Bruno Dumont
-
Back to One, Episode 182: Léa Seydoux
Léa Seydoux was a talented young French actor when she reached planet-wide stardom with her incredible performance in Blue Is The Warmest Color (she even shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which had never been awarded to actors before). Since then she has invaded Hollywood, starring in James Bond movies and Wes Anderson films, but also continuing to turn in exceptional performances for international directors like Yorgos Lanthimos, Arnaud Desplechin, Ildikó Enyedi, and, for her latest film, France, Bruno Dumont. In this episode, she talks about the “sweet craziness” of working with Dumont, the importance of learning the “language” of […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Dec 10, 2021 -
Cannes 2019 Dispatch 4: Lux Æterna, Jeanne, Young Ahmed
Gaspar Noé may never mature in the ways his detractors wish (rather, many of them long for the day that he disappears completely), and yet his work, especially from his erotic 3D film, Love (2015), to the present, continues to surprise me. Creator of his own distinct cinematic idiom—one almost always described as both formally and thematically extreme—Noé returns to Cannes only a year after his Directors’ Fortnight success story, Climax, with a medium-length, stroboscopic, essayistic polyptych titled Lux Æterna. Even as Lux opens with a gently flickering title card that quotes Fyodor Dostoevsky on epilepsy—a state he said offers […]
by Blake Williams on May 22, 2019 -
Cannes Dispatch #3: Jeannette, the Childhood of Joan of Arc; The Florida Project; Good Time
Cannes, like virtually every other major international film festival showcasing feature-length filmmaking, is largely devoted to cinema that participates in a primarily theatrical mode — dialogue- and performance-driven works that feature subjects with whom we are meant to empathize to some degree. This is an expectation, fused into the medium’s DNA when it was still young, that is embedded in the layout of the festival itself; it’s the world’s largest film market (and therefore tilts mainstream, toward things that can make money), and the prizes it offers — honouring exemplary screenwriting and thespian turns rather than, for example, montage, photography, […]
by Blake Williams on May 26, 2017 -
Cannes Dispatch #1: Sieranevada, Staying Vertical, Slack Bay, Toni Erdmann
Cristi Puiu’s enigmatically titled (and spelled) Sieranevada was the first and longest Palme d’Or hopeful to be screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for the notoriously impetuous press corps. Puiu, whose The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) is often thought of as the foundational ripple that set off the ongoing so-called Romanian New Wave, has a reputation as being his country’s most uncompromising and rigorous player, and his latest three-hour appointment furthers the trend in an equally pale if far less misanthropic portrait of contemporary Romania. Sieranevada is a self-consciously long, loquacious, and unstructured film, bloated and macho and […]
by Blake Williams on May 16, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Bruno Dumont’s P’tit Quinquin
“Open that cow’s ass so I can look inside” is just one of the bizarro takeaway lines from this trailer for Bruno Dumont’s first-ever miniseries. P’tit Quinquin (the French title scans less awkwardly than the archaically phrased suggested English title, L’il Quinquin) is 200 minutes of rural murder mystery, and by the looks of it it combines the usual Dumont staples — surly villagers, casual racism, banal brutality — with a seemingly newly discovered sense of (odd) humor. The title presumably comes from the French lullaby (translation: “Little child”), which can be investigated in full here. Dumont evidently likes “Quinquin” […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 2, 2014 -
Shape of Things to Come: MOMI’s First Look Gives Adventurous New Cinema a Home
If you’re heading off to Sundance in a few weeks (or just wincing at the January film releases), you may want to make a stop off in Queens. First Look, the annual showcase of new international cinema, opens today at the Museum of the Moving Image and offers filmgoers many compelling reasons to shake off the post-holiday doldrums and to leave the Netflix cave. It also suggests the expansiveness of independent cinema worldwide. Curated by Dennis Lim (editor of Moving Image Source, the Museum’s multimedia magazine) and the museum’s film curators, Rachael Rakes and David Schwartz, the series presents a […]
by Paul Dallas on Jan 4, 2013 -
CANNES LINEUP
The Cannes lineup is in a bunch of places: here’s the link to Indiewire’s piece. Quick take: Inarritu’s Babel, Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, new films by Bruno Dumont, Pedro Almodovar, Ken Loach and Aki Kaurismaki, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (which we have a tiny preview of in the new issue — more when it comes out), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s follow-up to Distant all in Competition. Andrea Arnold’s Red Road the sole first feature in Competition. (I’m wondering what happened to Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain — Variety reported that it would be the festival “somewhere” just […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2006
