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 ... more >
Archives for May 2016
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CANNES FESTIVAL | Predictions for a winner
There were 21 films in competition this year
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 ... more >
“Elle,” fiction about survival and bourgeois boredom, closes CANNES FESTIVAL
Paul Verhoeven's first French-language film
“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, ... more >
CANNES FESTIVAL | All about Nicholas’s mother
Undercover mothering
"The Neon Demon" is in the running for a Palme D'Or this year
The press conference for the new Nicholas Winding Refn film “The Neon Demon” was held this morning here at the Palais, following a smashing premiere screening last night (the film was fantastic, take my word for it). One of my friends, Gatien Monloyer, is one of the cameramen who have a permanent spot at the back of the room on the audiovisual bridge. Over lunch today he explains that, the ... more >
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 >
CANNES DAYS 8 and 9 | “La fille inconnue,” “Personal Shopper,” “Inversion” and “Juste la fin du monde”
More misses than hits in fest's second half
The second part of the Cannes Festival is turning out to be harder to love than the first one, an enlightened epoch when “Ma Loute” and “Mal de Pierres,” an off-kilter comedy and a love drama respectively, were easy to stamp as good cinema. Week two isn’t all gems. Yesterday, the Dardenne Brothers’s “La fille inconnue” (“The Unknown Girl”) received a lukewarm response. In it a young woman ... more >
An anthropologist of violence | INTERVIEW WITH JONATHAN LITTELL
Discussing his film "Wrong Elements" and the geopolitics of human conflict in Africa
Film is being distributed by French outfit Le Pacte
Before he wrote a novel and directed a film Jonathan Littell was, for a time, an international aid worker. He managed big-scale logistical operations in Africa and attended to war fronts from Bosnia to Syria as part of humanitarian relief teams. Littell, who doesn’t consider himself an optimist, is predictably not a stranger to the savagery of man. That he should be persuasive when writing or ... more >