The A.V. Club - Cannes Film Festival

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '11, day 10: Some last-minute viewing and thoughts on awards, including a deserving Palme D'Or winner

Sun, 22 May 2011 14:50:00 -0500

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 love Drive, I’d rather see world cinema’s greatest honor go to a visionary, borderline avant-garde work (see also last year’s deserving champ, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) than to an expert riff on B movies of yore. In any case, awarding Best Director to ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '11, day nine: The two most entertaining films in Competition, and neither one is directed by Pedro Almodóvar.

Fri, 20 May 2011 11:52:00 -0500

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 are unquestionably minor works, likely to have very little lasting impact. They don’t necessarily merit a big-deal award. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t a hell of a lot of fun. In fact, I can readily imagine a rabid cult following coalescing around Drive, which looked at ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '11, day eight: The latest from Takashi Miike, and a reminder of why grades often don't tell the whole story

Thu, 19 May 2011 09:13:00 -0500

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 feeling more Yea or Nay. In the long run, though, thumbnail quantifications amount to not much more than a catalogue of personal taste, and they don’t necessarily reflect what’s actually important. I liked The Kid With a Bike much more than Melancholia, for example, giving the former a ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '11, day seven: Two days after The Tree Of Life screening, Lars Von Trier issues a rebuttal

Wed, 18 May 2011 09:13:00 -0500

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 feature-length rebuttal in less than 48 hours. Conflating the personal and the cosmic with equal bravado, but focusing on the opposite end of the universal timeline, it’s clearly every bit as autobiographical as Malick’s film, though in this case the details have been shrouded in allegory. Would people ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '11, day six: The Tree Of Life and other things calling themselves movies

Tue, 17 May 2011 09:19:00 -0500

“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 prepared to reserve a place for it in the canon before it’s even halfway over—indeed, it often takes me two or three complete viewings before I finally make the leap from “just plain great” to “all-time masterpiece.” I’m slow that way. Roughly an hour into Terrence Malick ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '11, day five: Our favorite film at Cannes so far turns out to be our favorite film from Sundance, too.

Mon, 16 May 2011 09:08:00 -0500

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 has thrown at us so far. (It’s screening in Un Certain Regard, which was once clearly the second tier but in recent years has increasingly turned into “and here’s a bunch of other films.”) Yet another uncommonly intelligent provocation from the guys at Borderline Films, which also gave ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '11, day four: The Dardennes shoot for the Palme D'Or trifecta, and Freaks & Geeks' Linda Cardellini gets a rare showcase

Sun, 15 May 2011 08:18:00 -0500

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 Kid With a Bike, the latest from two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne. And the new film wastes no time in calling to mind one of those past triumphs, as its title character, played by 13-year-old newcomer Thomas Doret, arguably proves to be more single-minded, self-reliant and quasi-feral ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '11, day three: Dizzying highs and staggering lows from the Festival's sidebars

Sat, 14 May 2011 13:28:00 -0500

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 only strengthened when the New York Film Festival showcased his Godard-influenced I’m Gonna Explode a couple of years later, even if that film seemed rockier than its predecessor. With Miss Bala, screening here in Un Certain Regard, Naranjo has officially arrived—so much so that I suspect people will ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes ’11, day two: an evil child, a new Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and a TV pilot that isn’t

Fri, 13 May 2011 12:09:00 -0500

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’s long-awaited return to the screen after Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002). Barricading herself within the tormented psyche of a mother (Tilda Swinton) whose son has clearly committed some Columbine-style atrocity, Scottish filmmaker Ramsay fragments present-day misery and nearly two decades of memories into an impressionistic collage of red-streaked ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes ’11, day one: Woody Allen and naked self-victimization

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:20:00 -0500

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 remember the palpable anticipation, for example, as we all filed into the Grand Théatre Lumière for the world première of Southland Tales. (There’s nothing quite like 3,000 people realizing in unison that there’s more than two hours of this juvenile nonsense to go.) On ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Wrapping Up and Awards

Sun, 23 May 2010 13:31:00 -0500

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 oddly hot and cold on Hong—“oddly” because he arguably makes more or less the same movie every time, spinning endless variations on male fecklessness—but Hahaha mostly worked for me, thanks in part to what qualifies for him as a radical structural shift. Rather than the usual bifurcated narrative ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Day 10

Sat, 22 May 2010 09:39:00 -0500

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 you measure the worth of a festival by the average quality of its lineup, this edition looks pretty wretched—every day brought at least one clunker, and the last few films to screen, including Kornél Mundruczó’s gorgeous but moronic Tender Son — The Frankenstein Project and Nikita Mikhalkov’s ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Day Nine

Fri, 21 May 2010 09:35:00 -0500

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 film in last year’s lineup (D+), but I nonetheless “reviewed” it via an open letter to Lars von Trier in which I thanked him, with utter sincerity, for at least trying to shake people’s foundations. Ultimately, whether we do or don’t enjoy a movie pivots on any ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Day Eight

Thu, 20 May 2010 08:46:00 -0500

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 Ramírez, this miniature docudrama achieves a degree of nail-biting tension that the Bourne series would envy, while also functioning as a pitch-black comedy of errors and a genuinely incisive depiction of the ever-present struggle between idealism and pragmatism. It’s as expert as fact-based filmmaking gets—a tour de force ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Day Seven

Wed, 19 May 2010 13:13:00 -0500

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 it receive high marks today in the trades’ daily critics’ polls, but it seems that a sizable contingent of the international press (including nearly all of the French critics) feel that the K-man has totally sold out by making a talky, derivative (whether intentionally or not), Italian-set Juliette Binoche vehicle ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Day Six

Tue, 18 May 2010 09:43:00 -0500

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 movie from Chad while copping to a lack of appreciation for African cinema in general, inspired a charge of racism in the comments thread; I was accused, among other crimes, of “self-satisfied parochialism,” by which the dude in question meant that I’m totally cool with my blanket dismissal and ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Day Five

Mon, 17 May 2010 10:27:00 -0500

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 (Cannes’ enormous festival complex). Which was the truth, but not nearly as significant as I implied, since I was probably headed to Les Arches d’Or anyway. French dining is fantastic if you have a couple of hours to devote to the meal, but until last year I hadn’t ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Day Four

Sun, 16 May 2010 08:41:00 -0500

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 the last two years, after three days of titles that inspired rampant shrugging, the 8:30 a.m. screening on Day Four produced a sudden frontrunner. Last year, the insta-favorite was Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, which eventually won the Grand Jury Prize (second place); yesterday, Mike Leigh’s Another ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Day Three

Sat, 15 May 2010 11:23:00 -0500

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 top ten for the entire decade.) No such luck, alas. Pretty much the only thing I wanted from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was a Charlie Sheen cameo—not as Bud Fox, his character from the 1987 original, but as Two And A Half Men’s genial horndog Charlie Harper ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes '10: Day Two

Fri, 14 May 2010 10:36:00 -0500

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, well, that particular motion picture isn’t actually “in” Cannes, technically, per se. Alongside its umpteen official sections, Cannes also hosts a gigantic market, in which literally hundreds of pictures are screened for potential acquisition; every year, I wind up blowing off a few unappetizing-looking titles in favor of big-buzz ...