Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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The Back Nine At Cannes
Greetings from the back nine of Cannes! Our adventures continued with a second screening of Shorts Program 1 on Sunday in front of another packed house. It was a real pleasure to re-watch the other films, especially after having gotten a chance to meet the filmmakers – they’re a really amazing and talented bunch. Later that evening came one of the highlights of our trip when we got to meet two of our favorite DJs, Gesaffelstein and Brodinski, whose music is prominently featured in The Opportunist. They invited us to come see their live show at Club Access just off the […]
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Lesbian Lovemaking, Graphic Novels and a Changing China: Parsing the Cannes Awards
Sex sells, but it’s not the kind of thing that wins highbrow prizes—right? The fact that Abdellatif Kechiche’s explicit and entrancing Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle, chapitre 1 et 2) won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is a watershed moment, not least of which because its frank depiction of lesbian lovemaking wasn’t an obstacle towards being taken seriously. People may have tweeted their puerile snickering about the randy onscreen romps, but any sober viewer would acknowledge that those relatively brief moments (especially in a 179-minute film) were hardly exploitative — in fact, they […]
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Nebraska Star Bruce Dern on Alexander Payne and “the Dernsies”
This interview with Bruce Dern was originally published following the Cannes Film Festival, where Nebraska premiered. If you ever have the good fortune of getting a press pass that grants you access to a roundtable with a Hollywood star, there are few actors out there who could provide a better interview than Bruce Dern, who recently won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his performance in Alexander Payne’s comedic drama, Nebraska. A planned 20-minute roundtable with a few grizzled journalists turned into a half-hour sprawling monologue of memories and observations on movie production, gently flavored with imitations of Hollywood […]
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Blue is the Warmest Color Wins the 2013 Cannes Palme d’Or
In a ceremony hosted by actress Audrey Tatou and with a jury headed by director Steven Spielberg, the 2013 Cannes Film Festival awarded its top prize, the Palme d’Or, to Abdellatif Kechiche’s lesbian teen romance, Blue is the Warmest Color. In an unusual move for this auteur-centric festival, the jury gave the award to Kechiche and his two lead actresses, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux. The three-hour film, which also won the FIPRESCI prize, was bought for the U.S. during the festival by IFC’s Sundance Selects. The jury distributed awards evenly among the majority of films that had been buzzed […]
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Cannes 2013: Polanski’s Venus in Fur and Katrin Gebbe’s Tore Tanzt
My last day in Cannes brought about a number of mixed emotions: relief that the somewhat grueling schedule of waking up for early morning press screenings was coming to an end, disappointment that my time at the festival was over (and that I was shut out of the afternoon screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, bringing unceremonious closure to my festival experience), and excitement that I have had the experience of attending a festival like Cannes where there is so much energy devoted to the idea of cinema. Two of the last films I saw at the festival, […]
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Cannes 2013: Prizes for Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week Announced
As Cannes is coming to a close, the accolades are being handed out. We still have to wait for the Competition award ceremony,which will be on Sunday, but the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics Week have already both bestowed honors on their films. Though Directors’ Fortnight does technically have a competition, nevertheless prizes are handed out, with this year Guillaume Gallienne’s flamboyant comedy Les Garçons Et Guillaume, A Table! (an autobiographical piece about his difficult relationship with his mother) taking two prizes, and The Selfish Giant — Clio Barnard’s follow-up to The Arbor, a Cannes favorite in 2010 — also winning an award. […]
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Cannes 2013: Gray’s The Immigrant and Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty
James Gray’s The Immigrant is Classic Hollywood melodrama, done incredibly well, a film that powerfully portrays the emotional journey of a Polish immigrant, Ewa (Marion Cotillard), and her pimp, Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix). It offers a powerful historical account of the connections between the mass immigration to the United States and the often desperate desire to achieve the American Dream, while also serving as a brutal reminder of the ways in which that dream was exploited by people who were willing to take advantage of new arrivals, many of whom were overwhelmed by their new home. Gray’s film borrows from classical […]
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Cannes 2013: Payne’s Nebraska and Puenzo’s Wakolda
Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is an impressive achievement, a fresh and innovative take on that most familiar of genres, the road movie, one that takes conventions about the American heartland and turns them on their head. It’s also a story about a father and son learning to see and understand each other for the first time. The film opens with a shot of Woody Grant (Bruce Dern in what should be a performance that collects numerous awards) shuffling purposefully down a Billings, Montana, highway, his scraggly beard, limping gait and weathered face suggesting a man who has struggled for the little […]
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Cannes 2013: Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra and Refn’s Only God Forgives
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 […]
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Cannes 2013: Portraits of Purgatory
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 […]
