My knowledge of Greek cinema is imperfect, I admit--but am I alone? Greek cinema has historically suffered from a lack of promotional support abroad, which leaves moviegoers with scant information about the Greek canon. I remember watching Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Dogtooth” in Cannes a few years ago and feeling unnerved but also strangely delighted. Lanthimos took risks by putting characters that that were not likable in a situation so unusual

Two years ago with “Cosmopolis,” and now with “Maps to the stars” Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has been boosting his Hollywood cred with the appropriation of Robert Pattinson as his muse. Is this going to last much longer? While I waited to get into the Debussy theater for the film's 7:30pm screening a journalist told me, ironically, “they’ll shoot another third movie together and that one will be

The city. A couple in their late teens living in broken homes and attempting to get by in a Spain that's choking under the weight of austerity measures. From the very beginning of "Beautiful youth" ("Hermosa Juventud" in the original Spanish title) clues in the way of dialogues and confrontations are provided pointing to the bitterly difficult situation that this young couple, and so many others of their generation, are

Tommy Lee Jones made his Cannes directorial debut in 2005 with "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" and was awarded best screenplay for it (Guillermo Arriaga was scribe) and the best actor nod. It's taken him nine years to turn out his new opus "The Homesman," as director. After Faulkner, he's adapted a novel by Glendon Swarthout and revisits the Western genre. The resulting film, a moral and social fable from a different era, is excellent

“La Chambre Bleue” (“The Blue Room” in the original French), the extremely-talented actor Mathieu Amalric’s directorial debut, screened on Friday. Based on a slim 1955 novel by police procedural author Georges Simenon, it relates, or rather reveals, its story in a tortuously piecemeal fashion. In the course of an interrogation, we are introduced to Julien (Amalric), his mistress (Stéphanie Cléau) and his wife (Léa Drucker). What has transpired between them and the reasons for Julien’s interrogation gradually come into focus. Shot using the academy ratio of 1:33 (also used in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,”

(CONTAINS SPOILER ALERTS) Atom Egoyan’s to-catch-a-child-abductor caper “The Captive” was the third competition entry to arrive here. The motif of young ones in distress amid snow-clogged landscapes will no doubt bring to mind the director’s harrowing “The Sweet Hereafter,” which was a big prizewinner here in 1997. Sadly “Captive” does not come close to “Hereafter” in emotional force and restraint. Instead it brings to

It would be difficult to write a review of this year's Nuri Bilge Ceylan Cannes film in the space we normally intend for this type of article in Screen Comment. Our reviews are usually about 350 words and this word count just would not do it justice (plus, there's always another movie to go watch during Cannes). Instead, I'll give some impressions of it, by far my favorite one in this 67th edition of