"The Patagonian hare," "Shoah," "Tsahal," "Lights and shadows," "The last of the unjust." Claude Lanzmann was France's Holocaust orator, a vital testifier to the horrors and to the exceptionality of humanity's most talked-about tragedy. He died in Paris today. Lanzmann was born in Paris to a Jewish family that had immigrated to France from Eastern Europe. His family went into hiding during World War II. He joined the

This has been one of the strongest selections in years, with crowd-pleasers like "Leto" and fully-accomplished films like "Dogman" making an impression on festival-goers. The addition of press screenings to the schedule grid, better organized secured access to the Palais also helped make this seventy-first edition of the Cannes Festival an exceptional one. The jury annoyed and frustrated me by giving Jean-Luc Godard

“Knife + Heart” is a surrealistic and zany whodunit slasher inspired by the Italian giallo genre and directed by French director Yann Gonzalez. This is his first film in the official selection. In 2013 he presented “Les Rencontres D’Après Minuit” at Critics Week, one of the parallel sections at the Cannes Festival. “Knife+Heart” is a candidate for a Palme D’Or.Did you know? Anthony Gonzalez, one half of L.A.-based French band M83, is the brother of Yann Gonzalez

Everything about “Capharnaum” looked good, for a while. Nadine Labaki, its talented filmmaker, the trailer (“some squirt with killer looks stands in front of a judge in a Beirut court and tells him, “I want to sue my parents for having given birth to me”), the promise of a social drama examining Lebanese society, a film by a woman, going up for the top prize in Cannes. Labaki set out to make a movie about childhood. When young Zain

There is much going on in David Robert Mitchell’s new film “Under the silver lake,” one of the most thematically-dense feats of hardboiled storytelling of this 71st Cannes Festival. In this highly-entertaining “Lake,” to be catalogued under film noir, a tormented, and unemployed, young man, Sam (Andrew Garfield) who dreams of being famous, notices a new occupant in his L.A. apartment complex. Sam is intelligent

Good cinema takes time. Matteo Garrone first thought of the idea behind “Dogman” in 2008. He had this image, that of “a few dogs, locked up in a cage, bearing witness to the explosion of human bestiality” (from the production notes). “Dogman” (Garrone’s fourth film in Cannes) is like a corroded fresco of an Italy that’s concealed from the sightseeing brochures. Like in “Reality,” or “Gomorra,” the characters

En guerre (“At War”) focuses on one event in the life of employees of a French manufacturer of spare parts somewhere in France’s provinces: the shutting down of their plant. Two years after an agreement was reached to maintain jobs at their affiliate plant, the Germany-based parent company decides to call it quits. A strike goes in effect, and Laurent Amédéo (Vincent Lindon, here in his third collaboration with