#Light Apprentice

[neotoxin-x]

Mya from Light Apprentice

[themastergifs]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MICHELLE GOMEZ (November 23, 1966)

[lightwise]

THEY REFLECT EACH OTHER

[notyoujamie]

Capaldi era (2013-2017) ↪ I do what I do, because it's right! Because it's decent! And above all, it's kind. It's just that. Just kind.

[yogar-un-lyste-d]

I’ve been reading a lot of Star Wars Novels lately but one of Rael Aveross’ lines in Master and Apprentice really stood out to me

‘We don’t choose the light because we want to win… We choose it because it is the light’

To me it very well puts together the fight of the Jedi in the Clone Wars and later, the remaining Jedi’s battle against the Empire. They could of very well of given up but they chose to keep fighting on the side of good not because they knew it was the winning side, but because it was good because it was filled with light.

It’s Rael restating Qui-Gon Jinn’s line from earlier in the novel but I prefer the more simple way Rael phrases it.

[carnivoured]

[devoraqs]

Doc on doc Ginger on Ginger smooches continue

[soullessseraphim]

Hey have you ever wondered what having a dream in which you discover you're a lich looks like?

(Warnings in tags)

Music used:

I HAD SO MUCH FUN WITH THIS WAAAAA

Besides the whole A Greater Bliss album is FIRE INSPIRATION WILL DEFINITELY USE IT FOR OTHER PROJECTS HSHHSHSHS

[itsstilltru]

What if it was Strahm instead…

Without Saw lighting:

Couldn’t decide which I liked better so here you go 🪚

[finitevoid]

vv roleswap

Vanitas sits cross-legged on his bed, holding Terra’s old practice Keyblade and contemplating the exam’s results. You failed to keep the darkness inside of you in-check. Terra, hesitantly, as if despite himself, had looked at Vanitas, when their master said that. 

Vanitas rubs his gloved hand over his mouth, relishing in the scratchy feeling of leather against his soft skin. His thumb brushes the wood grain of the Keyblade, idly. 

Vanitas ponders the ways of the light and the dark. Terra and Vanitas have always been close; and what is Vanitas, if not ineffably tainted by the dark?

He chokes on the thought, attempting to swallow it and the emotions it conjures. He cannot allow himself to make an Unversed. Vanitas is being foolish; foolhardy, as his Master would say. He has to keep better control of his wandering thoughts; a focused mind leads to a focused heart, and only with focus can Vanitas overcome the darkness inside of him. 

And then there’s a wooden knock on his doorway. Expecting Aqua, or maybe the Master, Vanitas tosses the practice Keyblade onto his bedspread with more force than it probably requires, raising his head somewhat miserably, to look at—

Vanitas goes very, very still.

A boy stands in the open doorway, standing prim and tall. He’s dressed in… some kind of armor, Vanitas decides. It doesn’t look like metal, but it doesn’t look like cloth either. Not quite flesh, though something about it feels… organic. Bright, gleaming white, it hugs the boy’s torso, covering him from the tips of his fingers to the spiked, jagged helmet that covers his face.

He’s standing with one hand behind his back, and he raises the other in a jaunty wave. He bobs excitedly in place, leaning his weight on his heels. 

It sort of reminds Vanitas of when he… no, that can’t be right. But there’s something about this boy, something that has him freezing still like a rabbit standing before a predator. An Unversed tugs itself from his chest, bubbling up from the pooling darkness at Vanitas’ feet. 

A Hareraiser rises from the ground, formless purple turning into a rabbit, red eyes crying, holding onto its own ears. Vanitas feels his fear ebb, halfway to being calm. Swallowing the immediate rush of guilt and regret that tastes like bile, he fixes his gaze on the stranger.

He stands from his bed, falling into a combat position. The masked boy pays this no mind, though. Instead, he bends a little at the waist and coos. “Oh my,” he gasps, reaching out for the Unversed. “Aren’t you just the cutest little thing!” It flinches away from his outstretched fingers, skittering across the wooden floor. It hides behind Vanitas’ shins, making tiny noises.

“Who are you?” Vanitas snaps, making his voice as authoritative as he doesn’t feel.

The mask tilts, until it's faceless visage is looking at Vanitas, and not the Hareraiser. “So that’s seriously your Negativity? That’s so cool,” he sighs, forlorn and breathless, like he’s genuinely jealous of Vanitas’ Unversed. “Oh, sorry!” He chirps, straightening up suddenly. “Where’re my manners?” He hooks his hands underneath his helmet and pulls it off, revealing—

—something about his face is making Vanitas’ head spin. Spin and spin, like someone’s attached a rope to his heart and is tugging on it, incessantly. Something is making Vanitas’ chest feel hot and his fingers twitch. Viciously, he pushes it down. Shoves it back down and stomps on it, pulling on his memories of his Master’s advice for strength.

“You have to be in control, Vanitas,” Master Eraqus had said, three years ago now, eyes stony with seriousness. “You can never, ever let your heart run wild.”

It helps, a little. It makes him feel more grounded, present in his body. He is the master of his emotions, and one day, he will be free of his darkness. He just has to remember that.

Unbeknownst to Vanitas’ disparate emotions, the boy beams wide. His cheeks are ruddy with a youthful vigor that Vanitas lacks, and his green eyes sparkle like gems. There’s something bright, about his eyes, about his teeth. Like they’re backlit by the setting sun, just enough to make them gleam.

Blonde hair bounces as he sticks his hand out to shake. “I’m Ventus!”

He doesn’t want to touch this boy; something is telling him not to touch him. Something in the heart-pounding fear rattling his chest. Except for— something in him wants nothing more than to touch him. To feel— skin unlike Vanitas’ own. Unperturbed, Ventus drops his hand, grinning wide.

“I can’t believe myself! My master would have my head for being so rude!” He laughs, cheerful and bubbly, shaking his head. He thumps the heel of his hand to his forehead, expression sheepish. “That’s no way to introduce myself, is it? Especially not to someone who could become a friend.”

He drops his hand, and something about his entire cadence changes. His expression sharpens, though it doesn’t change; his smile goes from sheepish to wicked between one blink and the next. “Because we are going to become friends, aren’t we…” there’s something leading in his tone, halfway sweet and halfway… something else. “…Vanitas?”

Vanitas’ fingers go cold, and before he can swallow the feeling, another Hareraiser is rising from an inky puddle at his feet. Then two more, rising into existence as if formed from the shuddering in his chest, the pounding of his heartbeat. 

“How do you know that?” Vanitas asks, sharply. Another Hareraiser, and only then does the fear fade. “Tell me how you know my name.”

Ventus’ eyebrows climb to his hairline, a smile frozen to his face. “I know a lot,” he says, shrugging like this is… like this is nothing, a casual discussion, a joke. He smiles like Vanitas is an idiot, fluttering a hand. “‘Cause, the thing is… I’m not from here.”

Vanitas stares at him, blankly.

Grinning, Ventus extends a finger towards Vanitas’ window. Not just his window; at the sky. The stars. Other worlds. He’s from… he’s from away. He’s from outside. 

Vanitas wasn’t born on the Land of Departure. Nobody is; the Master welcomes those with the aptitude to wield a Keyblade, or he gifts them with the aptitude. Aqua and Terra don’t ever talk much about their life before coming here, but he knows there’s nowhere for them to return to. Why would there be? Their home is here.

Except, Vanitas wasn’t born here. His memory is— infamously— spotty, but he remembers… not a desert so much as just dirt, dirt devoid of life. Scraping against his soft, bare palms; hard dusty rock that spat clouds that made him choke. Flashes of sheer brown cliffaces, and the taste of his own blood.

“You’re from outside…” Vanitas says.

Ventus laughs like that’s just so funny, shoulders shaking and chest shuddering. He laughs like nobody Vanitas has ever met, like his laughter buoys him, elevates him, makes him better. And something burns in Vanitas— something between this boy’s face, and his laugh, and his name. 

Wait. 

The only other Keyblade Master— the man Master Eraqus had called his good friend— who’d come to oversee Aqua and Terra’s exam… he was from outside, too. This boy had joked about a master, maybe even a Master.

Vanitas says, “Master Eraqus said Master Xehanort didn’t have an apprentice.”

Ventus’ expression snaps to Vanitas, and for the first time, something truly ugly flashes across his face. And then it’s smoothed out, turned into something gentle and soft and a little mocking. “Well… if you spend all your time locked up here,” he shrugs a shoulder, giving a gentle smile. “What’dyou know?”

Vanitas doesn’t look down to see whatever Unversed that statement spawns; he just stands there, almost stutters out of his combat stance, and then forces himself to summon his Keyblade. Void Gear is heavy in his hand, and he holds it in front of himself defensively.

Ventus’ eyes fall onto the Keyblade, and then flick back to Vanitas’ face. “Funny,” he says, a wry tilt to his mouth. “Can I give you some advice? Since we’re friends?”

“Since when have we been friends?” Vanitas snaps.

Ventus laughs again. “Since always, silly,” he mimes wiping a tear from his eye. “But, hey. Since you don’t believe me, I’ll tell you anyway! Call it a sign of good faith.” He beams, clasping his hands in front of himself. “You might…” He taps a hand to his cheek, looking up at nothing, theatrical, “…want to check on Terra.”

“What?” Whatever Vanitas was expecting, it wasn’t that.

“I don’t think he’s gonna be feeling like himself,” Ventus says, the sides of his smile curled up sharp. “Not for much longer, anyway.”

Vanitas’ mind is racing, even as more Unversed rise from his feet. The Master will be so disappointed in him… but he can’t think about that. Instead, he thinks about Ventus. About his words, and his mocking smile, and the fact that he knows Vanitas’ name.

“What’s gonna happen to Terra?” Vanitas’ voice is foreign to his ears, a cruel scrape against the otherwise quiet. “What are you going to do to Terra?”

He feels the Unversed looming around the dark corners of the room.

“Me?” Ventus says, pointing to himself. “Nothing.”

“What is your master going to do, then?”

His eyes glow. He seems to gleam. His face… looking at it, Vanitas feels hot. Like claws raking against his heart, rending open his chest from the inside out. Looking at his face makes him feel like Vanitas is oozing something.

“Who are you?” 

“Who cares?" He says, easy as breathing. "Anyway, my master'll be expecting me back. Nice meeting you!” Ventus waves a hand, wiggling his fingers. And then there’s a pop, so loud Vanitas’ ears hurt. A bright, white light flashes, like lightning crashing against the cold ground. Vanitas flinches away, flinging Void Gear in front of his chest protectively.

When he blinks, Ventus is gone. Vanitas is alone.

Well, Vanitas and a horde of Unversed. He rubs at his nose, blowing out a frustrated breath. Another Unversed forms as he does; a Blue Sea Salt hovers in the air next to his head, and it gently headbutts him. 

Vanitas shoves it away, still trying to calm the racing of his heart. A Bruiser noses underneath Vanitas’ arm, and he allows himself to lean against it, lightheaded. He doesn’t know what’s going on— not yet. 

But he needs to find out. He needs to warn the Master, about this boy, and—

Maybe… Maybe he better check on Terra, first. That’s all. It’ll all make sense. Vanitas will make it make sense. With his bare hands and determination clutched in both fists, he’ll make it make sense.

And if he locks the Unversed in his bedroom, trapping them inside… well, nobody needs to know. He has to take precautions. He has to hide the evidence. He has to figure this out.

He needs to focus.

[bikananjarrus]

if yord had lived he'd be leading the hunt for qimir and osha and we would've gotten the most delicious tension between him and qimir. qimir would start out frustrated that yord got away, intent on finishing what he started. and yord, once hunted, now hunter, once an exemplary jedi, and now solely focused on revenge disguised as righteous justice (which it is also a bit of that). and qimir starts to enjoy the game, the chase. and in this timeline, sol still dies, osha still goes with qimir, but yord was unconscious, recovering in a bacta tank, so all he knows when he wakes up is that qimir is out there and took osha, his friend, away. so then you also have the tension of that confrontation, the realization that osha has willingly turned, and that maybe yord can't blame her for that, because what has he been doing these past many months, years, maybe, but give in to the selfish desire to finish what he started too?

[whileiamdying]

All the Films in Competition at Cannes, Ranked from Best to Worst

The twenty-two films that premièred in the 2024 festival’s main program offered much to savor and revile.

By Justin Chang May 26, 2024

The seventy-seventh annual Cannes Film Festival came to a startling and joyous conclusion on Saturday night, when the competition jury, chaired by Greta Gerwig, awarded the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor, to “Anora,” a funny, harrowing, and finally quite moving portrait of a sex worker’s madcap New York misadventures. It was startling because the movie, though one of the best-received in the competition, had not been widely tipped for the top prize, which seldom goes to a U.S. film; with “Anora,” Sean Baker becomes the first American director to win the Palme since Terrence Malick did, for “The Tree of Life” (2011), thirteen years ago. And it was joyous not only because the award was bestowed on a worthy and remarkable film but because Baker used the occasion to deliver the best, most eloquent and impassioned acceptance speech I’ve ever heard a Palme winner give.

Reading from prepared remarks, Baker singled out two other filmmakers in the competition, Francis Ford Coppola and David Cronenberg, as among his personal heroes. He dedicated the award to sex workers everywhere, a fitting tribute from a filmmaker who has put their lives front and center, with drama, humor, and empathy, in movies like “Starlet” (2012), “Tangerine” (2015), and “Red Rocket” (2021). He tossed some exquisite shade in the direction of the “tech companies” behind the so-called streaming revolution—including, presumably, Netflix, which came away as one of the night’s big winners; its major acquisition of the festival, Jacques Audiard’s musical “Emilia Pérez,” won two prizes. And, in a moment that drew rapturous applause, Baker delivered a plea on behalf of theatrical films, declaring, “The future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theatre.”

I was fortunate to see all twenty-two films in the Cannes competition on the big screen, projected under superior conditions in houses packed with fellow movie lovers. It’s my hope that, when these movies are released in the U.S., as the great majority of them likely will be, you will seize the chance to see them on the big screen as well—even “Emilia Pérez,” which Netflix may not keep in theatres for long, but whose bold dramatic and stylistic risks have the best chance of winning you over if they have your undivided, wide-awake attention.

I have ranked the movies in order of preference, from best to worst. Here they are:

1. “Caught by the Tides”

Jia Zhangke, a Cannes competition veteran, has long been the cinema’s preëminent chronicler of modern China (“Mountains May Depart,” “Ash Is Purest White”), mapping its social, cultural, and geographical complexities with great formal acumen, and also with the longtime collaboration of his wife, the superb actress Zhao Tao. Jia’s latest work, drawing on an archive of footage shot in the course of roughly two decades, unfurls a story in fragments, about a woman (Zhao) and a man (Li Zhubin) who fall in love, bitterly separate, and have a melancholy reunion years later. It’s an achievement by turns fleeting and monumental: a series of interlocking time capsules, a wrenching feat of self-reflection, and a stealth musical, in which Zhao dances and dances, standing in for millions who have learned to sway and bend to history’s tumultuous beat.

2. “All We Imagine as Light”

As the first Indian feature invited to compete at Cannes in nearly three decades, Payal Kapadia’s narrative début (after her 2021 documentary, “A Night of Knowing Nothing”) would be notable enough; that the movie is so delicately felt and sensuously textured is cause for outright celebration. Winner of the festival’s Grand Prix, or second place, it tells the story of two roommates, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), who work as nurses at a Mumbai hospital. It teases out their personal circumstances—Prabha’s estrangement from her unseen husband, Anu’s frowned-upon romance with a young Muslim man (Hridhu Haroon)—with a quiet truthfulness that, like the glittering lights of the city, lingers expansively in the memory. (A forthcoming Sideshow/Janus Films release.)

3. “Grand Tour”

The Portuguese director Miguel Gomes (“Tabu,” “Arabian Nights”) delivered some of the most virtuosic filmmaking in the competition—as the jury recognized by giving him the Best Director prize—with this characteristically yet extraordinarily playful colonial-era travelogue. Shifting between color and black-and-white, set in 1917 but full of fourth-wall-breaking anachronisms, the movie tells a story of sorts about a roving British diplomat (Gonçalo Waddington) and a fiancée (Crista Alfaiate) he’s in no hurry to marry. But its true fascination lies in the humid atmosphere and wanderlust-inspiring splendor of its East and Southeast Asian locations, ranging from Singapore and Bangkok to Shanghai and Rangoon. It’s a movie to get lost in.

4. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”

It’s impossible to absorb this blistering domestic drama without thinking of its dissident director, Mohammad Rasoulof, who recently fled Iran after being sentenced to prison and a flogging. (His appearance at his film’s première made for one of the most emotional moments in recent Cannes memory.) Shot entirely in secret, the story follows a Tehran-based husband (Missagh Zareh) and wife (Soheila Golestani) who are increasingly at war with their progressive-minded young-adult daughters (Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki) during nationwide political protests led by women. The result is a thriller of propulsive skill and blunt emotional force, marrying the muscularity of an action film to the psychological intensity of a chamber drama. (A forthcoming Neon release.)

5. “Anora”

The director Sean Baker is near the height of his storytelling powers with this dazzling (and now Palme d’Or-winning) portrait of a Manhattan strip-club dancer (a revelatory Mikey Madison) who impulsively marries the ultra-spoiled son (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch. Much comic chaos ensues, some of it pushed past the brink of plausibility, but Baker’s multifaceted love for his characters proves infectious and sustaining, as does his belief that acts of unexpected kindness can redeem even the darkest nights of the soul. (A forthcoming Neon release.)

6. “The Shrouds”

Early on in this elegantly sombre yet mordantly funny new movie, which stars Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and Guy Pearce, the director David Cronenberg, a master of cerebral horror, unveils his latest invention: a technologically advanced burial shroud that allows people to watch a loved one’s body decomposing in the grave. So begins a drolly fluid inspection of classic Cronenberg themes—the deterioration of the flesh, the instability of the image, the paranoia-inducing incursions of technology into every aspect of life—but imbued with a nakedly personal dimension that the director has noted in interviews; the story was inspired by his wife’s death, in 2017, from cancer.

7. “Megalopolis”

In this legendarily long-gestating passion project, which I’ve written about at length, Francis Ford Coppola posits that our fragile, battered civilization is headed the way of the Roman Empire. The grimness of that prospect is unsurprising from a director accustomed to peering deep into the heart of American darkness (the “Godfather” movies, “The Conversation,” “Apocalypse Now”). For all that, the filmmaking here glows with a particularly hard-won optimism, even a welcome sense of play—borne out by an ensemble of actors, including Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, and especially Aubrey Plaza, who fully embrace Coppola’s rhetorical and conceptual flights of fancy.

8. “The Substance”

Sympathetic or sadistic? Feminist or misogynist? Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror bonanza, which won the festival’s award for Best Screenplay, has been one of the competition’s more polarizing hits, which is unsurprising; divisiveness should be expected from a story about an aging actress and TV fitness guru who, desperate to regain her youthful bod of yesteryear, effectively splits herself in two. Whether the outlandish premise (think “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by way of “Death Becomes Her”) and its blood-gushing fallout withstand intellectual scrutiny, there’s no doubting the ferocity of the two leads, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, or Fargeat’s sheer filmmaking verve as she pushes her ideas to their sanguinary conclusions.

9. “Motel Destino”

Just a year after the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz appeared in competition with a surprisingly stiff-corseted English period drama, “Firebrand,” it was bracing to watch him rebound with the competition’s most sexually uninhibited and flagrantly horny title; corsets don’t apply here, and even underwear proves blissfully optional. Set at a seedy roadside motel where the clientele never stops moaning, it’s a feverishly shambling erotic thriller starring three very game actors (Iago Xavier, Nataly Rocha, and Fábio Assunção) in a romantic triangle that plays like James M. Cain with sex toys—“The Postman Always Cock Rings Twice,” as it were.

10. “Emilia Pérez”

A trans-empowerment musical set against the backdrop of Mexico’s drug cartels might sound like a dubious proposition on paper, and, for the many detractors of this genre-melding big swing from the French director Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet,” “The Sisters Brothers”), what actually made it onto the screen was no better. But I was disarmed from the start by Audiard’s quasi-Almodóvarian vibes, his touchingly imperfect embrace of song-and-dance stylization, and, most of all, his three leads: the remarkable discovery Karla Sofía Gascón, a scene-stealing Selena Gomez, and a never-better Zoe Saldaña. All three (along with Adriana Paz) were recognized with the festival’s Best Actress prize, awarded collectively to the movie’s ensemble of actresses; Audiard also won the Jury Prize. (A forthcoming Netflix release.)

11. “Oh, Canada”

After a tense trilogy of dramas about male redemption through violence (“First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” “Master Gardener”), the writer and director Paul Schrader has taken a gentler turn with an adaptation of “Foregone,” a 2021 novel by the late Russell Banks. (It’s his second Banks adaptation, after the 1997 drama “Affliction.”) In exploring the fragmented consciousness of an aging documentary filmmaker (played at different ages by Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi), Schrader bravely forsakes the narrative fastidiousness of his recent work and takes on grand themes of memory, mortality, and artistic self-reckoning, to formally ragged but sincerely moving effect.

12. “The Girl with the Needle”

This stark and terrifying black-and-white drama from the Swedish-born, Polish-based director Magnus von Horn (“Sweat”) was perhaps the competition’s bleakest entry. Set in Copenhagen immediately after the First World War, it pins us so mercilessly to the hard-bitten perspective of Karoline (an excellent Vic Carmen Sonne), a factory seamstress who becomes pregnant out of wedlock, that we scarcely notice her story shifting in a different, more sinister direction. It’s a bitterly hard-to-stomach brew of a movie, at once hideous and beautifully made, with a chilling supporting turn by Trine Dyrholm as a friend whose interventions turn out to be anything but benign.

13. “Three Kilometres to the End of the World”

The setting of this well-observed but emotionally opaque drama, from the Romanian actor turned director Emanuel Pârvu, is a small rural village where a closeted teen-age boy, Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), is brutally beaten after being caught in an intimate moment with a male traveller. Pârvu teases out the legal, psychological, and moral fallout with the pitch-perfect performances and laserlike formal focus that have become hallmarks of new Romanian cinema. But, though the movie is persuasive enough as an indictment of small-town religious fundamentalism and homophobia, it proves curiously incurious about Adi’s perspective, to the detriment of its own human pulse.

14. “Kinds of Kindness”

After his Oscar-winning period romps “The Favourite” (2018) and “Poor Things” (2023), the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos scales back—but goes long—with a sprawling, increasingly tedious compendium of comic cruelty. My favorite of the film’s three disconnected stories, all featuring the same actors, is the one where Jesse Plemons (the ensemble M.V.P., as the jury recognized with its Best Actor award) plays Willem Dafoe’s Manchurian candidate; my least favorite is the one where Emma Stone joins a sweat-worshipping sex cult. The one where Stone slices off her finger and cooks it for Plemons falls—much like the movie in Lanthimos’s over-all œuvre—somewhere in the middle. (A Searchlight Pictures release, opening June 21st in theatres.)

15. “Bird”

My admiration for the English filmmaker Andrea Arnold (“American Honey”) is such that I’m eager to revisit her latest rough-and-tumble coming-of-age story and find that I undervalued it. Arnold is certainly skilled at integrating recognizable actors, which in this case includes Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski, into her grottily realist frames, and she has an appealing lead performer in Nykiya Adams, as a twelve-year-old girl who overcomes persistent abuse and neglect. But the story may lose you—as it lost me—with a magical-realist turn that magnifies, rather than minimizes, the tortured-animal symbolism that has often dogged Arnold’s work.

16. “Beating Hearts”

An exchange of insults at a high-school bus stop provides a saucy meet-cute for a good girl (Mallory Wanecque) and a ne’er-do-well boy (Malik Frikah); so begins a raucous and endearing love story for the ages, in which the director Gilles Lellouche, with outsized glee and little discipline, merrily appropriates the conventions of classic Hollywood musicals and gangster flicks. The result is much too long at nearly three hours—the story spans several years, with Adèle Exarchopoulos and François Civil playing older versions of the two leads—but I can’t say I didn’t warm to its rambunctious cornball charm.

17. “Limonov: The Ballad”

Why make a film about Eduard Limonov, the globe-trotting Russian dissident poet and punk provocateur reviled for his pro-fascist sympathies? The filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov never musters a satisfying answer in this muddled English-language bio-pic, despite an energetically uninhibited central performance by Ben Whishaw and a cheeky panoply of filmmaking techniques—jittery camerawork, lengthy tracking shots—meant to catch us up in the épater-la-bourgeoisie exuberance of Limonov’s revolt. Considering his earlier work, I prefer the rebel-youth vibes of “Leto” (2018) and the dazzling cinematic assaults of “Petrov’s Flu” (2021), both of which also screened in competition here.

18. “Parthenope”

Nearly every new picture from the Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino could be reasonably called “The Great Beauty,” the title of his gorgeous 2013 cinematic tour of Rome. (It left that year’s Cannes empty-handed, but won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.) His latest work remains most intriguing for its ambivalent but still sensually overpowering vision of the director’s home town, Naples, from which springs a modern-day goddess, named after Parthenope, a Siren from Greek mythology. She’s played by Celeste Dalla Porta, a great beauty indeed and an empathetic screen presence, though only fitfully does her character seem worthy of this movie’s epic enshrinement.

19. “Wild Diamond”

Another disquisition on beauty and its discontents, this time from the débuting French writer and director Agathe Riedinger. She hurls us the life and busy social-media feed of a nineteen-year-old, Liane (a terrific Malou Khebizi), who has nipped, tucked, and tailored every part of herself to realize her dream of being selected for a hot new reality-TV series. Part influencer-culture cautionary tale, part bad-girl Cinderella story, the movie glancingly suggests the soul-rotting effects of beauty worship, but it falls victim to the trap that Liane is trying to avoid: in a sea of worthy candidates, it doesn’t especially stand out.

20. “The Apprentice”

Donald Trump’s attorneys have threatened legal action to block the release of this drama about his early rise to fame and wealth under the mentorship of the attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). It speaks to the useless proficiency of Ali Abbasi’s movie that the prospect of such censorship provokes more indifference than outrage. Shot to evoke cruddy nineteen-eighties VHS playback, the movie is well acted by Strong, Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, and an increasingly makeup-buried Sebastian Stan as Trump himself, depicted from the start as a sack of shit that gets progressively shittier. It’s not dismissible, but it’s hardly the stuff of revelation, either.

21. “Marcello Mio”

In this trifling meta-comedy from the French filmmaker Christophe Honoré (previously in the 2018 Cannes competition with the lovely “Sorry Angel”), the actress Chiara Mastroianni embarks on a strainedly whimsical personal odyssey to examine the legacy of her late father, the legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, and her own conflicted place therein. To that end, she spends much of this overstretched movie in “8½” and “La Dolce Vita” black-suited drag as she navigates a roundelay of industry in-jokes; among the French cinema luminaries making appearances are Fabrice Luchini, Nicole Garcia, and, most welcome, Chiara’s mother, Catherine Deneuve.

22. “The Most Precious of Cargoes”

The French director Michel Hazanavicius continues his uneven post-“The Artist” run with this animated Second World War fable, adapted from a 2019 novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg (and narrated by the late Jean-Louis Trintignant). It has an affecting opening stretch, in which a baby girl, thrown by her desperate father from an Auschwitz-bound train, is rescued and raised in secret by a woodcutter’s kindhearted wife. But when the child’s provenance is discovered, stoking local antisemitism, the movie becomes a bathetic wallow in Holocaust imagery, drowned in an Alexandre Desplat score whose every surge turned my heart increasingly to stone. ♦

[themastergifs]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MICHELLE GOMEZ (November 23, 1966)

[iwanttobepersephone]

Since you said you wanted a request.... please give me an angsty Halt and Will in book 9! <3

So, this still looks more funny than it does angsty to me, but I did finally remember to put a lazy little watermark thing, so proud of that

Here ya go!

[rookflower]

Can you draw swiftpaw and gorsepaw together in starclan please

im sorry gorsepaw looks like brightpaw here that just happens when you sit someone next to swiftpaw. no im not making his fur darker or getting rid of the white or anything. anyways they are ghost friends

[ofspacecrafts]

Kingsley the frog is my favorite character at the moment .