Kristen Stewart's latest film Personal Shopper was the first to receive boos at this year's Cannes Film Festival – but other critics have awarded it five stars.
Directed by Olivier Assayas, it tells the tale of a fashion PA (Stewart) haunted by the spirit of her dead twin brother.
Unimpressed French critics "exercised their time-honoured right to pour scorn" during the press screening, says The Times, warning that such a reaction at Cannes is "often a harbinger of doom for a film's prospects at the box office".
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But Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian awards it a full five stars, hailing it as Assayas's "best film for a long time" and Stewart's "best performance to date".
The actress is "calm and blank in the self-assured way of someone very competent, smart and young, yet her displays of emotion are very real and touching", says Bradshaw.
He admits that the "uncategorisable" film is something of a "marmite sensation", but insists Assayas "has brought excitement to the festival".
Judging from the" scattered boos and hisses", Personal Shopper "is not a movie whose ghostly ambiguity works on everyone", says Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair.
But he believes it is the most "arresting" festival entry he has seen this year. "Nothing in the plot description could have prepared me for Personal Shopper, which is strange, frightening and possessed of a dark ribbon of sadness that no champagne gulped down at a post-screening beach party could drown out," says Lawson.
Robbie Collin of the Daily Telegraph thinks Stewart should be "honoured" by the boos. "There are bad films and there are films that are booed at festivals, and the two groups don't necessarily overlap," he says. "Personal Shopper is one of the latter."
Indeed, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura were both derided at their Cannes screenings but are now regarded as cinema classics.
Describing Personal Shopper as "eerie, evasive and pricklishly sexy", Collin says it was booed "not because it's bad (it emphatically isn't), but because it breaks lots of good-taste conventions in a way that's deliberately designed to set your soul jangling".
