There are plenty of North American filmmakers influenced by the giants of international cinema. These filmmakers import stylistic references, different tones and rhythms, perhaps key collaborators, such as a cinematographer, to films that nonetheless are born of their own local filmmaking cultures. For his second feature, following the anarchic political satire of his The Twentieth Century, Canadian director Matthew Rankin has imagined a different approach. His formally precise and very funny Universal Language, a Cannes’s Directors Fortnight discovery this year, is not only influenced by the Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, among others, but considers a Winnipeg […]
Blue Sun Palace, Constance Tsang’s first feature, is a migrant story that’s vividly attuned to the temporal and emotional dislocation of those stranded far away from home. Set in Flushing, Queens—where the director grew up—the film follows three transplants as they forge new ties in the borough’s Chinese community, which Tsang depicts as a bubble suspended in time and space. Save for the occasional, blink-it-and-you-miss-it glimpses of road signs and billboards, there’d be no way of identifying this as a corner of New York City; Blue Sun Palace unfurls for the most part inside crammed apartments and massage parlors, where […]
“Please stop me if any of the terms don’t make sense.” A few days before his feature debut, Eephus, will premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight, Carson Lund is sitting on a rooftop terrace in Cannes and worrying I may not catch all the jargon. Understandably. A chronicle of the last baseball game played at Soldiers Field in Douglas, MA before the grounds will be paved over and replaced by a middle school, the chat’s testing my—admittedly limited—knowledge of the sport. Yet how you’ll respond to Lund’s wistful film won’t depend on your level of inside baseball. It will depend on […]
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 […]
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? […]
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, […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Since he was last on the podcast (Ep. 112), Tom Pelphrey has been nominated for an Emmy for his work on Ozark, he’s had juicy roles on Outer Range and David E. Kelly’s Love and Death, and now Kelly has given Pelphrey perhaps his most exciting role to date in the character of Raymond Peepgrass in Netflix’s A Man In Full. On this episode, Pelphrey takes us deep into his work on that limited series. He talks about why a good costumer designer is an actor’s best friend, what made him feel free to go “full weird” with Regina King, […]