“We’re not sure how to describe it,” Bujalski told the Cambridge Day‘s Tom Meek of his seventh feature, the Tribeca premiere There There. “We’re just gonna put it on the screen and let everybody else tell us what we did.” That promised a strange film, and There There delivers. After a disorientingly shot-at-home sax solo from musician Jon Natchez (whose quarantine-vibes solo sets provide interludes between segments), There There begins the first of six narrative sequences centered around pairs of unnamed characters with Lennie James and Lili Taylor, who’ve spent the night together for the first time. They’re introduced in rigorously locked-off shots […]

For two weeks I lived within a Cannes-imposed schedule, with every day structured by the bookending options of a new Directors Fortnight title each morning and a new Competition film at night. More importantly, there was the 7 am roll call, when tickets were unlocked online for screenings four days out. This became a relatively smooth process once the functionally unusable press URL initially given for this purpose was changed, but those tickets still went fast. Every day (before the last four days of the festival, when this unloved ritual ceased), my roommates and I would wake up at 6:59, log […]

In France, I mostly don’t get immediately ID’d as American, which I assume is partially because I don’t conform to braying jackass US tourist type and partially because, the older I get, the more I look indeterminately “other.” Generally I first get spoken to in French and play along if I can, then when I can’t keep up I get “Do you speak English?” This is pretty flattering and will obviously only be an increasing asset as the American Experiment continues to go up in flames. A friend noted that, with its virulent displays of racism, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. could just as […]

For Annie Ernaux fans, The Super 8 Years is something better than a movie—it’s effectively a new Ernaux novella, assembled from home movie footage shot by her late ex-husband Philippe Ernaux and directed by her son David. The author reads her text over a trim 61 minutes, assembled from footage shot by Philippe beginning in 1972, when he first bought a Bell & Howell super 8 camera, until their separation in 1981. Ernaux’s memoirs have examined her life while rarely overlapping what’s recalled from one book to another, which is true here even as what we see fills out her work: […]

The man sitting two seats over had averted his eyes from the screen a few times before he finally hit his breaking point. I saw a penis and a drill of some kind coming right for the urethra and heard a doctor saying that he was going to put the device on the “Kalashnikov setting.” What, I wondered, might that mean? When the drill started pumping away and blood spurted, the poor guy had had enough and exited swiftly, and I absolutely couldn’t blame him. This was the second screening of the instantly infamous De Humani Corporis Fabrica that day; after the […]

Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother and Sister ended to the audible reception of somewhere around seven boos, two derisive whistles and nothing else; if you’re someone who believes indifference is a worse reaction than active hostility, this somehow seemed to split the worst possible difference. Consensus holds, not inaccurately, that Desplechin’s peak work is, at least for now, behind him, with the arguable exception of My Golden Days—non-coincidentally, a prequel to 1996’s My Sex Life. His experiments outside of erratic interpersonal dramas, like 2011’s self-explanatorily titled Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian and 2019’s crime drama Oh Mercy!, have been received with tepid bewilderment. I have more sympathy for these […]

One Fine Morning, Mia Hansen-Løve’s eight feature, messily synthesizes familiar recurring autobiographical threads. The writer-directors’s parents were philosophers whose divorce was traced over in the excellent Things to Come. Isabelle Huppert stood in for her mother there; One Fine Morning takes the daughter’s perspective, with Hansen-Løve rendered as translator Sandra Kinsler (Léa Seydoux). With father Georg (Pascal Greggory) increasingly hollowed out by a rare neurodegenerative disease, Sandra and her mother, Georg’s ex-wife Françoise (Nicole Garcia), are forced to make a number of draining caretaking decisions. (In the press kit, Hansen-Løve says she was “partly inspired by my father’s illness while he was still alive.”) When the understandably stressed […]

At the Nice airport, a sign greets arrivals with “Welcome to the Côte d’Azur” in French, Russian and (smaller type) English, giving an idea of the area’s most regular visitors. But at this year’s Cannes, the yacht count is likely to be down, what with presumably diminished attendance from extremely wealthy Russians. The first person to point that out was a friend before leaving, the second a stranger on the bus from the airport to Cannes—one of a pair arriving to raise financing for four features in development and a fifth in post, which they said was “more of a […]

Held back even longer than No Time to Die, Top Gun: Maverick is the last major film repeatedly delayed by the pandemic to see release. In that time, it’s already taken on multiple unintended resonances, like the irony of this sequel to an uber-patriotic property getting denounced for appeasing communism by Ted Cruz. In December 2020, Cruz took to the Senate floor to decry, among other films proving Hollywood’s unseemly deferral to China, Maverick. Referring—accurately in terms of enrollment rates—to the original as “maybe the greatest Navy recruiting film ever made,” he noted that the Taiwanese flag had been removed from […]

With no conscious motivation, I was repeatedly drawn to films about Russia and the USSR’s former satellite states while sifting through this year’s Visions du Réel. The most formidable, Emilija Škarnulytė’s Burial, visually maximalizes the inherently spectacular structures of nuclear power plants. A sparse clutch of title cards contextualize the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP)—built as an equally large sister to Chernobyl, its decommissioning and dismantling now a requirement for Lithuania’s entrance into the EU. The cavernous interiors slowly being broken down include, most captivatingly, a control room wall scanned in a three-minute, smoothly sustained right-to-left dolly, its nodes, buttons, meters and […]