Part-psychodrama, part-sexual thriller and 100% French, Stranger By The Lake is engrossing and rigorously shot. It elevates exploitation to bold, subversive cinema, studying queer morals and desire in the most casual, straightforward, matter-of-fact way imaginable. Expect plenty of puritanical bashing.
Day off. It's the first day during my time in Cannes so far where I've never attempted to queue and see any film. In other words, I've done fuck-all. But it was worth every minute to saunter around the Boulevard de Croisette, catch the blazing sun along the beach and indulged in cocktails.
The Past has the right ingredients of a tour-de-force family drama, but feels slightly overcooked. It's not as compelling as Farhadi's masterful A Separation. However, he weaves a tangle of relationships that's equally complex and nuanced, and peels layers of human depth that most filmmakers today could ever dream of achieving.
The Order of the Day was supposed to be comprised with the Benecio del Toro-starring Jimmy P. as the starter, to be followed by the new Coen brothers' latest Inside Llewyn Davis as the main course. Turns out I failed to wake up for the former, and missed out on not only one but two screenings of the latter....
Thanks to the free espressos in the Palais, I would've been crawling around in half-slumber, drifting around in the corners of the Croisette, looking for a place to quickly get a nap. Instead I ended up hanging around between the Orange-sponsored wifi-café and a boulevard restaurant where I spent my entire lunch staring at a...
Fruitvale Station has all the potential of a compelling socio-political human drama calibrated to wrench hearts and rouse anger about the injustices of authority, but if it weren't for its contrived, stilted dramatisation and inconceivably pedestrian first hour, it would have fared to be a far better film than what everyone in Sundance and Cannes...
This is easily Sofia Coppola's funniest, snarkiest film to date. The Bling Ring has less melancholy and soul-gazing than other Coppola's works, but with more biting, satirical poking at the vacuous celebrity worship and religious high-end brand adulation by imbecilic, aimless youths, one of whom portrayed to comic precision by Emma Watson, who throws her...
I cannot remember the last time I've woken myself up at an ungodly hour of 6am to go and queue up for a film screening. Not ever in my lifetime so far. I consider this actively insane. But this is what cinemagoing in Cannes meant to people here, and it's beyond pure bloody determination. Waking...
Many have made films about sad, beautiful whores, and Jeune & Jolie is a welcome addition to the gallery. François Ozon's masterstroke here isn't provocation but rather the power of understatement, subtlety and nuance, delicately portraying youth when it denies the banality of age and sexuality.
A few years ago, I thought the Cannes Film Festival regularly takes place on Planet Jupiter - surreal, far-fetched, an unattainable figment of the fabulous imagination. Now I'm on this planet, and it's fucking awesome to be here.
This Gatsby adaptation is far from perfect - but Luhrmann does his damnedest to achieve a gloriously elaborate, beautifully mounted domestic drama that does justice to Fitzgerald's transcendent novel. Faithful in narrative yet irreverent in style, it balances craftsmanship and excess, storytelling and style and most of all, grand emotion and depth, anchored by a...
The third outing of this metallic franchise is solid but hardly breaks new ground in the arena of superhero movies built with familiar chassis and recycled parts. What Iron Man 3 gives you, however, is good fun - like being in a shiny, snazzy party but goes home feeling slightly empty afterwards.
Do yourself a fucking favour and avoid this film at all cost. If there's a legitimate reason why North Korea will ever launch a nuke on us, it's the very existence of films as irresponsible, cretinous and obnoxious as Olympus Has Fallen.
And so the competitors (and showmakers) of the world's most esteemed film festival have been revealed this morning during the Conférence de Presse in Paris, officially kickstarting the butt-clenching excitement that is next month's 66th Festival de Cannes. It is quite a list - Polanski, the Coen brothers, Payne, Ozon, Sorrentino, Gray, Farhadi, Soderbergh and...
The cinematic equivalent of an Ikea furniture - minimalist in approach, derivative in design yet functional as a whole. It just doesn't help Oblivion is settles for acceptable mediocrity rather than aim for achievable greatness.
Whether Harmony Korine set out to make a satirical comment on the pointlessness of the MTV lifestyle or the perverted exploitation of these former Disney starlets is beside the point. There's no denying Spring Breakers' corrosive perspective on the mad, lunatic, vacuous Floridian beach-party pilgrimage, in itself a religion followed by the hollow souls of...
There are two things running around my mind this week: 1) Ryan Gosling can punch you right in the face and drag you across the floor by the jaw whilst maintaining his cool and looking adorable, and 2) Baz Luhrmann could either deliver this year's most glorious cinematic feast or the most weirdly anachronistic misfire...
A profoundly moving portrait of love caught in a minefield of socio-political conflict. Like the best of cinematic debuts, Out in the Dark is thoughtful, poignant, nerve-shredding and hauntingly relevant - a story of human turmoil that demands to be seen by anyone who has a beating heart.
The connoisseurs of the Cannes Film Festival have unveiled the official poster for this year's festivities - and it looks rather fabulously retro-chic. In case you're wondering who these loved-up doves are - they're Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward in a film I won't pretend I've seen. Apparently taken whilst the couple were...
This will satisfy gorehounds in the planet - it's balls-to-the-wall gory, graphic and executed to exaggerated extremes. Too bad it's a needless rehash. Bruce Campbell seems to be having the last laugh.
This may be the trashiest, raunchiest, riskiest motion picture event you'll ever likely to see in recent memory - and all the better for it, especially in an industry where 90% of films are mainly playing it dull and discreet. Lee Daniels clearly couldn't give a toss about what you think and risks his career...
Any lover of darkly amoral cinema will lap this up. Stoker is one highfalutin dysfunctional family psychodrama that's equally unnerving, self-consciously perverse and artfully deranged. The more it becomes unhinged, the harder it takes to look away. Mark my words, this will go down as a pitch-black Gothic classic.
There's a sense of wonderment in Sam Raimi's approach to Oz, as if discovering digital wizardry for the first time. This prequel is a surprisingly palatable affair, like a sugar confection with enough dose of cinematic glucose, balancing visual delights with old-fashioned escapism. Although multi-million dollar pixels can't quite conceal the hackneyed plot. Nonetheless, it's...
Cloud Atlas, when it works, is a breathtaking portfolio of juggernaut editing and storytelling, almost immeasurable in scope, size and gargantuan technical ambition. Something to applaud the trio of directors involved. But for every incarnation of a poignant Ben Wishaw and a very game Hugh Grant, there's Tom Hanks talking the tru-tru and Hugo Weaving...
Do you think Oscars really hold sway over the Grand Scheme of Things? Take a long hard look at this tableaux of films that the Academy Awards have snubbed over the years. Just about a few of the greatest films ever made on the Face. Of. The. Earth.
Masterful and subversively assembled, Cabaret is more than your mundane musical extravaganza. It is a glitteringly dark, intelligent, audacious and morally complex slice of cinema with a tragic heroine (played to a scintillating, iconic, career-bolstering performance by Liza Minelli) reflecting an even more tragic, nihilist era of turmoil and dissolution. This is a musical movie...
A tough-to-ignore morality drama with enough razor-sharp truths that pierce the reality in which we all live in. Arbitrage is taut, tense and intelligently direction, matched by Richard Gere's riveting, tour-de-force of a performance. His Robert Miller maybe one of cinema's most distinctive bastards since Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.
Who knew this wasn't coming? Les Misérables is a mess. Lincoln is a tad tedious. Life of Pi is for kids. And Zero Dark Thirty is directed by a woman. Argo is the only one that ticks all the boxes. In the parallel universe where justice is serviced, Amour and The Master would have swept...
Merely watchable historical drama kudos to Daniel Day-Lewis's towering Method-marvel of mythmaking. Other than that, Lincoln is dripping with contemptible self-importance and over-praised bathos, with team Spielberg and Kushner lethargically reiterating historical events like a bunch of anaemic historians who badly need to see some daylight.
Don't let the television aesthetic distract you, this is the crown jewel in Pablo Larrain's trilogy of Pinochet's dictatorship. No is incisive, insightful and unexpectedly moving, anchored by an understated, sensitive performance by Gael Garcia Bernal.
Cannes 2013: Day Seven
May 22, 2013
Cannes 2013: Day Six
May 22, 2013
Cannes 2013: Inside Llewyn Davis
May 21, 2013
Cannes 2013: Stranger By The Lake
May 21, 2013
Cannes 2013: Day Five
May 20, 2013
Cannes 2013: The Past
May 20, 2013
Cannes 2013: Day Four
May 19, 2013
Cannes 2013: Day Three
May 18, 2013
Cannes 2013: Fruitvale Station
May 18, 2013
Cannes 2013: The Bling Ring
May 17, 2013
Cannes 2013: Day Two
May 17, 2013
Cannes 2013: Jeune & Jolie
May 16, 2013
Cannes 2013, Day One
May 15, 2013
Cannes 2013: The Great Gatsby
May 15, 2013
Iron Man 3 (2013)
Apr 25, 2013
