Triangle of Sadness stands as the conclusion of what Ruben Östlund has recently deemed a trilogy about “being male in our times.” (It will not be a quartet.) As with the middle entry of said triptych (his 2017 Palme d’Or-winner The Square), Triangle is a movie of set pieces blanketed by a shapeshifting social critique obsessed with the myriad ways in which civilization and morality distort human life. Its initial target is the modeling industry, a chapter (the first of three, Östlund’s new favorite number) dominated by cheap shots at the scene’s stereotypical superficiality and cattiness, especially its particular gender […]
by Blake Williams on May 24, 2022The 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