Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Trailer Watch: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Dance of Reality
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 […]
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Premiere Day at the Cannes Critics’ Week
Well, the big day has arrived. We woke up early to heavy rain and made a quick run for our morning pastries before putting on our Sunday finest for the screening. After trying to find a cab for the better part of an hour, we called and last-minute audible and decided to walk, torrential downpour be damned! We arrived mostly intact and a little worse for the wear, but were warmly greeted by the Semaine staff who whisked us back to the green room where we got to meet the other Critics’ Week filmmakers. At the theater, which was almost […]
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Cannes 2013: Jodorowsky’s Dune and Inside Llewyn Davis
“I wanted to make something sacred and free,” says Alejandro Jorodowsky about his planned adapation of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction classic, Dune. Indeed, Dune will be more than just a movie, argue the director and his collaborators in Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary that premiered Saturday in the Directors Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival. Says Jodorowsky in the film, “Dune will be the coming of a god.” There are several documentaries about nightmare shoots and even unmade films — Lost in La Mancha comes to mind — but Jodorowsky’s Dune is the only documentary I can think of […]
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Cannes 2013: Farhadi’s The Past and Desplechin’s Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian
Given that James Franco’s adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying will be playing at this year’s Cannes, it seems appropriate to recall one of the novelist’s most famous quotations when thinking about two of the festival’s more memorable films. Reflecting on the conflicts over race and national identity that tore apart the deep south where he lived, Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” This persistence of the past — how it can haunt us in myriad ways — is central to two of the more powerful films at this […]
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Cannes 2013: Jia’s A Touch of Sin and Ozon’s Young and Beautiful
Negotiating Cannes is a unique challenge, especially for someone attending the festival for the first time. Although the festival is commonly associated with red carpets and other assorted glamour, my clearest memories of the festival entail trekking from a borrowed condo in Antibes early in the morning — thanks to the monumental patience of my wife who drove me in — to queue up with other journalists for an 8:30 press screening (finding those lines the first couple of days is an entirely different matter). Rainy weather early in the festival also seemed to undermine Cannes’ reputation for sun and […]
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Cannes 2013 Opens with 3-D Glamour, Call Girls & Sci-Fi Animation
This year’s 66th Cannes Film Festival opened with a venerable love fest at the Jury Press Conference on Wednesday. Led by Steven Spielberg, this year’s panel drew an incredible mix of cinema talent Ang Lee, Nicole Kidman and Christoph Waltz, as well as Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and Scotland’s Lynne Ramsay. Spielberg and Lee admitted to the assembled press that they absolutely worshipped each other, despite being pitted up against each other at the Oscars this year. Although Spielberg said he was ready to judge, he claimed, “I look at this as two weeks of celebrating film, not two weeks […]
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Starting Tonight: Secret Film Club @ reRun
Since IFP and Filmmaker began programming the reRun Theater in Brooklyn, we’ve been trying to bring audiences great films, but also do it in an interesting and different way whenever possible. One of the ideas that we came up with to bring a little variety to proceedings was our Secret Film Club, which kicks off tonight. In the next week, we’ll be playing 11 films over five different nights. The screenings will all be free. But we won’t be telling anyone what the films are. Cryptic clues will be distributed to give you something to go on, however, the first […]
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The Opportunist on the Croisette
Director David Lassiter, whose short film The Opportunist is playing in the Critics’ Fortnight, is blogging about his Cannes experiences. You can read his first dispatch here. Day one at Cannes and we’re already off to the races! After almost a full day of travel (L.A. -> Toronto -> Zurich -> Nice -> Cannes) we checked into an Airbnb apartment owned by a charming Frenchman named Olivier, dropped off our bags, and hit the Croisette. Our first stop was the Palais de Festival, where we were warmly greeted by Julie Marnay and her lovely team at Semaine de la Critique. […]
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Cannes 2013: First Clips from Gray’s The Immigrant and Saulnier’s Blue Ruin
Another day, another bunch of clips from U.S. indies playing at Cannes. Above there is a quick snippet, featuring Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Renner, from James Gray’s period drama The Immigrant (previously called Lowlife). The Weinstein Company will be putting out the film (also starring Gray regular Joaquin Phoenix) later this year and, barring terrible reviews from Cannes critics, it should be a 2013 awards contender. Below are a teaser trailer and a clip from Jeremy Saulnier’s second feature, Blue Ruin, which looks incredibly compelling and has the potential to establish the director (who mostly plies his trade as a […]
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Cannes 2013: Veterans Return to the Croisette
There’s a good reason James Toback named his new Cannes-set showbiz documentary Seduced and Abandoned (unspooling here May 20). No other film festival is quite as alluring – and none has an audience as uniquely emotional. As the world’s premier showcase for cinema, Cannes is arguably the most extravagant way to introduce a film on an international stage. That said, expectations are high and reactions can tack violently from swoon-worthy praise (Michael Haneke’s 2012 drama Amour received the most recent tsunami of adoration) to outright condemnation (just ask Johnny Depp or Vincent Gallo about their respective directorial fiascos, 1997’s The […]
