Swan Song review – amiable tale of a hairdresser’s final flourish

A celebrity stylist comes out of retirement to do the funeral preparation for his arch enemy in this insubstantial yarn

‘I know I’m not going to please everyone’: Lucile Hadžihalilović on her beguiling film-making

Story of Film director Mark Cousins talks to an emergent champion of slow-burn, surrealist cinema on the release of her debut English-language feature, Earwig

Olga review – political gymnastics drama sets the bar high

Gymnast Anastasiia Budiashkina gives an impressive performance as a rising star whose world is flipped upside down by the 2014 Ukrainian revolution

Pickpocket review – existential thrills in Robert Bresson’s study of a thief’s progress

Bresson’s 1959 film about a misfit who dreams of rising above conventional morals is a brilliant example of the cinema of ideas

Between Two Worlds review – Emmanuel Carrère’s jagged, furious tale of low-paid work

Newcomer Hélène Lambert excels alongside Juliette Binoche in this gritty drama about friendship and lies on the breadline

Mother and Son review – moving immigrant drama goes from Ivory Coast to Paris

A son reflects on the struggles he faced with his brother and wayward mother after they moved to France from Africa, in a meditative coming-of-age story

Pacifiction review – trouble in paradise, in apocalyptic Tahitian mystery

Benoît Magimel’s French high commissioner confronts the end of his personal Eden in Tahiti, in Albert Serra’s distinctive film

Nostalgia review – bittersweet crime yarn also homecoming love-letter to Naples

Tremendously shot and terrifically acted, this Neapolitan gangster drama from Mario Martone shatters the rose-tinted spectacles

Tori and Lokita review – clarity of purpose in the Dardennes’ parable of the dispossessed

The new film from double Palme d’Or winners focusses on a pair of young immigrants to Belgium who find themselves working in dangerous situations

Decision to Leave review – Tang Wei stuns in Park Chan-wook black-widow noir

Park’s tale of a married detective torn between infidelity and moral duty keeps the viewer off-balance at every turn

Forever Young review – endlessly tedious story of self-involved drama students

Valerie Bruni-Tedeschi’s latest Cannes lock-in is a woeful soap about aspiring actors in 80s Paris with neither the songs – or the soul – of Alan Parker’s Fame

Brother and Sister review – sibling battle with Marion Cotillard that leaves us all losers

The latest in Arnaud Desplechin’s overwrought oeuvre features plenty of film-making elan but not one line of plausible dialogue

Cairo Conspiracy (aka Boy from Heaven) review – stirring spy thriller set on an Egyptian campus

Egypt’s religious and secular institutions both breed mistrust in Tarik Saleh’s superbly realised paranoid nightmare

One Fine Morning review – Léa Seydoux sparkles in poignant drama

Mia Hansen-Løve returns to Paris with this powerful drama about a single mother torn between emotionally unavailable men

Russian Cannes contender defends Roman Abramovich as a ‘patron of the arts’

Dissident Russian film-maker Kirill Serebrennikov, whose film Tchaikovsky’s Wife received backing from the oligarch, has called for sanctions to be lifted