If Behind the Candelabra is Steven Soderbergh’s last film before he retires to pursue other interests, it serves as a fitting tribute to his fascination with celebrity and to his ability to depict complex emotional relationships in an accessible and engaging fashion. The film depicts the tumultuous relationship between Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his lover, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), during the last few years of the pianist’s life, relating the story primarily from Scott’s perspective as he is welcomed to see behind Liberace’s widely recognized stage persona and to gain access to the person behind the image. When the film …

Portraits of purgatory dot this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with movies that run the gamut in terms of styles and techniques: epic drama, cheeky comedy, documentary, animation, and surrealism. No matter what the setting, the plight is the same, with characters stuck in a cycle of emotional limbo where hope for happiness floats tantalizingly but incessantly out of reach. The most accomplished of the group is The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s voluptuously crafted riff on La Dolce Vita and a masterful study of 65-year-old Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a dilettante journalist still coasting on the acclaim of a single early-career …

While I was in graduate school, many years ago, I wrote a master’s thesis on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and have always loved the novel’s rich layering of the multiple, fragmentary points-of-view. Faulkner used to this technique — which he once described as “thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird” — to depict the Bundren family’s mock epic journey from their little hamlet to the county seat of Jefferson, where they have promised to bury the family’s matriarch, Addie. Because of my knowledge of the novel, I approached James Franco’s adaptation with a great deal of trepidation. Add …

There’s a trend in actor-turned-director helmed films at Cannes this year, an impeccable direction of the people on screen. You can tell there’s a sense of trust and cohesive goal to create something great. One of the clearest examples of this is James Franco’s new feature film, As I Lay Dying, based on the great American classic by William Faulkner, the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s quest to honor her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson. The vivid characters have come to life on the big screen through Franco’s split-screen filmmaking, led by …

Hirakazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son engages with questions of family and identity, exploring what it means to be a father, using a plot device in which children from two different families are switched at birth, a detail that is only discovered when the sons are about to enroll in school. The film’s primary point of identification is Ryota, a young father and ambitious businessman who strives to provide for his family and also to ensure that his son will have every opportunity for success. This desire for success is conveyed from the very opening shot, in which Ryota’s son, …

Earlier today Scott wrote about Jodorowsky’s Dune, the Cannes doc about the legendary mystical auteur’s famous failed attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel for the big screen, so now is a perfect time to post the trailer for the director’s new film, which is also having its world premiere on the French Riviera. The Dance of Reality is Jodorowsky’s first film since 1990, but the 23-year layoff does not seem to have dulled the director’s visual flair, sense of the bizarre or, well, general weirdness. This trailer has French rather than English subtitles, but the images more than speak for …