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 ... more >
ARCHIVES
Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society”
A great Allen vintage
Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg
Directed by Woody Allen
2016 is starting to shape up as the year of the love letter to Hollywood’s Golden Age. We started the year with the Coen Brothers's "Hail Caesar!," a kidnapping comedy set in a fictional fifties studio with million-dollar mermaids, crooning cowboys and blacklisted commie screenwriters. Still to come is Damien Chazelle’s musical "La La Land" with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Stuck in the middle is ... more >
CANNES DAYS 8 and 9 | “La fille inconnue,” “Personal Shopper,” “Inversion” and “Juste la fin du monde”
More misses than hits in fest's second half
The second part of the Cannes Festival is turning out to be harder to love than the first one, an enlightened epoch when “Ma Loute” and “Mal de Pierres,” an off-kilter comedy and a love drama respectively, were easy to stamp as good cinema. Week two isn’t all gems. Yesterday, the Dardenne Brothers’s “La fille inconnue” (“The Unknown Girl”) received a lukewarm response. In it a young woman ... more >
“PERSONAL SHOPPER” at the Cannes Festival
Film got negative reception at press screening
Kristen Stewart and Lars Eidinger
Directed by Olivier Assayas
“Personal Shopper” by Olivier Assayas is a movie about ghosts, the ghost that Maureen (played by Kristen Stewart) works for as personal shopper and that of her dead brother Lewis, whom she is trying to reconnect with. Kyra Gellman (Nora von Waldstätten) is an international socialite who needs her wardrobe constantly augmented, so she hired Maureen to regularly visit the best clothiers and ... more >
CANNES FESTIVAL OPENING, the star-studded red carpet
The beautiful actresses of this year's festival, up close
It would be hard to imagine the Cannes Festival without its coterie of stars, from Paris to Hollywood and points in between (but mostly from those two places). Yesterday's premiere of “Cafe Society” included castmembers Blake Lively and Kristen Stewart, as well as members of this year’s competition jury. ... more >
STILL ALICE, when family bonds are tested
Initial release: January 15th
Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart
Directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland
A lot of the buzz surrounding “Still Alice” revolves around Julianne Moore’s Oscar-worthy performance as a woman struggling with Alzheimer’s. And upon viewing there is no denying that Moore’s performance is the film’s winning factor. However, that is not to say that “Still Alice” is not a well-made film, because it is. Shot for less than five million dollars over the course of twenty-three days ... more >
CANNES – Clouds of Sils Maria
Not the director's best work
Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart
Directed by Olivier Assayas
For an unbeatable view of the Swiss Alps and their picture-perfect mountaintops see the “Clouds of Sils Maria.” This new film by French director Olivier Assayas (“Summer hours,” “Carlos”) shot entirely within the idyllic spreads of rural Switzerland puts in focus the coming undone of Maria Enders, an older actress (played by Juliette Binoche) who is confronted by her past when an actress half her ... more >