‘Coward’ Review: Lukas Dhont’s Third and Most Ambitious Feature Sticks Soldiers in a Tortured Queer Love Story Mired in Emotional Fraudulence
Lukas Dhont's film 'Coward' explores the complexities of queer love amidst the backdrop of war. While the film showcases Dhont's talent for directing young actors, it suffers from a lack of chemistry between leads and an overreliance on emotional manipulation. Critics have noted that the film's grand ambitions often come off as hollow and artificial.
- ▪Lukas Dhont is known for his previous films 'Girl' and 'Close', which examined themes of sexual and gender identity.
- ▪The film 'Coward' features rookie Belgian soldiers and includes musical elements that aim to convey heightened emotions.
- ▪Critics have pointed out the lack of chemistry between the lead actors and the film's tendency towards self-conscious grandiosity.
The Hollywood Reporter files mainly under film tv. We currently carry 405 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Hollywood Reporter |
| Canonical URL | https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/coward-review-lukas-dhont-1236602728/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 22:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T22:01:35.754Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T22:01:35.754Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | _DaH_KBMQxCU |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
'Coward' Cannes Film Festival Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment With his first two features, Girl and Close, Lukas Dhont carved out a reputation for piercing examinations of the minefield for children and adolescents of sexual and gender identity, whether internalized or in relation to the outside world. Both films drew acclaim, but also detractors who bristled at the Belgian director’s perceived exploitation of subjects as sensitive as gender dysphoria, self-harm and suicide for the purposes of emotional manipulation.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Hollywood Reporter.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Hollywood Reporter
