cannes film festival
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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 ...
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Cannes '09: Day Three
There’s a tiny part of me that dreads coming to Cannes every year, and it’s because of days like today. Not that I much mind sitting through four or five interesting failures, though that can start to get a tad demoralizing after a while. As Theodore Sturgeon once ...
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Cannes '09: Day Two
Frankly, to hell with Cannes. WHAT HAPPENED ON LOST?!? I don’t think I can get away with eating up two hours here in the press office streaming the finale, as the monitors are pretty large and I’m stationed nearby and in plain view of the info desk.
Anyway ...
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Cannes '09: Day One
Despite the apparent prestige involved, films selected to open Cannes tend to be clunkers, as if the festival seeks to dampen expectations right off the bat. Three years ago, for example, jetlagged journalists were forced to endure Ron Howard’s leaden adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, after which even ...
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Cannes '09: Anticipatory Salivation
I am not supposed to be here.
Howdy all. My name is Mike D'Angelo, and I'll be reporting daily from this year's Cannes Film Festival, which we can only hope will be half as mindblowingly awesome as it looks on paper. I'm still trying to wrap ...
