It’s fitting that the Cannes film festival, presently celebrating its 70th incarnation, would choose to open this edition of shameless and unbridled self-reflexivity with a film that does the same. Arnaud Desplechin’s latest, Ismael’s Ghosts, is pure, saturated Desplechin (at least when he isn’t tipping his cap to Hitchcock’s Marnie and Vertigo), perhaps to a fault. Detailing a years-spanning love triangle set to its maker’s characteristic whip-pan rhythm, this is a vision so consciously expressive and overloaded with formal decoration (time jumps, iris-ins, rear-projection montage, direct address to camera and so on) that it finds itself explicitly likening its manically layered […]
by Blake Williams on May 18, 2017New films by American independents Benny and Josh Safdie, Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola and Noah Baumbach will all premiere in Competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The official selection’s full slate includes the Safdie brothers’s Robert Pattinson-starring Good Time, Haynes’s Amazon-financed childrens picture Wonderstruck, and the latest from Baumbach, the Netflix-acquired, Adam Sander-starring The Meyerowitz Stories. International auteurs include Lynne Ramsay’s collaboration with Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here; Michael Haneke’s Happy End, dealing with the European refugee crisis; and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, one of four festival films featuring Nicole Kidman. Also noteworthy […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 13, 2017