Who was this giant of cinema, this at once diffident and arrogant workhorse of a filmmaker, Fassbinder? He was self-destructive, gay, antigay, versatile (he learned just about every trade associated with the cinema), he was terribly vexing and charming, all at once. Trying to pigeonhole him is a fool’s errand (he covered his trail, eluded categorizing). He dominated the melodramatic genre, in all its shades, from the

HE'S BAAAACK! Lars Von Trier's "The House that Jack Built" will be shown at the Cannes Festival this year, helping to deliver a shot in the arm, a mixture of adrenaline and steroids, to the official selection. Seven years ago, Von Trier was ejected from the Cannes Festival after fumbling his way, with devil-may-care indecency, through a Q&A with the press following the screening of his film "Melancholia." I hadn't attended

The Cannes Festival just announced this year's jury composition. The members are, Chang Chen (an actor from China), Ava DuVernay (writer, director, producer), filmmaker Robert Guédiguian (“The snows of Kilimandjaro”), Khadja Nin (a songwriter and composer from Burundi), actress Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, and Russian writer-director Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose film “Loveless”

The Czech-born director Milos Forman, who twice won the Academy Award for Best Director for his films “One flew over the cuckoo's nest” (1975) and “Amadeus” (1984) died on Friday at his home in the United States at 86 after a protracted battle with illness. His widow, Martina, told the Czech news agency CTK, "he died peacefully, surrounded by his family and loved ones.” Forman was a politically-committed filmmaker

It'll be hard to deny it: the Cannes Festival doth Iranian cinema love. Asghar Farhadi's "Everybody knows," which stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, will open this 71st edition, in a long tradition of showing deference to Iranian cinema. Jafar Panahi, under house arrest in Tehran by order of Iran's judicial courts (he won the top prize at Berlinale for his "Tehran Taxi" in 2015), has a horse in this race, too: his film is called "Three faces."

As the countdown to the seventy-first Cannes Festival begins, the official poster was released today. This year’s poster (see full image at the end of this article) was taken from 1965’s “Pierrot Le Fou.” Everyone at the Festival next month will see it, here, there, and everywhere. It’ll adorn the many sides of the Palais, the streets nearby, lampposts, ice-cream parlors and souvenir shops. A lively visual leitmotiv

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 leitmotifs of Farhadi's films and figure front and center in the script.