Cannes Film Festival
-
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 5: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Information, context and mystery have been on my mind quite a bit since seeing the two new films that Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought to this year’s Cannes: his feature-length, Tilda Swinton-starring, Colombia-set Memoria, and the 13-minute “Night Colonies,” the segment that concludes The Year of the Everlasting Storm omnibus project, which collects seven short films about creativity in the time of COVID-19 from global arthouse heavyweights such as Jafar Panahi, Dominga Sotomayor and David Lowery. This is partly because Weerasethakul’s new films, like the rest of his cinema, negotiate the divide between our sensory and cognitive functions better than […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 18, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 4: The Tsugua Diaries, Titane
Films in this year’s Cannes (especially the better ones) have been prone to metafiction—demonstrating and examining the process of making movies, creating images, writing and rehearsing scenes, or editing sound, putting the creative process on full display. It’s hardly a new trend in art cinema—make what you know, love and experience, and your livelihood is bound to bleed in some way or another—but self-reflexity is clearly in style, and Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro’s structural, faux making-of puzzle film The Tsugua Diaries may be the most exemplary case. True to its title, the diaristic Tsugua fictitiously dramatizes its own production, which disintegrates […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 16, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 3: Drive My Car, Bergman Island
“I am not really necessarily interested in performance, per se, but in emotion,” Ryûsuke Hamaguchi told Vadim Rizov back in 2019 when asked how meaningful the work of Jacques Rivette was to him. The answer went on to more or less say “not very,” which is even more incredible now that his new three-hour Murakami adaptation, Drive My Car, has landed, so absorbed with the art and nuances of rehearsal and performance that the French New Waver will inevitably be the default assumed touchstone once again. Indeed, Drive My Car is, along with its 40-page source material (found in Murakami’s […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 13, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 2: Benedetta, Hit the Road
Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s “lesbian nun movie” Benedetta may have taken two extra years to land (Verhoeven’s hip surgery in 2019 prevented him from completing post-production in time for that year’s Cannes), but its prologue wastes no time informing the audience of its mischievous timbre (for the handful heading into it expecting anything close to reverence), slipping in flame-farting jesters and a bird (ostensibly possessed by the Virgin Mary) dropping a turd in a bandit’s eye at our young heroine’s request. Adapted from Judith C. Brown’s 1986 book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, the […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 10, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 1: Section Openers Onoda, Ghost Song, Between Two Worlds, Cow
Cannes declared itself open for business earlier this week, 2021’s first major international film festival to do so in an entirely physical edition (save the partially-digital market). The irony has not been lost on some attendees that Thierry Fremaux and co. opted to launch its first Un Certain Regard selection in more than two years (the festival’s main opening film, Leos Carax’s Annette, was reviewed by Vadim Rizov earlier this week here) with an epic about a man who continued fighting a war for nearly three decades after it ended. Invisible enemies, lost time and interminable isolation: familiar pandemic phraseology […]
by Blake Williams on Jul 9, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Annette
Leos Carax’s Annette begins with a variant on Holy Motors’s “Entrac’te,” now split from one mid-film break into opening and (mid-end-credits) closing musical numbers that set a similarly grimly determined/celebratory tone. The director and his real-life daughter are among the first people seen, leading Sparks and the film’s main cast out of the recording studio and into the world. Adam Driver gets on a motorcycle and zooms into the night to begin his diagetic story proper as confrontational stand-up comic and antihero Henry McHenry, his castmates calling “good luck” after him. A slow-motion love triangle revolves McHenry and the Conductor (Simon Helberg) […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 7, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival Announces 2021 Official Selection with Pictures by Sean Baker, Sean Penn, Kogonada, Mia Hansen-Løve and More
A larger-than-usual Competition — 24 films — for its 2021 edition was announced today by the Cannes Film Festival, along with the Out of Competition, Un Certain Regard and other titles that comprise (for now) its official selection. Delayed from its usual dates in mid-May to July 6-17, the festival opens with the long-awaited Leos Carax Sparks-scored musical Annette and contains new features by Asghar Farhadi, Mia Hansen-Løve, Jacques Audiard and Nanni Moretti. Cannes also adds this year a new section, Cannes Premieres, containing films by festival veterans such as Oliver Stone, Kornél Mundruczo and Andrea Arnold. Among the American […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 3, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Leos Carax’s Annette (Plus Cannes 2021 News)
The long-awaited trailer for Leos Carax’s musical Annette — his follow-up to Holy Motors, one of best films of the last decade — has just been posted online. Concurrent with a communique from French President Emmanuel Macron that seems designed to assure anxious international industry about the viability of the upcoming ’21 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where Annette will be opening night, it’s a particularly impressive publicity drop. The film’s synopsis, from the press release: Los Angeles, today. Henry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian with a fierce sense of humor who falls in love with Ann (Marion […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2021 -
As the Calendar Rolls Around: Producers and Sellers on the Pandemic-Altered ’21 Festival Season.
For more than 40 years, there was a certainty to the film festival calendar—a comfort in knowing that, since 1978, when the Berlin International Film Festival moved to February, followed by Cannes in May, and Venice in the fall, there were three distinct seasons for producers, sales agents and buyers to meet, see films and make deals. But in 2021, things are different, of course. While the inflection points of the business cycle—winter, summer, fall—remain somewhat in place, the ongoing pandemic has scrambled the dates, formats and plans for hundreds of film events, upending launch strategies and causing potential logjams […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Apr 8, 2021 -
Pasolini, Thierry Frémaux’s Requested Cuts and Working with Music: Bertrand Bonello’s Masterclass at FIDMarseille
Bertrand Bonello, cinephile filmmaker, is not one to conceal his references. On War, with Mathieu Amalric in the lead as a director called Bertrand, quotes from Apocalypse Now at length, House of Tolerance transplants Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai to belle époque Paris and Nocturama concocts a beautiful synthesis of Carpenter and Romero. Yet, as the disparity of these citations indicates, Bonello’s shapeshifting, consistently surprising cinema makes it difficult to pinpoint what might have been his formative influences. Had I been pressed to try, I wouldn’t have come up with Pasolini, so it was a surprise to discover that his […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Jul 25, 2019
