Coming into this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it looked like the programmers had whipped up one of the festival’s strongest lineups in a long time, and for the most part, that turned out to be true: There may have been no one masterpiece on the order of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin from last year, but there were also hardly any outright bad films even the two worst in competition (Sean Penn’s The Last Face and Brilliante Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa) aren’t quite the catastrophes some have made them out to be.
