SHIELD OF STRAW BOMBS HARD AT CANNES

Showing everybody else how not to show up at Cannes, the normally reliable Takashi Miike's second film in Official Competition in three years has attracted the first boos of the festival this year. A supposedly standard bounty-hunter thriller, reviewers have not been kind.

David Rooney at The Hollywood Reporter labels Shield of Straw protracted, but also watchable. Less complimentary, if that was even the case, is Peter Bradshaw, who writes that the film is 'crude and absurd' in The Guardian. Echoing david Rooney's claim that the film would be ripe for a Hollywood remake is Variety's Peter Debruge, who states that 'even the hackiest of Hollywood writers would have known how to fix its considerable script problems'. Keith Uhlich at Time Out New York is equally disappointed, as is Guy Lodge on Twitter, but Craig Kennedy, writing in Awards Daily, is the outlier, giving the film a rare good review.