cannes film festival
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Cannes '11, day 10: Some last-minute viewing and thoughts on awards, including a deserving Palme D'Or winner
The Tree Of Life
Good job, Cannes jury. The Tree of Life wasn’t my favorite film in this year’s Competition, but it was the most notable combination of ambition and accomplishment, and that’s arguably what ought to win an award as weighty as the Palme d’Or. As much as I ...
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Cannes '11, day nine: The two most entertaining films in Competition, and neither one is directed by Pedro Almodóvar.
Drive
Since yesterday’s post, I’ve seen my two favorite films in this year’s Competition lineup, and I think I can state with confidence that neither one has a chance in hell of winning the Palme d’Or. Which is fine, really. My taste is my own, and these ...
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Cannes '11, day eight: The latest from Takashi Miike, and a reminder of why grades often don't tell the whole story
Hara-Kiri
Looking at the comments for previous posts, I’m a little disheartened by how much emphasis y’all are placing on the letter grades. Not that I’m anti-grade, by any means—it’s often helpful to have a quick, easily digestible summation of whether a critic ultimately wound up ...
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Cannes '11, day seven: Two days after The Tree Of Life screening, Lars Von Trier issues a rebuttal
Melancholia
In an uncanny instance of festival synchronicity, Melancholia (which I’ll go ahead and review immediately, since I got shut out of last night’s screening of Naomi Kawase’s Hanezu) plays as if Lars von Trier saw The Tree of Life on Monday morning and then somehow shot a ...
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Cannes '11, day six: The Tree Of Life and other things calling themselves movies
The Tree Of Life
“I am watching one of the greatest movies ever made.” It’s a thought I’ve had many times before, but only when revisiting old favorites, or having my first belated look at a decades-old classic. No matter how obviously magnificent a contemporary film may be, I’m not generally ...
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Cannes '11, day five: Our favorite film at Cannes so far turns out to be our favorite film from Sundance, too.
Martha Marcy May Marlene
I suspect that a grave injustice has been done. Not here in Cannes, where no prizes will be given until Saturday, but at Sundance ‘11, where Martha Marcy May Marlene somehow failed to win the Dramatic competition, even though it wipes the mat with everything this festival’s main event ...
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Cannes '11, day four: The Dardennes shoot for the Palme D'Or trifecta, and Freaks & Geeks' Linda Cardellini gets a rare showcase
The Kid With A Bike
With no clear favorite having yet emerged from this year’s Competition slate—We Need to Talk About Kevin probably comes closest so far, but even it has managed only an anemic 2.5 average (out of four) in Screen’s international critics’ poll—hopes were unusually high for The ...
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Cannes '11, day three: Dizzying highs and staggering lows from the Festival's sidebars
Miss Bala
One of the pleasures of the festival circuit is watching a new filmmaker develop into a major talent right before your eyes. After seeing Gerardo Naranjo’s small but assured Drama/Mex at Toronto in 2006, I filed him away as someone to watch, and that sense of promise was ...
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Cannes ’11, day two: an evil child, a new Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and a TV pilot that isn’t
We Need To Talk About Kevin
Last year at Cannes, my favorite “film” was the roughly hourlong section of Olivier Assayas’ Carlos devoted to the 1975 OPEC hostage crisis. This year, it’s gonna be tough for anything to beat the gobsmacking first 30 minutes (or so) of We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay ...
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Cannes ’11, day one: Woody Allen and naked self-victimization
Owen Wilson in 'Midnight In Paris'
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in nine years of attending the Cannes Film Festival, it’s that trying to predict the quality of a given year’s lineup in advance is a mug’s game. Movies that look tremendously exciting on paper frequently fizzle—I can still ...
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Cannes '10: Wrapping Up and Awards
Another year, as Mike Leigh would dryly note. The closing ceremony for Cannes 2010 is still about 35 minutes away as I write this, but last night saw Hong Sang-soo’s Hahaha awarded the top prize in Un Certain Regard, courtesy of a jury headed by Claire Denis. I run ...
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Cannes '10: Day 10
Well, I think it’s safe to say that 2010 won’t be remembered as one of Cannes’ stronger years. “Comfortably the worst Competition that I can remember,” sighed someone at The Guardian; judging from conversations I’ve had with various colleagues, that’s not an uncommon sentiment. Certainly, if ...
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Cannes '10: Day Nine
More than anything else, what I want from the Cannes Film Festival—from the films in Competition, in particular—is to experience something that feels singular, unprecedented, visionary. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean “great,” either (though it’d be nice). Antichrist,for example, was perhaps my least favorite ...
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Cannes '10: Day Eight
The most thrilling movie I’ve seen at Cannes this year runs just a little over an hour, telling an explosive real-life story in minute, riveting detail and yet with brutal economy. Sharply written and beautifully directed, and featuring a star-making, coldly charismatic performance by little-known Venezuelan actor Edgar Ram ...
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Cannes '10: Day Seven
Not that it’s anything new, by any means, but the movies that are exciting the masses here at Cannes aren’t the same movies that are wowing me. Having spoken to several friends and colleagues who shared my rapturous response to Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, I expected to see ...
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Cannes '10: Day Six
What responsibility does a critic have to overcome his/her personal biases? The scope of that question is a bit much for a quick blog-post intro, but it’s on my mind this morning all the same, for a couple of reasons. Yesterday’s rundown, in which I dismissed a ...
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Cannes '10: Day Five
When Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Fast Food Nation screened here a few years back, I ended my review by noting that the film’s climactic slaughterhouse scene, clearly intended to inspire revulsion, had instead sent me straight to the McDonald’s located just a short walk from the Palais ...
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Cannes '10: Day Four
I’ve always wondered to what extent Thierry Fremaux (Cannes’ chief programmer) and his team can intuit which Competition films are most likely to be warmly received, and whether they devise the schedule with a particular critical rhythm in mind. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that in each of ...
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Cannes '10: Day Three
For some reason, no Competition titles were screened today, so I wound up checking in with three filmmakers of whom I’m not especially fond, hoping against hope to be surprised. (It happens - after despising the first two films directed by Carlos Reygadas, his third, Silent Light, landed in my ...
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Cannes '10: Day Two
Ready for the ol’ good news/bad news routine? The good news is that we’re only two days into the festival and I’ve already seen what’s certain to be one of the year’s very best films—a bona-fide, rattle-your-nerves stunner. The bad news is that, um ...
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Cannes '10: Day One
So far, all anyone can talk about here at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival is that goddamn volcano. Was your flight delayed? How long? My trans-Atlantic took this enormous two-hour parabolic detour over freakin’ Greenland and Iceland—just how big is that ash cloud, anyway? I’ve heard blood-curdling ...
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Cannes '09: Day 11
Well, the lineup did look awesome on paper, you must admit. Pity about the actual films, for the most part, but some years simply have no towering masterpiece to offer. Even if most other critics liked Bright Star and A Prophet and The White Ribbon more than I did, I ...
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Cannes '09: Day Ten
Okay, I see where I goofed now. Easily remedied for next year. “Won’t somebody please show up with a film that’s truly bold and audacious and visionary and unprecedented?” I’ll once again plead. But from now on, I’ll make sure to add “and not utterly stoopid ...
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Cannes '09: Day Nine
Scrambling to write up yesterday’s films during a brief window between screenings—a window that’s so brief because the movie I just saw ran nearly three hours. Almost every film in Competition this year is needlessly long, frankly, which has reduced most of the press corps to zombies ...
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Cannes '09: Day Eight
As you’ll recall, today’s morning screening was Inglourious Basterds, which wound up getting its own separate advance report. Thinking more about the film last night after talking about it with friends and colleagues, I kept flashing on perhaps my single favorite moment in Pulp Fiction, when Vincent is ...
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Cannes '09: Day Seven
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Mainstream American comedies don’t come much blacker than Bad Santa, a chunk of congealed eggnog so gleefully nasty that some refused to believe it could have been written by its credited screenwriters, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, since their only previous ...
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Cannes '09: Inglourious Basterds
Still planning a roundup from my somewhat abortive Day 7, but here’s breaking news from Day 8, as I’m sure many of you would prefer not to wait 24 hours to hear about Inglourious Basterds just so that I can stick to my predetermined coverage plan. Tarantino’s ...
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Cannes '09: Day Six
After surviving the gynocidal assault of Antichrist—and its combative press conference, in which Lars von Trier declared himself to be the greatest filmmaker in the world and coldly reminded the press corps that they were his invited guests rather than vice versa—critics were apparently in the right frame ...
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Cannes '09: Day Five
AN OPEN LETTER TO LARS VON TRIER
Dear Lars,
I love you, man. Not in a lame, hokey Rudd-and-Segal bromance way, but deeply and profoundly. If our paths cross over the next couple of days while you’re in town, don’t be surprised if I walk up unannounced and ...
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Cannes '09: Day Four
Well, we have a frontrunner. Jacques Audiard’s epic prison drama A Prophet, which screened early Saturday morning, received the most sustained applause I’ve heard for any film thus far and now sits atop both of the daily trade polls (about which more below). And yet my hunger for ...
