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CANNES FESTIVAL (DAY ONE): Farhadi Lite opens the Cannes Festival, Edouard Baer delivers euphoric ceremony opener

Last night’s opening ceremony, which was shown to the press corps via simulcast in the Debussy theater, was pure joy, especially if you speak French. French film and theater actor Edouard Baer emceed the event with ironic bonhomie and a piano player who accompanied him as he delivered a spoken-word-style love letter to cinema and to humanity at large. With Anna Karina, the actress from “Pierrot le ... more >

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Asghar Farhadi’s new film TODOS LOS SABEN (“Everybody knows”) to open Cannes Fest.

Film will run in competition

Asghar Farhadi's eighth film was shot entirely on location in Spain. Laura (Penelope Cruz) lives with her husband (played by Javier Bardem) and their children in Buenos Aires. When they return together to her native village in Spain for a family event, the trip gets derailed after unexpected events bring secrets out into the open. The family, its ties and the moral choices imposed on them are all ... more >

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THE LAST FACE at the CANNES FESTIVAL

Film was written by Erin Dignam
The score was composed by Hans Zimmer
Produced by Bill Gerber and directed by Sean Penn

"The Last Face," starring Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem and Adèle Exarchopoulos and directed by Sean Penn, premiered in Cannes this morning. In this romance drama juxtaposed with a humanitarian action story Theron plays the director of an international aid agency who meets a Doctors Without Borders doctor (Bardem), as an armed conflict in Liberia drifts into full-on civil war. The topic of a ... more >

To the wonder

Your guide to Terence Malick's To The Wonder
Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko
Directed by Terence Malick

Here’s a topic for sitting around the campfire: are the worst films by the best directors still better than 80% of what is released? Are say, "Bringing Out the Dead" or "The Hudsucker Proxy" still relative carrots for the eyes when compared to the "Transformer" movies? Terrence Malick’s "To the Wonder" is a lot more "The Prairie Home Companion" than "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." Following in the ... more >

To the wonder

To the wonder

Why hide it?
Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams
Directed by Terrence Malick

Less than three years after “Tree of Life” and his Palme D'Or win at Cannes, Terrence Malick is back with “To the Wonder,” a film-as-poem whose secret only he knows, apparently. At some point during the time lapsed Malick’s creativity and inspiration went out the window. In fact, with this vaguely sensory, visual fog of a film, Malick, convinced of his own genius and assured of making a new ... more >

SKYFALL

Invigorated and relevant: the new James Bond
Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem and Judi Dench
Directed by Sam Mendes

That name. The musical score playing over the line of a gun sight. That Aston Martin. That dry martini. Few things in Hollywood stay fresh for this long, but Ian Fleming’s "James Bond" franchise just keeps reinvigorating itself. Its best move, recently, was the recruitment of Daniel Craig--one of the most impressive Bonds ever, no doubt. We first see him involved in an improbable action ... more >

Eat, Pray, Love

A well-known set of circumstances
Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem
Directed by Ryan Murphy

Eat, Pray, Love is not your typical chick flick. Julia Roberts, as author Elizabeth Gilbert, spends much of the film feeing depressed and lost, and the story gives us only intermittent moments of the spontaneous, over-the-top bliss that characterizes this genre. In fact, Eat, Pray, Love is almost its own genre--the self-help kind. After being married for eight years (to a character played by ... more >