cannes film festival
-
Cannes 2013, Day Six: Michael Douglas plays Liberace in Steven Soderbergh’s swan song, Behind The Candelabra
Behind The Candelabra
Sometimes I forget that prizes are handed out at the end of this festival. It’s always difficult to guess what a given year’s jury will find worthy, especially when it comes to the acting awards—Cannes strongly encourages a share-the-wealth approach, so often Best Actor or Actress will ...
-
Cannes 2013, Day Five : Takashi Miike schlocks it up, in a good way
Shield Of Straw
Monday is traditionally the day at Cannes when people start making qualified assessments of the year’s overall strength or weakness—usually finding it wanting compared to previous years that were themselves considered hugely disappointing at the time. It’s all a bit silly, as we’re only at roughly ...
-
Cannes 2013, Day Four: The Coen brothers return to the festival with a folk-rock flashback
After four straight days of unseasonable downpours, it’s finally stopped raining here in Cannes. I’m still seeking shelter, though, as I seem to be the only critic in town who wasn’t blown away by Inside Llewyn Davis, the latest merry exercise in perversity from les frères ...
-
Cannes 2013, Day Three: Cheers for the young stars of The Selfish Giant, jeers for the new films by Hirokazu Kore-eda and Arnaud Desplechin
Buzz emanating from Cannes can be highly misleading. Often you’ll hear that such-and-such a film was booed (there’s a retrospective happening in New York called “Booed at Cannes” as we speak), but that doesn’t necessarily mean much—one or two vocal malcontents don’t represent an audience ...
-
Cannes 2013, Day Two: Iranian director Asghar Farhadi chases A Separation with another stunning drama
The Past
After rattling off a bunch of big-auteur names in yesterday’s post, I felt the need to parenthetically explain who Asghar Farhadi is, which a couple of commenters apparently found condescending. Sorry, fellas. (I tried to reply directly, but for some reason I can rarely comment on my posts when ...
-
Cannes 2013, Day One: Sofia Coppola offers the first misfire of the festival
The Bling Ring
Last week, I joked on Twitter that while I hadn’t much liked Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, I was still hopeful that his Gatsby Le Magnifique, which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, would be much better. Beneath the comedy of deliberate obliviousness, however, lies a half-buried ...
-
Cannes 2012, Day 10: Cronenberg meets DeLillo, Matthew McConaughey's name is Mud, and our critic plays the jury
So it’s all over here at Cannes save for the awardin’. And actually even that has already begun: I’m just back from catching up with the winner of the top prize in the Directors’ Fortnight (which you’ll recall is technically a completely separate festival that takes place ...
-
Cannes 2012, Day Nine: The director of Precious drops another prestige stinkbomb and an unfilmable novel gets filmed
No film festival is complete without an unmitigated disaster, and Cannes 2012 finally served one up yesterday morning in the form of Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy,the most repugnant and inept movie to be inexplicably treated like high art since…whaddaya know, since Precious (Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by ...
-
Cannes 2012, Day Eight: The director of Silent Light drops a bold curiosity and Bernardo Bertolucci makes his first movie in nearly a decade.
Well, the honeymoon was bound to end eventually. And I kinda suspected that the big disappointment might turn out to be my most anticipated film of the festival: Post tenebras lux,Carlos Reygadas’ follow-up to the sublime Silent Light (which won a Jury Prize here in 2007). Reygadas has never ...
-
Cannes 2012, Day Seven: Leos Carax's bugfuck masterpiece strikes Cannes like a lightning bolt
The glory of Cannes—and of cinephilia in general, for that matter—is that you never know for sure from which direction the long-awaited lightning bolt will strike. Sure, I was plenty eager to see Holy Motors, having loved previous Leos Carax films like Mauvais sang (1986) and The Lovers ...
-
Cannes 2012, Day Six: Alain Resnais does his Prairie Home Companion, and amateur sleuths comb obsessively through The Shining.
So we’ve reached the festival’s midpoint now, and it seems as if Haneke’s Amour is the only real consensus masterwork thus far, with Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills also widely acclaimed but a bit more divisive. As far as my own favorites (besides Amour) are concerned, folks ...
-
Cannes '12, Day Five: Get out your Haneke-chiefs, we have a Palme D'Or favorite
Ladies and gentlemen, your Palme d’Or frontrunner has arrived. In fact, had Michael Haneke not won a mere three years ago for The White Ribbon (one of his weakest films, in my opinion), I’d be prepared to tell the remaining Competition hopefuls to pack up their gear and ...
-
Cannes '12, Day Four: Bootleggers, transsexuals and falsely accused pedophiles, oh my!
"Lawless"
One of the dangers of gorging yourself on four or five films per day is festival fatigue, by which I don’t mean physical exhaustion (though that happens too) but rather a certain involuntary weariness in the face of so much exacting, challenging, or otherwise “difficult” art cinema. Toss me ...
-
Cannes '12, Day Three: Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone tackles reality TV and past Palme d'Or winner Cristian Mungiu gets cloistered
"Reality"
Festival programmers aren’t stupid. They know journalists on tight deadlines are grateful for a hook, and they assemble the screening schedule accordingly, often pairing films with similar premises or themes. Both of yesterday’s Competition films, for example, look deeply askance at religious faith—though only one does so ...
-
Cannes '12, Day Two: The latest from the director of A Prophet, plus Michel Gondry gets on the bus
As a general rule, I try to learn as little as possible about the films here before I see them. Keeps the experience pure, cuts down on potentially troublesome preconceptions, all that worthy stuff. Tabula rasa is my new jam. So all I knew about Rust And Bone was that ...
-
Cannes '12, Day One: Wes Anderson kicks off the festival in enchanting form
About halfway through Moonrise Kingdom, the delightful new Wes Anderson film that opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, 12-year-old Suzy tells her boyfriend, Sam, with whom she’s run away from home, that she envies him for being an orphan. After all, the protagonists of her favorite novels—several ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
