“Hey, it’s me,” said Sean Price Williams as he walked up to me at the after-party for Josh and Benny Safdie’s simply fantastic Good Time in Cannes last week. It did take me a second to recognize Williams — cleanly shaven, in a spiffy tux and strolling around a Dior-sponsored event for a film in the Main Competition of the Cannes Film Festival. If Williams seemed like a bit of a happy anomaly there, it’s because, like Good Time itself, the DP has ascended to cinema’s most revered platform with work that’s wholly of a piece with the raw, street-level […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 30, 2017Cannes, like virtually every other major international film festival showcasing feature-length filmmaking, is largely devoted to cinema that participates in a primarily theatrical mode — dialogue- and performance-driven works that feature subjects with whom we are meant to empathize to some degree. This is an expectation, fused into the medium’s DNA when it was still young, that is embedded in the layout of the festival itself; it’s the world’s largest film market (and therefore tilts mainstream, toward things that can make money), and the prizes it offers — honouring exemplary screenwriting and thespian turns rather than, for example, montage, photography, […]
by Blake Williams on May 26, 2017