By Stephen Garrett 5/19/12 3:28pm

Letter from Cannes

Marion Cotillard with director Jacques Audiard and costar Matthias Schoenaerts on the red carpet. (Getty Images)

Cannes, Day Deux: Marion Cotillard’s Whale of a Movie

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

By Stephen Garrett 5/17/12 8:19am

Letter from Cannes

Jason Schwartzman, Bruce Willis, Wes Angerson, Ed Norton, Tilda Swinton and Bill Murray (Getty Images)

Cannes, Day Un: Wes Is Not 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

By Stephen Garrett 5/19/11 4:22pm

Trouble

Cannes Day 8: Von Trier’s Still Got It!

It’s official: Europeans don’t have a sense of humor. The Cannes Film Festival announced today that Lars von Trier is “persona non grata” and will not be allowed to return, ever, after he wrapped up a press conference by saying he was a Nazi, was sympathetic to Hitler and wanted to make a movie about the Final Solution “but Read More

By Stephen Garrett 5/18/11 3:52pm

Cannes

Cannes Day 7: Von Trier Courts Disaster

If the best way to critique a film is to make a film, then The Tree of Life officially has its soul-crushing rebuke. With this morning’s world premiere of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, the dour Dane punched a hole into the buoyant spirituality of Terrence Malick’s hymn to existence. Punched a hole? More like stuck Read More