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The first scores have landed on Screen’s 2024 Cannes jury grid with Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond receiving an average score of 2.1.

The French filmmaker’s debut received nine scores of two (average) while Katja Nicodemus from Germany’s Die Zeit and Screen’s own critic gave it three (good). This was rounded off by a one star (poor) from Bangkok Post’s Kong Rithdee.

Click on the jury grid above for the most up-to-date version.

Wild Diamond follows a 19-year-old woman who sets her heart on success as a reality show star. Newcomer Malou Khebizi leads the way...

From her debut feature, French filmmaker Agathe Riedinger wants a sparkling yet still-realistic account of the thorny relationship between youth and fame. Wild Diamond is the first film to screen in this year’s Cannes Official Competition and it owns it, not least by including a quippy response about the main character potentially becoming an actress in a Croisette festival film. Riedinger knows the protagonist very well by now, having made Waiting for Jupiter in 2017, a short where she introduced Liane, a young girl living in the South of France who dreams of becoming a reality-tv star. Seven years later, Wild Diamond provides the canvas for a fuller character study with a wonderfully dedicated Malou Khebizi in its lead role.

From its opening sequence, Liane is the center of attention: we see her sway around a light pole of sorts in a wide shot. It’s pitch-black, but her high-heeled...

The heart of “Wild Diamond,” the only debut to play in competition at Cannes this year, is a story we’ve seen before. A young woman living in grim-to-disappointing circumstances has dreams of stardom, and her journey toward fame takes her to dark places, physically and emotionally. You can find versions of this scenario in Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” to Ninja Thyberg’s “Pleasure.” Director Agathe Riedinger’s debut feature has little new to say about the pursuit of fame and the toll it takes despite a truly unique heroine in Liane, played with a strange and alluring distance by Malou Khebizi. It’s only a shame that the film does her a disservice in leaving the world around her underdeveloped.

The 19-year-old Liane has mastered the art of making herself up for the internet. In one sequence, we watch as she gets ready. She contours her face with precision.

“Hater says I’m superficial,” muses one of the TikTok influencers who rule the version of the world that obsesses 19-year-old Liane in Agathe Riedinger’s Cannes Competition entry Wild Diamond (Diamant Brut). “Yes, I’m superficial,” continues the influencer, “but that doesn’t mean I’m a moron.”

Maybe not, but there aren’t many prospects for young women like her fan Liane (Malou Khebizi), whose adeptness at facial contouring, applying diamantés to her towering shoes and blowing kisses to her 50,000-and-counting followers are not generally regarded as marketable skills. Not in the old-school versions of the world, anyway; she can see that her middle-aged career counsellor, for all that she is worn down by Liane’s tantrums, pities her.

Liane doesn’t see things that way. For her, being beautiful – her kind of beautiful, read: hot — is her future. It makes people look at her. They may look...

When Liane (Malou Khebizi), the protagonist of Agathe Riedinger’s stylish debut feature Wild Diamond (Diamant Brut), says that she will be the French Kim Kardashian, it sounds more like a prophecy than a desire.

The 19-year-old waitress from Fréjus is obsessed with fame and beauty. She scrupulously saved her paychecks to get breast augmentation surgery. She had a friend inject hyaluronic acid into her lips to plump them. Now she has her sights set on getting a Bbl. Liane chronicles her body modifications on Instagram, where her thousands of followers leave adoring comments that she repurposes as daily affirmations. “I’m not like everyone else,” Liane says throughout the film to the skeptics and doubters.

Premiering in competition at Cannes, Wild Diamond is Riedinger’s compassionate contribution to the “perils-of-social-media-and-fame” genre. The film expands on themes first explored in the director’s 2017 short Waiting for Jupiter, which followed a young woman,...

Stillwater Review — Stillwater (2021) Film Review, a movie directed by Tom McCarthy, and starring Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, Camille Cottin, Lilou Siauvaud, Deanna Dunagan, Idir Azougli, Anne Le Ny, Moussa Maaskri, Isabelle Tanakil, Naidra Ayadi, Pierre Piacentino, Jean-Marc Michelangeli and William Nadylam. Tom McCarthy’s new film, Stillwater, plays out similarly to his Oscar-winning film [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Stillwater (2021): Matt Damon Excels in a Mostly Conventional Drama...

Marseille reaffirms its status as one of the most dangerous cities in France with “Shéhérazade,” director Jean-Bernard Marlin’s accomplished feature debut. But its reputation for crime and poverty makes all the more affecting the tentative relationship between a troubled 17-year-old boy just sprung from juvenile detention and the title character, the teenage prostitute he falls in love with. Shooting in a color-streaked vérité style and coaxing terrific performances from his non-pro cast, Marlin clearly has a promising future ahead. What keeps ‘Shéhérazade’ from ranking higher in the pantheon of streetwise French crime dramas is the story’s overall familiarity. But the question of whether the love between two lost teenagers can survive such a miserable environment provides more than enough emotional pull, provided that audiences can find this 2018 Cannes Film Festival gem on Netflix.

“Shéhérazade” is a feature-length riff on Marlin’s similarly Marseille-set “La Fugue” (aka “The Runaway...