Delight is not a word frequently associated with the films at Cannes. Seriousness, slowness, strangeness: the movies on the Grand Palais screen are often dour and demanding. This year the world’s most acclaimed directors have …
Sean Penn Leads a Fast Five Films for Friday
The countdown ticks toward Sunday’s Palme d’Or ceremony. With two days left, only two of the 20 film in competition are left to see. In a Festival that began with big names and high hopes, a gentle malaise has settled upon the
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The Skin I Live In: Almodovar’s Surgical Thriller
The noted plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) believes that his radical experimentation in “transgenesis” could cure diseases and correct deformities. But what the doctor really wants to do is direct — to …
Cannes Bans Lars von Trier for Nazi Remarks
How far is too far? For the gentlefolk who run the Cannes Film Festival, too far is when a crazy-great director like Lars von Trier uses Europe’s version of the N word: Nazi.
Melancholia: Lars von Trier’s Tree of Death
Wagner’s Overture for Tristan und Isolde thunders its ominous beauty on the soundtrack, and a blond woman (Kirsten Dunst) in a bridal gown watches anxiously as birds fall dead from the sky. In a farther region of the sky, one …
Lars von Trier: “O.K., I’m a Nazi”
Within the hour, Richard Corliss will be posting his review of Lars von Trier’s (in my view, excellent) new film Melancholia, which had its world premiere this morning. But von Trier, the wildly talented, supremely maddening Danish director of such Cannes favorites as Europa/Zentropa, Breaking the Waves and Antichrist, topped himself for …
The Tree of Life: Terrence Malick’s Cosmic Cinema
The mob scene of a couple thousand critics pushing and shoving, pleading and shouting, to get in; the hushed anticipation as the film began; and at the end, the belligerent booing answered by defiant applause. What stoked the …
Restless: Gus Van Sant Draws a Blank
The other night we had the pleasure of meeting Mia Wasikowska, the wan, wonderful young actress who has played the title roles in Alice in Wonderland and Jane Eyre and was in Cannes to promote her new film, Restless. Tall and polite, and flashing deep dimples she almost never reveals on screen, the 21-year-old Australian rhapsodized …
We Need to Talk About Kevin: The Face of Pure Evil
When a child dies, it is a tragedy for the parents, an upsetting of the natural order. But when a child kills, is the parent also guilty of the crime? We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay’s solid, scary film that became …
Wu Xia: Martial Arts Majesty
Wu Xia, which will be called Dragon when The Weinstein Company releases it in the United States, brought the Festival’s weekend slate roaring to life. An antidote to the slow, overweight Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger …
Johnny Depp’s Pirates Sinks on the Riviera
Today two action films invaded the stately art house that is the Cannes Film Festival. In line with the Festival’s policy of keeping the slate of pictures competing for the Palme d’Or pure and rigorous, Pirates of the Caribbean: …
Unlawful Killing: Was Princess Diana Murdered?
Will they show the death photo? A week after that question dominated U.S. news in the wake of the Osama bin Laden killing, all of Cannes — or, rather, many in the British press reporting on the film festival — was …
Kung Fu Panda 2: A Jolly Sequel, But Not an Equal
The evil Lord Shen (voiced by Gary Oldman) has just introduced gunpowder to China and plans to aim it at the country’s greatest martial artists, a group that implausibly includes a pudgy panda bear named Po (Jack Black). Po’s …
