CANNES, France — I have an ear-to-ear smile plastered on my face as I just watched the trailer for "Coupez!" the next-day refresher after taking in the movie last night here in Cannes, where it opened the 75th edition of the festival. At the screening I laughed and I laughed and I laughed again. Because the film is brilliant and handled with maestria by Michel Hazanavicius (“The Artist”) and it's not afraid to be an honest-to-goodness comedy, one that shows the mishap potential

CANNES, France-Two tribes, the Didinga and the Logir, on different sides of a vast patch of fertile vegetation. Their cattle graze on that patch so the space must be shared, but each tribe cattle-raids the other and tit-for-tat conflict is constant.

This dispute that takes place in South Sudan echoes many others before it throughout history, it’s a old problem, the fight

Arriving early, anywhere, is winning. Sort of. On Monday my train, the first one out of Paris that morning, was held for four hours in Saint-Raphael, about fifteen miles outside of Cannes, after an electrical outage wreaked havoc at the Cannes Gare. Four hours later, the train started moving and we were in Cannes within moments. The same fate was awaiting those of my colleagues who decided to take a later train out of the French capital,

CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, Ill.—The final two days of Ebertfest which ended on Sunday featured some great films in addition to stellar guests who spoke about their craft. Mostly, the invited guests discussed what motivated them to create their art, and the organizers also testified to what drives some of them to program the films they do.

Chaz Ebert kicked off Friday’s

Wednesday evening kicked off the 2022 festival with “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” which recently won the Oscar for best documentary. On Thursday morning, Ebert’s widow Chaz opened the proceedings by introducing the first full day of programming now that the festival has returned to in-person screenings for the first time since 2019. “During the ‘great pause’

Graham Moore won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for the 2014 film “The Imitation Game,” his first feature credit. It would take until 2022 for him to have another film in theaters, though Moore insists he has been anything but lazy in the intervening years.

“I did publish two novels between then and now,” Moore said recently during a phone conversation we had together.

The manifold themes of “Northern Skies over Empty Space”—there’s revenge, the upending of gender roles, heroism, searching for water in a barren land, a patriarchy on the wane, a natural habitat that is threatening—are something to behold, yet filmmaker Alejandra Marquez Abella has directed an evocative and everchanging film, which opened at Berlinale over the weekend, that draws on multiple narrative threads convincingly.