Nicole Kidman pisses on Zac Ephron’s face! Eva Mendes cradles a Parisian sewer troll! A nude Kristen Stewart jerks off Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund—at the same time! Kanye West unveils the future of cinema inside an enormous white pyramid! Film festivals usually mete out their lunacy with more deliberation. This year, though, after a subdued week of world-class cinema, Cannes got weird fast. Read More
Here comes the sun. All week, the Cannes Film Festival has been drenched with relentless rain, billowing wind and a sweater-worthy chill—plus a dearth of high-wattage stars, ever since Bill Murray and his Moonrise Kingdom crew left after opening night. But all that changed this morning as the clouds parted in the Mediterranean skies and Brad Pitt popped up onscreen at the 8:30am screening of Killing Them Softly. Read More
Three films here in Cannes have held a funhouse mirror up to our relationship with media, and it sure isn’t a pretty sight. Political ads, no matter how well intentioned, are still slickly produced distortions; reality TV encourages a pathological fealty; celebrity culture taken to its extreme will literally make people sick. The trio forms an unintended trilogy of how television can shape, and then warp, our perceptions. And if the medium is the message, then the message is loud and clear: Reality bites. Read More
CANNES, FRANCE, MAY 19— Love is in the air here at Cannes, and so is at least one Oscar prospect. Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard is first out of the gate this year with a riveting performance as a double amputee in Jacques Audiard’s tough, achingly beautiful drama Rust and Bone. Crippled by a freak killer whale accident in the south of France (yeah, I just wrote that), Orca trainer Cotillard mends a shattered life by finding mutual redemption in the arms of a stoic single father and amateur kickboxer (played with muscular intensity by human bicep Matthias Schoenaerts). Read More
CANNES, FRANCE– Last year’s Cannes Film Festival was a bizarre anomaly by any measure. The art-house powerhouse debuted Oscar’s best picture (The Artist); Woody Allen’s highest-grossing film ever (Midnight in Paris); Terrence Malick’s mystical, masturbatory tone poem (The Tree of Life); and Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic melodrama (Melancholia), which prompted the Danish provocateur to announce himself a Nazi, get officially labeled “persona non grata,” and be told he physically can’t come within 100 yards of the festivities. That’s a hard act to follow, even for the French. Read More
