For the first time since he was in his 2006 picture “Scoop,” Woody Allen has given himself a part in his next film, which has the working title of “The Bop Decameron” and is due to start filming in Rome in July. The Decameron is the name of Boccacio’s erotic 14th-century stories, often made into film, most famously by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1971 and also by Fellini/de Sica et al for the 1962 "Boccacio 70." Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page and Roberto Benigni star. Thus, year in, year out, the director pays his tithe to the gods of cinema, this time around surely especially buoyed by the resounding and well-deserved success of his multi-actored, multi-period “Midnight in Paris.”

The much-awaited biopic on French President Sarkozy, “La Conquête” or “the Conquest,” presented outside the competition, fizzled out on Wednesday. The audience expected an intelligent story with revelations and analysis of the French political class. What it got instead it was a made-for-TV wooden narrative with nothing new or original and actors who are exact copies of the actual people they represent. The story is that of Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to power from 2002 when he becomes Interior Minister under Jacques Chirac to 2007 when he wins the presidential elections. The two threads followed are one, the fierce in-fighting with another member of government who absolutely hates his guts, Dominique de Villepin, and two, the breaking apart of his marriage to Cecilia Sarkozy, uninterested in the trappings of power and in love with another man whom she will go away with just as Sarkozy wins the elections. We cannot be remotely interested in these people as there is no larger perspective, no analysis of politics or of the strange motivations of the men and women who pursue success in the fraught and ultimately unrewarding corridors of power. No Nanni Moretti’s “Il Caimano” (about Berlusconi) here, nor “W,” Oliver Stone’s study of Bush.

"The Conquest" generally fails except in illustrating what is well known: the tight ranks of the “legitimate” political class in France, tall graduates of the famous ENA school, well-bred and moneyed, for whom a short, ordinary man born to a Hungarian Jewish family, even when elected president, will always remain a figure of ridicule, certainly unfit to lead the French Republic.

[post_author_posts_link] [post_date] [post_comments] [post_edit] Provincetown, Mass., prides itself on several [...]

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The marriage of circus and cinema took place in the very early days, fittingly enough as film, the new form of entertainment, sought to capitalize on one of the oldest ones. Some of the first memorable movies about the big top are Chaplin’s “The Circus” in 1928 and Tod Browning’s unforgettable “Freaks” in 1932. From then on, the list of circus movies is unending, about pathetic carnival sideshows in Fellini’s “La Strada” or extravaganzas like Cecil B. de Mille’s “Greatest Show on Earth,” (this last earning a reputation as worse Academy Award winner ever). There are the Marx Brothers, there’s “Trapeze,” we even have Elvis in “Roustabout,” for crying out loud. Some of these films are spectacular or inspired, many corny, hammy, sentimental, and likable. None of these qualifiers apply to “Water for Elephants” a strangely inert vehicle for cardboard cutout characters who sleepwalk through a tired and predictable story.

Robert Redford is a good man. He is earnest and [...]