Cannes Film Festival 2018
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Cannes Dispatch #7: Climax
In a genuinely shocking turn of events, self-promoting shit-stirrer Gaspar Noé’s new film Climax — re-screened for festival-goers yesterday after it won the Directors’ Fortnight’s Art Cinema Award — is one of the best and most broadly-loved films to premiere in Cannes this year, pleasing devoted followers while winning over a fair many skeptics in the process. I’ll confess to being reasonably on board with his let’s-not-call-it-a-“project” coming into this one — especially when he works in 3D, as he did in his throwback to ’70s erotica, Love (2015) — though my enthusiasm for his movies has been invariably mitigated by […]
by Blake Williams on May 19, 2018 -
Cannes Dispatch #6: Under the Silver Lake, Burning
While there are discoveries to be had at this festival, Cannes is notoriously light on unknown quantities; Yomeddine is the only debut in this year’s Competition slate, and who knows how or why that happened. It’s a festival that prides itself on grandiosity and presenting the vanguard of arthouse filmmaking, albeit with some degree of familiarity, which means that much of the excitement of coming to watch movies here stems either from promises fulfilled or witnessing the occasional familiar face move in a new direction. Invigorating as these latter cases are to behold, they inevitably arrive with mixed results, as exemplified in […]
by Blake Williams on May 18, 2018 -
Cannes Dispatch #5: BlacKkKlansman, The House That Jack Built
Among the markers of a great film—of a great work of art in general—is its ability to conjure itself up unannounced, repeatedly, in the light of neighboring films and artworks; it becomes a lens through which other work is viewed, a standard by which everything else is held, a shadow enlightening the world we now walk through. This is one way of briefly reiterating something I attempted to articulate in my third dispatch: Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Bookis great art, corroborated for me by its persistent presence in my consciousness during the last several days of movie watching—most notably (and […]
by Blake Williams on May 15, 2018 -
Cannes 2018 Dispatch #4: Shoplifters, Girl, Happy as Lazzaro
Over the last couple of days, I’ve encountered a string of films that I’ve found to be less than generative, and hence difficult to write about. Cannes, like most international film festivals, offers a selection of films that tend to be too forthcoming about their moral positions, and too specific with regards to how their viewers are intended to emote. For instance, this morning’s competition screening, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters—a poignant, carefully structured look at an impoverished Japanese family’s daily life—is nice to look at, impressively acted and easy to be moved by, but places hard, unmissable accents on all of […]
by Blake Williams on May 15, 2018 -
“It Went from ‘He Can’t Breathe’ to ‘He is Really Cold'”: Director Joe Penna on his Cannes Survival Drama, Arctic
Los Angeles-based writer/director Joe Penna has made a name for himself in the YouTube world with his popular channel MysteryGuitarMan. Combining his passion for music and stop-motion animation, the channel, now over ten years old, boasts 2.8 million subscribers and over 400 million views. Videos such as “Guitar Impossible” have screened at the Guggenheim Museum. In addition to his many commercials for top brands, the native Brazilian gained further attention for his short films, including Instant Getaway, that was produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer and Turning Point and was selected to play at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. […]
by Tiffany Pritchard on May 14, 2018 -
Cannes 2018 Dispatch #3: The Image Book
Last week I had coffee with American filmmaker/projectionist/translator Ted Fendt, and he said something that has, as I’d expected, stayed with me during my time watching and thinking about movies in Cannes. He suggested—or at least wondered aloud—that the lack of great writing on Jean-Luc Godard’s late period might be attributable to the fact that it is so difficult for critics to match the radicality of the films themselves. I was immediately inclined to push back against the idea, just as I was intrigued by it, and proceeded to wonder if a thorough exegesis of a Godard film might be […]
by Blake Williams on May 12, 2018 -
From NYU to Cannes: Egyptian Filmmakers A.B. Shawky and Dina Emam on Their Debut Feature, the Competition Title Yomeddine
Egyptian writer/director Abu Bakr (A.B.) Shawky and his filmmaking and real-life partner Egyptian producer Dina Emam made an impact weeks before their first feature, Yomeddine, even screened in Cannes. Theirs is the rare first-time feature to screen in what is most certainly the most prestigious launchpad for any movie: the festival’s Main Competition. Meaning “Day of Judgment” in Arabic, the film centers around a man with leprosy (Rady Gamal, “Beshay”) who goes in search of his family across Egypt with all of his possessions loaded on a donkey. Together with a young orphaned boy (Ahmed Abdelhafiz, “Obama”), the two fend […]
by Tiffany Pritchard on May 12, 2018 -
Cannes 2018 Dispatch #2: Donbass, Petra
Speaking of soap operas: Jaime Rosales follows Farhadi’s plunge into the vernacular of Spanish culebrones with a complementary appropriation of melodrama in Petra, an achronological chronicle of one woman’s search for truth, history and her own identity. Starring Bárbara Lennie (who, funny enough, also appears in a significant supporting role in Everybody Knows), the movie intrigues from the outset, playfully opening with a title card announcing Chapter II, along with a concise summary of the key narrative information this chapter will provide (“How Petra enters Jaume’s world”), a strategy that each subsequent chapter also employs. At his characteristically unhurried tempo, […]
by Blake Williams on May 11, 2018 -
Cannes 2018 Dispatch #1: Everybody Knows, Birds of Passage
One’s valuation of a film—really, any piece of art—is inseparable from the conditions in which it was experienced. The time of day or overall mood and health at the time of the screening (or link-watching) inform my appreciation of a movie just as much as anything else (save for aesthetic preference and sensibility, perhaps), and this extends to festival contexts—to the ways a film participates in the narrative arc of the nine or ten or twelve days of the event, to the impatience stemming from a lack of masterpieces (or good movies, period), and so on. I bring this up […]
by Blake Williams on May 9, 2018 -
Anticipating an Exciting (?) Cannes: Films We’re Looking Forward to in the 2018 Edition
I was talking with some French producers recently, and they were seriously looking forward to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And they were miffed by some of the preview articles that have been posted, including Todd McCarthy’s piece questioning the firepower of this year’s line-up. For years people have been wanting the Festival to be more adventurous, they told me, and now, when they are, Cannes is being criticized for not having the new films of the familiar auteurs who have appeared in the main selection so many, many times. I heard similar comments from a Latin American producer, who […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2018
