Jury President Isabelle Huppert announced the 62nd Cannes Film Fest awards, eliciting cheers and jeers from the critics sequestered in their separate theatre with direct transmission. Giving the eight awards to nine different films (the Jury Prize went to two films),…
Art Films: In the past couple days, several intellectually and artistically designed films have screened. Each merits recognition for the director’s unique, stylistic presentation that refuses to pander to audiences or to conform to convention. Among the most successful has…
Day 11: In agonizingly long takes with minimal action or dialogue, Ming-Liang Tsai’s Visage/Face is more experimental art than anything approaching a narrative film. With a two and one-quarter hour running time, it demands patience and the ability to enjoy…
Day 10: To elicit that most elusive “wow” response, a film based on a wild doctor’s imagination must show far-ranging creativity of its own, a heavy burden. Writer/director Terry Gilliam does achieve the needed, inspired flights of fancy here and…
Cannes, Day 9: Timing is everything, and so recent Ponzi schemes and the lure of hyped investments should add resonance to French writer/director Xavier Giannoli’s A L’Origine/In the Beginning. Not that it needs help engaging an audience with its intriguing,…
Day 8: Quentin Tarantino and Inglourious Basterds: Cannes’ most anticipated film and press conference did not disappoint, with a packed Lumiere theater for the press screening and a crush to get into the press conference immediately after the two hour…
Wow. The most unexpected, out-of-the-blue surprise I’ve ever received at a film festival came today from one of my cinema icons, the legendary French New Wave director Alain Resnais at the press conference for Les Herbes Folles/Wild Grass, his film…
Day 7 kicked off with Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, a multilayered melodrama that dramatizes reclaiming traumatic memories and revealing painful secrets. Performances by Almodovar stars Penelope Cruz, Blanca Portillo and Luis Homar bring life and, occasionally, poignancy to the story…
With an ironic Sunday screening, Danish director Lars von Trier’s Antichrist divided as much as it perplexed Cannes critics. At the conclusion of the film, some journalists booed, some applauded, and some just shook their heads in response to von…
Day 5: Vengeance and director Johnnie To’s press conference
How curious that directors producing the most taut, poetically violent fare present in press conferences the calmest, gentlest personas with the sweetest touches of humor. The films of South Korean directors Chon-wook…
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