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“The Fact That It’s Thermal Imagery, It Hits Memory in a Different Way”: EDGLRD Creative Director Joao Rosa on Harmony Korine’s Visionary AggroDr1ft
AggroDr1ft
Harmony Korine's AggroDr1ft unfurls through sheets of kaleidoscopic color — neon shades of gold, aqua and red — that ripple and pulse, achieving almost an intelligence of their own as they add expressionistic textures to the film's Miami-set tale of a melancholy hitman out for a demonic Final Boss. And while the narrative recalls, at times, Robert E. Howard, Michael Mann and Grand Theft Auto, the film's genuinely unique method of production allows its hallucinatory vibe — aided by an insidious AraabMuzik score — to reign supreme. Working with his team at new production outfit EDGLRD, including creative director Joao Rosa, who oversaw the film's VFX, Korine lensed the film using thermal cameras, producing solarized black-and-white image that he then… Read more
Sartorial Losses and Nervous Excitement: Producer Stephanie Roush’s’ Cannes Diary #1
The Cannes Film Festival and Market
I somehow lost my Sundance 2024 hat before arriving in Cannes. I was forced to take it off for the automated passport control in Paris, as it would’ve obscured my face too much for the fancy camera technology that only worked for about every third person in line. Walking to my next terminal with my luggage, it started raining and I went to put my hat on only to realize it was no longer poking out from the top of my purse. How is it that I managed to lose my one token of legitimacy immediately upon arriving in France? Of course, a baseball cap is far afield from what I’ve been told “Cannes attire” is. One exec friend told… Read more
Cannes 2024: Megalopolis
Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis
Now that Megalopolis has premiered, nothing has actually changed. The film is a self-consciously impractical act that few would care nearly as much about if it weren’t very publicly known to have cost $120 million of Francis Ford Coppola’s personal money. That’s the kind of extravagant gesture you don’t get to ever see on this scale, and hence destined to be praised for being willed into existence amidst a sea of algorithimically conceived risk-aversion—or, alternately, decried as a hubristic folly in the trades with a palpable subtext of “how dare he?” Megalopolis is praiseworthy for mostly predictable reasons: lavish eccentricity, undeniable ambition, relentless novelty. That I’m skeptical of it comes down to Coppola’s intellectual project, which is sometimes surprisingly coherent… Read more
Cannes 2024: The Second Act, An Unfinished Film and Wild Diamond
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“Last year, as you know, we had a few polemics,” admitted Cannes General Delegate Thierry Fremaux at the opening of the 77th edition on Tuesday. “This year we decided to host a festival without polemics to make sure that the main interest for us all to be here is cinema.” With ignorance this willful, you have to laugh. Cannes has gotten so used to sweeping its problems under the rug that no one seems to know when, how, or if the Sous les Écrans la Dèche strike–-which would affect some 200 projectionists, programmers, floor managers, and press officers working the festival—was or will be avoided, and therefore whether or not we’ll be let in to any given screening. Judith Godrèche’s… Read more
Cannes 2024: This Life of Mine, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Philippe Katrine and Agnès Jaoui in This Life of Mine
At dinner my first night at this year’s Cannes, a friend asked our waiter if this was his restaurant’s busiest time of year. Not even close; that would be MIPIM, “the world’s leading real estate market event,” taking place in March and drawing 26,000+ people—a number handily dwarfing the 13,000+ market attendees, plus assorted press and filmmakers, at last year’s festival. It was a useful perspective check: if Cannes is roundly conceded the status of world’s biggest film festival when all components are accounted for, that doesn’t mean too much in the global scheme of things, where cinema, as we keep being told, is waning in relevance and generally in deep trouble. An appropriately doom-laden mood was nicely set by… Read more
“We Question Together Hyper-Masculinity in Life as Well As In the War Movie Genre”: Roberto Minervini on The Damned
The Damned
In The Damned, Roberto Minervini embeds us with Union Army soldiers ranging across the Western front in 1862, far from the battlegrounds in the East but no less at risk. But when you direct a Civil War movie in 2020s America, it can be hard for audiences to view it as solely a fictional matter, especially when you’ve previously directed two of the most revealing documentary cross-sections of the United States in the last decade, The Other Side (2015) and What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire (2018). It’s possible to watch The Damned as a rugged journey with a rank-and-file company of bewhiskered volunteers, who trade marksmanship tips and tin-pot coffee in an isolating wilderness. But it’s… Read more
15 Films Not to Miss at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival
Eephus
Amidst wi-fi and cellular outages, a threatened workers' strike, and dialogue around the #MeToo movement in France, the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is underway. For Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov and Blake Williams are both back with on-the-ground reports and Critics Notebooks, and we begin with this list of 15 films that might be sliding under your radar. You don't need us to recommend Coppola's Megalopolis, Schrader's Oh Canada, Cronenberg's The Shrouds or any of the other titles from the higher-profile auteurs. Instead, we've focused here on debuting directors, U.S. independents, and arthouse auteurs who have dazzled us with previous work. Gazer. This year represents the sophomore effort for the current, Julien Rejl-led regime at the Quinzaine des cinéastes sidebar,… Read more
