Cannes Film Festival
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Cannes Dispatch #4: Thoughts on Awards, I, Daniel Blake, Risk, Elle
I won’t spend too much time bemoaning the Competition prizes handed out last night by George Miller’s jury. Their decisions sucked, just as the Coen brothers’ jury’s did, just as Campion’s did, just as Spielberg’s kinda did, just as Moretti’s very much did, and okay fine I’ll stop there. The best film way more often than not goes home empty-handed from these things, and it rarely matters. Maybe a few less people sought out Holy Motors because Nanni Moretti thought Leos Carax didn’t spend enough time developing his characters, or a few more people were curious to discover whatever the […]
by Blake Williams on May 23, 2016 -
Cannes Dispatch #3: It’s Only the End of the World, The Park, The Red Turtle
The best thing about Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World: 35mm. Take whatever jabs you will at the 27 year-old Québécois (he’s certainly taken his fair share this year as the first of several punching bags in the Competition slate), but he is as mindful as any active filmmaker — young or old — about basic formal decisions like aspect ratios and the textural differences between digital and celluloid images. The only new film in the entire festival to be projected from a film print (Cannes Classics has two: Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital and Roger Corman’s The Pit and […]
by Blake Williams on May 20, 2016 -
Cannes Dispatch #2: Paterson, Happy Times Will Come Soon, Harmonium, Personal Shopper
I really ought to have more faith in Jim Jarmusch. Here’s an artist who, despite routinely delivering cinematic UFOs time and again, is still capable of surprising me with works that feel sui generis not only with regard to world cinema, but to his own filmography as well. Paterson, which is not even close to the “slight” or “minor” effort early reports claimed were threatening to land it in a sidebar (low key, sure, but so what?), manages to restate a number of Jarmusch’s pet motifs and themes in a tenor I’d not yet experienced in his work—at least not […]
by Blake Williams on May 17, 2016 -
Jarmusch x2 Tops Cannes 2016 Competition Lineup
Announced this morning, this year’s Cannes slate brings forth the expected pack of established masters in Competition, with some unexpected outliers sprinkled in per usual (Brillante Mendoza!). You’ll want to turn to David Hudson for a thorough annotation of everything known about these films to date. (Annual gender equity note: three out of 20 films in competition are directed by women.) A special congratulations to overachiever Jim Jarmusch for having two titles at Cannes: the Adam Driver drama (?) Paterson in Competition, and Gimme Anger, a documentary on The Stooges. Opener Cafe Society (Woody Allen) Competition Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil) American Honey (Andrea […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 14, 2016 -
Hell on Earth: László Nemes on Son of Saul
László Nemes’s debut feature Son of Saul was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes this year. Taking place over a 36-hour-period at Auschwitz in 1944, the film tells the story of Saul, a member of the “Sonderkommandos,” the Jews forced to handle the dead bodies in the crematorium. When Saul sees the body of a boy he believes to be his son, he goes on an impossible mission to try to save the body from the flames and find a rabbi who can recite the Kaddish to give the boy a proper burial. Saul risks everything and stops at nothing, […]
by Shevaun Mizrahi on Oct 28, 2015 -
Dispatches from Cannes and the Los Angeles Film Festival
Cannes by Aaron Hillis The same way New Yorkers love to bitch about living in what they also proclaim to be the world’s greatest city, the Cannes-accredited can spend nearly two weeks in the south of France watching nothing but prestigiously vetted films and have the nerve to call it a “so-so year.” But if that was a too-common sigh, it’s partly because the festival’s main competition had few unanimous hits, which is neither unusual nor taking stock of the parallel pleasures within the Un Certain Regard, Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sections, or out-of-competition premieres of innovative multiplex fare […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 23, 2015 -
Cannes 2015: Five Questions For Tale of Tales Star Salma Hayek
Salma Hayek rarely picks up her cell phone when the number is unlisted. But one day she did so while driving around Los Angeles, and the man on the other end was Italian director Matteo Garrone. Having been introduced to modern Italian cinema by her friend Valeria Golina, Hayek was flabbergasted. Garrone’s films Gomorrah and Reality were two of her favorite recent pictures. Not only that, but Garrone was offering her the role in a period film bringing to life the tales of 17th century Neapolitan scribe Giambattista Basile. She would play the role of a Spanish queen, the film would […]
by Ariston Anderson on May 22, 2015 -
Cannes 2015: Five Questions For Tale of Tales‘ Vincent Cassel
He’s played a troubled youth in the Paris ghettos in La Haine, a vengeful husband in Irreversible, and an abusive ballet company director in Black Swan. One pattern is clear with French actor Vincent Cassel: he works with directors of a special breed who can’t be boxed up neatly within a genre. His latest Cannes film is no exception. Cassel partnered with Italian director Matteo Garrone to play the role of a casanova Medieval king who’s always on the search for his next sexual conquest in Tale of Tales. Based upon the stories of Giambattista Basile, Europe’s original fairytale scribe, […]
by Ariston Anderson on May 22, 2015 -
Cannes 2015 Critics’ Notebook 2: Love and Youth
Quick, try to describe Irreversible and Enter the Void writer-director Gaspar Noé without relying on the words “controversial,” “provocateur,” “bad boy” (or, more Gallically put, “enfant terrible“) or “transgressive.” Noé’s latest potential scandal-maker, Love — hotly anticipated after smutty publicity materials teased it as a 3D art-house porno, complete with semen-sticky title treatment — was surprisingly softer and less shocking than anyone expected from last night’s midnight premiere. It’s also callow, shallow and numbingly insipid, despite its explicit mélange of blowjobs, threesomes and orgies. (Seriously, how does one make hardcore fucking more vanilla than Fifty Shades of Grey?) In a two-hour-plus scrapbook of flashbacks and time jumps forward, a […]
by Aaron Hillis on May 21, 2015 -
Cannes 2015: Five Questions for Carol Director Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes reteams with Cate Blanchett, after 2007’s I’m Not There, for his latest Palme d’Or contender Carol. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s semi-autobiographical novel The Price of Salt, Rooney Mara plays shopgirl Therese, who falls in love with the older, married Carol (Blanchett) in the ’50s. The two embark on a road trip, which culminates in Carol’s husband blackmailing her with the liaison to prevent her from having custody over their daughter. Edward Lachman’s cinematography is rich in period detail. And two masters at their craft bring the challenging characters to life, ending the film in a final wordless scene […]
by Ariston Anderson on May 18, 2015
