I share only a few of these groaning maladies and observations, but Keith Sullivan, age 45, woke me up this morning at 6:40 am….”mentally I’m still 25 but you couldn’t pay me to go to a club.”

After a grueling eight-hour SAS flight from Oslo to JFK, our plane sat on the tarmac for 55 minutes before we were allowed to park at a gate…thank you so much!

And yet no more passport lines. You stand before a camera and they identify you solely by facial features. Roughly a kin of the digital procedure that 2001’s Dr. Heywood Floyd submitted to when he arrived at the orbiting space wheel.

After waiting way too long for my suitcase and finally reporting it missing via an online system (remember those lost-and-found offices of yore, conveniently located not far from the carousels?…gone), HE’s dark-gray, hard-plastic Samsonite finally turned up…the last lonely bag on the carousel, nearly an hour after we first entered the baggage claim area.

For years my bag had an identifying bright blue tag for instant recognition, but the animals who work in baggage handling in Oslo or JFK stole it.

Plus it was sprinkling outside with big puddles everywhere, and the temps were flat-out chilly. Oslo was at least 10 degrees warmer when I left — high 60s or thereabouts, zero wind. When I finally arrived at Jett’s home in West Orange it was moist scarf weather, technically 57 but more like the high 40s.

Thank you, northeast tristate corridor for transforming traditionally warmish May weather into a miserable mid-March atmosphere.

Put simply, it felt like brutal treatment and was therefore depressing as hell to be back here. I’ve felt this way each and every time I’ve returned from Europe. Fun’s over, fella. Back to grim reality…the enveloping gray salt mines of the soul. I was so happy over there. Oslo and Cannes are great towns, quality-of-life-wise. Oslo is expensive, true, but everything is spotless and gleaming and super-efficient, and the natives are so friendly and obliging

West Orange upside: The trees are fully in bloom, and the luminous green of it all is lovely.

But whitesides are nonetheless a problem. They really are.

I’ve emphasized two or three times that last night’s awarding of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or to Cristian Mingiu‘s Fjord was fully deserved.

I regretfully felt that Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur, an anti-Putin, anti-Ukraine War makeover of Claude Chabrol‘s La Femme Infidel (’69), was a bit rote or even humdrum. It lacks, for one thing, the silky, sensual intrigue of Adrien Lyne‘s Unfaithful, the first Chabrol remake, and Dmitriy Mazurov‘s dull, cuckolded husband can’t hold a candle to Richard Gere.

But I was nonetheless glad for the jury handing Andrey the Grand Prix award, or the second-place prize. The Minotaur win was driven, I believe, by two sentiments: (a) “Good for you, Andrej, for slamming Putin’s demonic war” and (b) “We’re very heartened, Andrej, that you’ve recovered from your horrible Covid illness and that you’re back on the stick.”

I’m kind of appalled that the Best Screenplay trophy went to Emmanuel Marre for A Man Of His Time, an indisputably flat saga about Henri Marre (the director-writer’s great-grandfather) playing the bureaucratic go-along game under Marshall Petain‘s Vichy regime in early 1940s France.

Splitting the Best Actress award between All Of A Sudden costars Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto was one of those “our hearts and spirits are soaring and so we’re locking arms in solidarity” thing. The female jury members — Demi Moore, Chloe Zhao and Ruth Negga — were so exceptionally moved by the confessional, open-hearted dialogue between Efira and Okamoto (Jessica Kiang’s Variety review will give you a taste) that they ignored the fact that their performances have zero dramatic energy or any kind of constructive strategy — their characters do nothing except give voice to meditative musings about facing death with grace and insight as well as the infinite importance of caring and nurturing.

Splitting the Best Actor trophy between Coward costars Emmanuel Macchia, whose wet-behind-the-ears performance is thuddingly one-note (he mostly does a zombie stare while occasionally slightly grinning), and the excessively cloying and wildly irritating Valentin Campagne, whom I wanted to strangle minutes after his initial appearance, was flat-out ridiculous. In so doing the jury more or less spat in the faces of the far more deserving Javier Bardem (The Beloved) and Rami Malek (The Man I Love).

Yesterday’s incident makes four, right? The Butler ear-piercing. The guy at the golf course. The recent White House Correspondents dinner. And now this. The shooter, 21 year-old Nasire Best, is in Valhalla now.

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Yesterday, in a Facebook post by Yale film research scholar Oksana Chefranova, B. Ruby Rich, for many decades a respected film critic (Chicago Reader, old friend of Roger Ebert) and current editor of Film Quarterly, passed along a second-hand observation that calls Cristian Mungiu‘s Palme d’Or-winning Fjord “the MAGA film.”  

This, trust me, is a bluntly inaccurate view, not to mention a combative one. Yes, Fjord does characterize a cabal of Norwegian woke lefties who persecute a Christian couple as villainous, but it doesn’t spray buckshot. There’s nothing rash or intemperate about it. It’s very carefully composed, restrained, measured and precise.

Rich said she’d lifted the “MAGA film” observation from “an esteemed U.S. curator.”  So the progressive critical elite pushback that I predicted yesterday has definitely started.

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No Cannes ‘26 film made HE’s bell go ring-a-ding-ding like Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, and now it’s won the Palme d’Or!

And not a single American critic at Cannes will acknowledge what “Fjord” is actually about — i.e., not Norwegian wokeness but the American and British and French kind also. Or why Mingiu’s film is such a wrenching achievement.

I’m obviously rejoicing, but I’m also dreading reading the flood of “Why ‘Fjord’ Is More Ambiguous Than It Looks” think pieces that will be used to diminish if not torpedo the film’s commercial prospects and awards chances.

Incidentally: I’m heading into Oslo on a nice smooth bus as we speak. It’s 10:07 pm and dusk is only just starting to settle in. I love this!

My SAS Nice flight is scheduled, most definitely scheduled to leave for Oslo at 5:05 pm. SAS airlines rep: “Scheduled, Mr. Wells, but not, I fear, destined to do so.”

I really tried to see and write about more than 23 films at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, but with filing (I could be a faster writer) and a need to walk around and sleep five or six hours and grab an occasional meal, 23 was all I could manage. This is all I ever seem to manage at 10-day festivals.

I decided against seeing Club Kid, and am completely at peace with this. I’m sorry I missed the 4K restored-footage version of The Devils, but it’ll play theatrically in the fall. I didn’t see La Bola Negra or I Saw Buildings Fall Like Lightning so fuck me.

Due to an absence of passion I didn’t write about five of the 23 — Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet A Woman’s Life, Radu Jude‘s The Diary of a Chambermaid, Diego Luna‘s Ashes (Ceniza en la Boca), Marie Kreutzer‘s Gentle Monster and Jean Herry‘s Garance.

I wrote next to nothing about Emmanuel Marre‘s Notre Salut, a mystifyingly draining and generally empty film.

Repeating: The keepers were, in this order, Fjord, Fatherland, The Man I Love, Paper Tiger, The Beloved, The Match, Maverick, Dernsie and (in my estimation at least) Parallel Tales. Nine in all.

I saw nothing yesterday (Friday, 5.22) due to having to write a thorough, thoughtful, carefully phrased pan of Coward, which upset me greatly, and then compose another freelance piece (a Cannes sum–up) for the New York Sun.

Caught, bagged and tagged: (1) The Electric Kiss (d: Pierre Salvadori); Butterfly Jam (d: Kantemir Balagov); (3) The Match (d: Juan Cabral, Santiago Franco); 4. A Woman’s Life (d: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet); 5. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (d: Jane Schoenbrun); 6. Ashes or Ceniza en la Boca (d: Diego Luna), 7. Fatherland (d: Paweł Pawlikowski…actually saw it twice); 8. Parallel Tales (d: Asghar Farhadi); 9. The Diary of a Chambermaid (d: Radu Jude); 10. All of a Sudden (Sudain) (d: Ryusuke Hamaguchi), 11. John Lennon: The Last Interview (d: Steven Soderbergh), 12. Gentle Monster (d: Marie Kreutzer), 13. The Beloved (El Ser Querido) (d: Rodrigo Sorogoyen), 14. Paper Tiger (d: James Gray); 15. Garance (d: Jean Herry); 16. Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean (d: Barnaby Thompson); 17. Moulin (d: Laszlo Nemes); 18. Fjord (d: Cristian Mungiu); 19. Minotaur (d: Andrey Zvagintsev); 20. Notre Salut (d: Emmanuel Marre); 21. Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern (d: Mike Mendez); 22. The Man I Love (d: Ira Sachs); 23. Coward (d: Lukas Dhont).

And the second I arrived, I froze. I’d forgotten how deeply awful those places can be. A guy was singing “New York, New York”, Sinatra-style, and I was thinking about trying to kill myself. Okay, I wouldn’t actually, sincerely try to commmit suicide over the existence of a karaoke bar, but the thought certainly flashed into my brain.

Barnaby Thompson‘s Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean, assessed by Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and posted this morning (5.22):

“From the outset, David Lean was using movies to express who he was. We associate [his films] with the word ‘epic’ (the opposite of ‘intimate’). But Maverick spins on the counterintuitive reality of what a personal filmmaker Lean was.

“By the time he made Brief Encounter (’45), Lean had already married and divorced Isabel Lean, abandoning both her and the son they had together, and he was in the middle of his fraught marriage to Kay Walsh, an actress who would be the second of his six wives, with hundreds of flings in between and on the side. His divorces ultimately left him scrambling for stability and turned him into a kind of moneyed vagabond, living out of suitcases.

“He was successful but rootless, and as Maverick goes on, and we hear the stories of how these relationships foundered and fell apart, something strange happens. Lean’s flawed love life starts out sounding typical enough, and then it comes to seem sordid and opportunistic and finally, in a strange way, it becomes borderline funny, because we hear excepts from the letters Lean would write, and he sounds just like the ardent geeks of Brief Encounter, though the truth is that he was a hound — a hound who needed to convince himself, in every case, that he was having the love of a lifetime.

“Lean was hawkishly handsome with a purse-lipped grin, which in later years made him resemble a genteel English David Lynch. But his polite façade masked a driven, at times raging ego of a personality.”

Aired last night or in the early morning in Cannes, I’ve only managed to watch this. The crowd joining McCartney (whose voice is more than half-gone), Costello, Colbert and the gang on-stage…perfect.