First reviews for Thor star's new movie May December
May December premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival yesterday (May 20), with first reviews for the film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore now arriving.
While widely popular Killers of the Flower Moon had its world premiere at Cannes earlier the same day, May December's screening was also a hit with its viewers.
In May December, we see Portman play a Hollywood star who is researching Gracie-Atherton (Moore) who is in her sixties and also happens to be a true crime subject. Portman's character becomes so immersed in her research that the lines start to become blurred between the two women's lives.
Related: Indiana Jones 5's first reviews have arrived
Deadline
"You cannot, cannot do better than having Portman and Moore front and center with juicy roles like these. Watching their cat-and-mouse game again confirms these two Oscar winners are as good as it gets. Charles Melton (Reggie on Riverdale) really is believable and vulnerable here as the 33-ish-year-old version of a kid who succumbed to this in the first place, though just who seduced who seems to be a bone of contention between Gracie and Joe."
The Guardian
"[Todd] Haynes' film – which competes for the Cannes Palme d'Or – sets itself up as a tense chamber piece, a study of merging identities and shifting power dynamics in the manner of Joseph Losey's The Servant or Ingmar Bergman's Persona. But May December also comes coloured by the lurid downlight of tabloid culture. It could be a pastiche of a psychological thriller, or a playfully misdirected daytime afternoon soap."
The Telegraph
"How we can ever know one another fully, or look in the mirror with objectivity, are fairly profound questions, and rich themes for Todd Haynes in May December – a teasing, ticklish, fascinatingly layered study of our defined identities and the isolation that comes with them. It's about acting, denial, wrongdoing and the age of consent, but also about growing up, and the different ways we tread through that process, or fail to."
The Wrap
"[Elizabeth's] transformation in a scene where Portman breaks the fourth wall and reads one of Gracie’s old love letters in her voice and demeanor is simply breathtaking acting that will surely be taught in many an acting school. Matching the chameleon-esque Portman is a stupendous Moore with her ethereal gaze as a woman who confuses delusion with naïveté, and a heartbreaking Melton as a man whose life has merely been reduced down to a story that once was in the headlines, facing the consequences of his manipulation for the first time.
"Despite a heavy-handed cocoon motif that sometimes spells out the story's themes to a fault, Haynes has done something spellbinding here: heady, grown-up and committed to a refreshing dose of moral ambiguity... You'll cherish every bite of this complex layer cake that will reveal its kaleidoscopic colors as soon as you cut it open."
Despite overwhelming praise, currently scoring 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, not everyone was as keen:
The Hollywood Reporter
"The lead actors ensure that it's always fascinating, but despite the raw nature of the wounds reopened, it's all a bit glacial. [Christopher] Blauvelt's camera gets in close at regular intervals to the lush vegetation from which Joe gathers tiny eggs for his hobby of breeding monarch butterflies. Those images hint at a hothouse atmosphere of which the rather academic May December could have used a bit more."
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