CANNES FESTIVAL - Film critics and festival jurors: two divergent forces that make the weather for the eleven days that the festival lasts. And yet, there's hardly any consensus between the two, with nary an exception. Last night, "I, Daniel Blake" won the Palme D'Or. I'll venture that this is the film both jurors and press met each other halfway on. With last night's win Loach joins that small club whose members--eminent directors

I’ve watched all twenty-one films in competition this year and must give credit to Thierry Frémaux and his team for having put together such a strong program. I room with one of France’s most eminent TV critics and there’s been some grousing coming from him and from some around the press rooms about the questionable quality of the films this year. But it seems to me that every year people are complaining about the mediocrity

“Elle,” last to be shown in competition, isn’t the best or the most accomplished film. It made sense to show it last in the festival for several reasons, however: the storied career of Paul Verhoeven, its director (at 77, Verhoeven is the oldest filmmaker among this year’s competition directors and has two major hits under his belt, “Basic Instinct,” 1992 and “Starship Troopers,” 1997), the cast, made up of A-plus-plus actors

The press conference for the new Nicholas Winding Refn film [...]

"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 second part of the Cannes Festival is turning out to be more challenging, quality-wise, than the first where “Ma Loute” and “Mal de Pierres,” an off-kilter comedy and a love drama respectively, were easy to stamp as good cinema. Week two, on the other hand, isn’t all gems. Yesterday, the Dardenne Brothers’s “La fille inconnue” (“The Unknown Girl”) received a lukewarm response. It's a drama about a young woman doctor who, overcome

Before he wrote a novel and directed a film Jonathan Littell was, for a long time, an international aid worker. He managed big-scale logistical operations in Africa and, throughout his life, attended to war fronts from Bosnia to Syria as part of humanitarian relief teams. Littell, who doesn’t consider himself an optimist, is no stranger to the savagery of man so it’s no surprise, therefore, that he should be so persuasive when writing or making films about it.