Hollywood heavyweights tackle evil and politics in new films.
The banality of evil was a recurring theme at this year's Cannes Film Festival, with films exploring mankind's ability to commit atrocities while deluding themselves into thinking they're doing the right thing. While Robert De Niro's character in Killers of the Flower Moon is not an example of banal evil, Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest is. The festival also featured films that explored the manipulation of language to cover up evil behavior, the misogyny around us, and the power of lazy language to warp a child's self-image. The message from Cannes this year is that the world is set up to make evil as easy as possible to partake in, and the question is whether we choose to start thinking about it clearly.
