A great prize list aside—better than any since at least 2011—I can’t fall in line with a majority of this year’s press corps in declaring this a banner year for Cannes; ironic, given that, on paper, this indeed was going to be a banner year for Cannes: Malick! Bonello! Hausner! Tarantino! Dumont! Diop! Lav! Bong! There was something for everyone, and most of it seemed to go down quite smoothly, even as distinctions between the good, bad, and ugly was as indiscernible as ever. On the two critics’ grids I participated in, for example, virtually every film across every section […]

We all know that Cannes appraises itself as the supreme purveyor of a given year’s most handsome industrially-produced arthouse motion pictures (that is, those that happen to have completed their post-production by late April of said year) — a launchpad for quote-unquote major achievements by the world’s most recognizable and uncompromising narrative filmmakers. Its unwillingness to accommodate the more outre or difficult projects from directors who fit that description hasn’t been too contentious thanks, mostly, to the Directors’ Fortnight’s relatively eclectic and much less constricted programming philosophy—carried over from one artistic director to the next for more than half a […]

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 […]

Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner made her English language debut with the UK-set project, Little Joe, taking up science fiction for the first time in her career after previously exploring horror and the period drama in Hotel (2004) and Amour fou (2014), respectively. In the film, Alice (Emily Beecham) works at a corporate biotechnology lab with a team of scientists who aim to develop new breeds of flowers that can, with their oxytocin-rich pollen, elevate people’s happiness, friendliness, and sex life—an evocative and typically rich concept for Hausner that still manages to be supplemental to her exquisitely detailed and precise mise […]

I didn’t attend Cannes in 2009, but what I’ve come to understand to be that year’s Official Selection highlight—namely, Alain Resnais’s delirious late masterpiece Wild Grass—is precisely the kind of movie I always long to experience, here or anywhere: a vision always blossoming, driving deeper into a world entirely of its own creation, ever-willing to swerve off-road to see where the unpaved path might lead. The scarcity of such work in cinema no doubt runs down to the roots of the industry, attributable as much to the fortress of protocols one must fulfill to get any given project off the […]

Cannes opened its 72nd edition last night with Jim Jarmusch’s self-reflexive and divisive zomedy The Dead Don’t Die, a movie that reunites the American filmmaker with the horror genre he flirted with in 2013’s Only Lovers Left Alive, and serves to further clarify his late digital style. Though reportedly not the festival’s first choice for the slot, it’s easy to see why Cannes was content to offer it this year’s first red carpet; Jarmusch stacked his cast with A-listers—Bill Murray,  Adam Driver, Danny Glover, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Selena Gomez, and I really could just keep on going—while the title […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]