Those lucky enough to have discovered Yorgos Lanthimos right as he was establishing himself as a world-cinema weirdo — we’d carbon-date the initial who-the-fuck-is-this-guy?! moment as mid-2009, when his breakthrough film Dogtooth was worming its way through the festival circuit — remember what a shock it was to encounter the …
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Some 45 years ago, the Cannes Film Festival invited Francis Ford Coppola to bring his latest project to the French Riviera for a special “work-in-progress” screening. The movie’s production had already achieved a mythic status as an example of Murphy’s Law made manifest, from last-minute actor replacements to monsoons to …
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She is watchful, wary, able to ward off Wasteland degenerates and War Boys alike with a well-aimed headshot. She’s a survivor, a scrapper, someone who makes a compelling case for smeared axle grease as a postapocalyptic fashion statement. You need someone to do repair work on a War Rig going …
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As far as high concepts scenarios go, Thomas Cailley’s The Animal Kingdom has been blessed with a primo what-if premise: France is in the middle of a pandemic. (No, not that one.) A good deal of the population has been stricken with what doctors and scientists have been calling a …
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Movies are designed to dazzle through sound and vision. That leaves three out of five senses untapped, at least until cinema reaches its inevitable maximum-immersive “feelie” stage. The Taste of Things, the latest from the French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, is one of those rare works that gives you the …
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You may know Kōji Yakusho as the oyster-slurping mystery man from the noodle-Western extraordinaire Tampopo (1985). Perhaps you remember him as the depressed suburbanite who ballroom dances his blues away in the international feel-good hit Shall We Dance? (1996). He’s the reformed felon in the Cannes-winning character study The Eel …
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All Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) wants to do is get to the coastal Greek town of Malia, get some quality time with her BFFs — Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake) — and spend the next few days getting royally fucked up. This unholy trinity of 16-year-olds have just finished …
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Jonathan Glazer was, by his own admission, a little lost. The writer-director behind Sexy Beast and Under the Skin had been chasing an unformed idea for a movie for years, uncertain of where he would go with the story or what he wanted to say about the subject. “It wasn’t …
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Greta Gerwig will make history at the next Cannes Film Festival. On Thursday, the festival announced that the Barbie director will lead the jury next year, making her the first American woman to become the jury president. “As a cinephile, Cannes has always been the pinnacle of what the universal …
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Holocaust movies are now a genre. It makes one more than a little queasy to acknowledge this. We’re talking about art that seeks to recreate an atrocity of such devastating scale and magnitude; to imagine the unimaginable. You can say the phrase “Holocaust movie” and a number of images and …
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