromising drama of extraordinary intimacy and intelligence. Amour asks the question of what will, in Larkin's words, survive of us – and what the word means as we approach the end of our lives. Haneke begins the movie with a flash-forward sequence which impresses on our minds and retinas a devastating memento mori motif, governing how we react to everything that succeeds it.

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva give breathtaking performances as Georges and Anne, retired music teachers in their 80s, living in a handsomely furnished, book-lined Paris apartment with a baby grand piano. They are happy, affectionate, loving; active and content. We see them attending the performance by one of Anne's former pupils, and are delighted with his success. But one day, Anne suffers the first of a series of strokes which paralyse one arm, making playing the piano impossible, accompanied by progressive dementia. Trintignant's face is etched not merely with the cares of age but dismay and fear: the person whom he loved and loves is beginning to vanish before his eyes. As Anne's life ebbs away, so does her identity: is their love itself beginning to be dismantled? The movie reminded me of Proust's remark about the end of life being a mystery akin to actors laying down a role played for so long that it had become part of who they are.

Having promised the terrified Anne that he would never put her in a home or hospital, Georges is placed under the increasing, insupportable strain caring for her at home. And this in turn colours his difficult relationship with his grown-up musician daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) and her new husband Geoff (William Shimell) for whose British mannerisms Anne has never greatly cared.

Perhaps the most horrifying parts of the film are the first, tiny indications that something is wrong. Anne awakens in the middle of the night and stares into space — and then assures the baffled Georges that nothing is wrong. The next morning at breakfast, she becomes as still as a statue, her beautiful, mild face as serene as a death mask. When Anne awakens a minute later, with no clue as to why Georges is suddenly so agitated, Riva superbly conveys her sudden, unmentionable thought: is my husband losing his mind? (Watching this sequence, I was reminded of the awful moment in Haneke's early film The Seventh Continent, in which a small child suddenly and mystifyingly declares that she is blind.)

Haneke shows how in this situation, the family home becomes a barricaded, besieged place and the lives and cares of the outsiders – friends, even close family – are unwelcome and almost meaningless. Their star pupil Alexandre (played by musician Alexandre Tharaud) pays them a well-intentioned but misjudged visit which succeeds only in underlining for Anne the loss of her health, status and music. With courage and good humour, Georges tackles the demanding new choreography of getting his Anne in and out of her wheelchair, on and off the lavatory. While Anne is still lucid, there is deeply moving gentleness and humour in their relationship. He recounts to Anne the grim absurdity of attending the funeral of one of their friends, in which the Beatles' Yesterday was played. (Perhaps he should have been grateful it wasn't All You Need Is Love.) But Anne's light begins to fade.

In Haneke's The Piano Teacher, the discipline of the piano and music were questioned as something cruel, a submission to power. Now music is seen as a token of something different, less bizarre and confrontational, but perhaps no less disquieting. Georges and Anne have no religious beliefs, and their music and refined cultural life might have been expected to provide secular consolation. But do they? Perhaps they are simply something else to be taken away, the ability to play and appreciate music simply erode with the physical faculties. Georges and Anne are thrown back, almost primevally, on each other.

This is film-making at the highest pitch of intelligence and insight. Haneke's mastery and supremacy have resounded here in Cannes like an orchestral chord.

Rating: 5/5

Michael Fassbender

The actor is noted for his huge range of work, from Shame to Jane Eyre and his new role as a robot in the prequel to Alien is likely to add to his plaudits

When Michael Fassbender was a teenager growing up in Killarney, Co Kerry, he wanted more than anything to be a heavy metal rock star. He grew his hair long, wore cut-off combat shorts and 10-hole Doc Martens and spent much of his spare time listening to thrash metal bands Metallica and Slayer at ear-splitting volume.

As it was, he performed a single concert in a pub with his friend Mike. It was the middle of the day and the regulars kept asking them to turn the volume down. "Nobody wants to hear Metallica at lunchtime," Fassbender recalled in a recent interview with GQ magazine.

But heavy metal's loss turned out to be acting's gain. At the age of 35, Fassbender has become part of the Hollywood A-list, an actor with a gift for teasing out the complex nuances of character. The sheer range of his work alone is impressive: in the last year, he has tackled gothic romance (Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre), comic-book heroism (Magneto in X-Men: First Class) and psychotherapy (Carl Jung in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method). Next month, Fassbender will star as an android in Prometheus, Ridley Scott's hotly awaited prequel to his seminal 1979 film, Alien. Although details of the plot are closely guarded, Fassbender has described his character as "incredibly human… he cries robot tears – and creeps everyone out".

Scott has called his new star: "One of the best three or four actors out there. He holds the screen." And according to the director Steve McQueen, who has worked with Fassbender several times: "There is no one like Michael out there right now. And there hasn't been, for me, since Marlon Brando. There's a fragility and a femininity to him, but also a masculinity that can translate. You're not in awe of him. You're part of him. He pulls you in. And that's what you want from an actor. You want people to look at him and see themselves."

On screen, Fassbender is able to convey both intensity and vulnerability in equal measure: his haunting portrayal of a sex addict in Shame won him critical plaudits and a clutch of awards, including the Volpi Cup for best actor at the 2011 Venice film festival. To the astonishment of many, he was overlooked for an Oscars nomination.

Off screen, he is renowned for his dedication. He will read a script up to 300 times before filming and has attributed this perfectionism to his Teutonic ancestry – his father, Josef, is from Germany. "If I came home with 85% in a test," Fassbender has said, "he'd always ask what happened to the other 15%."

When he played IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in McQueen's 2008 film, Hunger, Fassbender survived on 900 calories a day – a diet consisting mainly of nuts, berries and sardines – and lost 40lbs, taking him down to nine stone. Hunger went on to win the Caméra d'Or at Cannes. For Jane Eyre, Fassbender learned to ride, although filming was repeatedly delayed because every time the actor mounted his horse, the animal got an erection – much to the amusement of onlookers.

Vincent Cassel, who spoke to the Observer earlier this year and was Fassbender's co-star in A Dangerous Method, said simply that he was "an amazing actor… he and I really got along. It was one of the reasons I was attracted to doing the film – getting to work with him". His fellow actors use similar phrases to describe him. Although he brings a fierce, almost obsessive passion to each role, when Fassbender is off-duty, he is "very sane", "good company" and "a laugh"; one acquaintance recalls the hilarity of seeing Fassbender solo Cossack-dancing at a friend's wedding a few years ago.

David Cronenberg has described him as "so perky, it drives you crazy. One day [while filming A Dangerous Method], I found him out in the sun in his costume and make-up, with this big smile. I said, 'Michael, why are you smiling like that?' He said, 'I don't know... life.' I said, 'It's so irritating that you're happy all the time.'"

All of this points to the fact that fame has not gone to his head. Despite his Hollywood success, Fassbender still lives in the same modest flat in Hackney, east London, that he has owned since his late 20s, when he was struggling to get enough work to make ends meet. When a magazine journalist visited the flat recently, he noted it was covered with boxes and clothes and had bubbling paint on the ceiling where there had been serious water leakage.

"My mother wouldn't be happy," Fassbender admitted.

The first thing everyone notices is the name. The actor was born in Heidelberg in west Germany, and "Fassbender" is the German term for someone who repairs casks or barrels. Michael was almost born on April Fool's Day but, according to family lore, his father told his mother to hang on a bit longer and he appeared at half-past midnight the next day.

His mother, Adele, comes from County Antrim in Northern Ireland and when Fassbender was two, his parents moved to Killarney, where they ran the West End House restaurant, with his father working there as chef.

Fassbender and his older sister, Catherine (who is now a neuropsychologist), spent summer holidays in Germany and he speaks the language fluently.

In County Kerry, he went to the local Catholic school and was head altar boy at the age of 12 – an onerous responsibility that required him to attend all weddings and funerals and to look after the keys to the church. "A couple of times I slept in," he admitted in an interview with the Guardian. "And the whole congregation was waiting outside the church… but that was my first experience in a way of being on stage, before an audience, of sorts."

At the age of 16, his parents allowed him to move into rooms over the restaurant in town and to live a relatively independent life in return for his working shifts at the weekend. Someone who knows him from that period remembers the young Fassbender as "a very hard worker. He was a great character, great fun. He had great interaction with the customers – he made lots of tips.

"I wasn't surprised that he became an actor. It was all in him. He always had that ability, that roguishness.

"He's still great fun and very down to earth. We're all very proud of him here. When he comes home at Christmas, everyone respects him greatly but he just wants to be plain old Michael and we respect that too."

After failing to make it as a heavy metal star, Fassbender decided to become an actor. At first, his father tried to put him off the idea. "It sounds funny now but I tried to talk him out of it because it is such an unstable profession," Josef Fassbender told a fan site in 2009. "It depends so much on luck, who you meet, how you are received."

Nevertheless, his son went on to study at the Drama Centre in north London, dropping out before graduating after being cast in Steven Spielberg's epic Second World War television mini-series, Band of Brothers. Although it was meant to have been Fassbender's big break, he spent several months in Los Angeles being rejected for parts before eventually retreating to London and carving out a living on British television; through the years, he has appeared on Poirot, Holby City and Murphy's Law.

His breakthrough came when he turned 30 in 2007 and met the artist Steve McQueen, who was then planning to make his debut feature film. Although the pair's first encounter was inauspicious – McQueen thought Fassbender was cocky – they were persuaded to meet again by the casting director. This time, things went more smoothly. McQueen has since compared the experience to "falling in love. You want to keep it. And I think myself and Michael are very pleased that we've found each other in that way".

Fassbender's performance as Bobby Sands gave him his breakthrough into the big time. A year later, Quentin Tarantino cast him as the English officer Lt Archie Hicox in Inglourious Basterds alongside Brad Pitt and there was no turning back.

His appearance in Ridley Scott's science fiction bonanza is likely to earn him yet more plaudits and box-office success. In his personal life, too, he seems more settled of late, having recently confirmed he is dating his Shame co-star, Nicole Beharie. No wonder David Cronenberg remarked on Fassbender's remarkable perkiness – he's got every reason to smile.

Cannes 2012: day four on the red carpet – in pictures

David Cronenberg, Mia Wasikowska and Nick Cave among the guests as Antiviral, Lawless and The Sapphires receive their premieres