The Playlist

Cannes Review: JC Chandor Puts Robert Redford Through Watery Hell In Bruising, Formally Rigorous 'All Is Lost'

By Jessica Kiang
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May 24, 2013 4:31 PM
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0 Comments

Reviews

It almost feels like JC Chandor is showing off. In what is only his second feature film, after the chalk-and-cheese financial collapse movie “Margin Call," he sets himself a kind of exercise in filmmaking rigor, in the bare-bones, one-man survival-at-sea story “All Is Lost” and delivers. From the strong but talky, pointing-at-screens-spouting-financial-mumbo-jumbo of his debut, it’s initially hard to see how we could have predicted the filmmaker’s ability to deliver a much more visceral, physically gruelling, dialogue-free experience. But hindsight is 20/20 and what both movies share is an almost documentary-like immediacy to the material, and a hugely confident filmmaking style, unobstrusive and economical, that belies Chandor’s relative inexperience.

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5 Things You'll Learn From 'Jodorowsky's Dune' From Nicolas Winding Refn's Thoughts, The Original Cast & More

By Kevin Jagernauth
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May 24, 2013 11:40 AM
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2 Comments

News

The fact that Alejandro Jodorowsky -- coming off the double whammy of 1970s cult favorite mind benders "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain" -- even got near bringing Frank Hebert's "Dune" to the big screen perhaps speaks to the wackiness of the 1970s movie world. That it actually got as far as it did, hiring an insane set of collaborators, an equally ambitious cast and actually reaching the stage where sets were going to be built, its even more miraculous. But alas, it fell apart and has become one of the great unmade movie stories in cinema history. The mind still reels at what it could have resulted in, but the new documentary "Jodorowsky's Dune" gives a pretty good insight into what could have been a game changing sci-fi epic.

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Cannes: New Clip From ‘The Immigrant’; James Gray Talks Title Changes, Working With Joaquin Phoenix & Marion Cotillard & More

By Rodrigo Perez
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May 24, 2013 10:35 AM
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5 Comments

Marion Cotillard, James Gray, Jeremy Renner, Cannes

Festivals

James Gray’s long-awaited period drama, “The Immigrant,” finally screened in Cannes early this morning. Starring the excellent cast of Joaquin Phoenix, Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Renner, “The Immigrant” centers on a conniving pimp (Phoenix) who manipulates a destitute Polish immigrant (Cotillard) into a life of prostitution. Saddled with a sick sister, she works to pay for her medicine and her dismal life seems hopeless until a curious magician (Renner) enters her life.

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Cannes Review: James Gray’s Careful, Poised 'The Immigrant' Builds Slowly To A Resonant Climax

By Jessica Kiang
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May 24, 2013 6:46 AM
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14 Comments

Festivals

A strangely chimeric movie, that only reveals its truest colors in its closing moments, James Gray’s “The Immigrant” which screened In Competition this morning in Cannes is a meticulous reframing of the director’s familiar themes and concerns that mostly lived up to our high expectations, while never bursting their bounds the way we might have dared to hope. It’s a beautifully shot film marked by deeply felt performances from its leads, that will play to those attuned to the loveliness of Gray’s minor-key redemption stories, but is unlikely to win new converts among the impatient or those whose expectation of a period drama is something more traditionally epic and grandiose.

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Cannes Review: Masterful ‘Blue Is The Warmest Color’ Is The Sublime Story Of A Transformative Relationship

By Jessica Kiang
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May 23, 2013 7:18 PM
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9 Comments

Reviews

Why do we watch movies? No, really, why is it? As close an answer as we’ve ever come to for our own, fairly evident obsession with what we consider the greatest storytelling medium humankind has ever developed, is well, that life is short. Bear with us a second on this: basically to submerge yourself in a story well-told is a way to live out other lives within your own, and through those complex and magical processes of identification, to breathe and dream and feel things that your own short span might otherwise never afford you.

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Watch: Cannes Clips Including 'Zulu' With Orlando Bloom & Forest Whitaker, Claire Denis' 'Bastards,' Jia Zhangke's 'A Touch of Sin' & More

By Edward Davis
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May 23, 2013 6:31 PM
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0 Comments

News

To the outsider, the Cannes Film Festival can be a nebulous thing. Even if you know the filmmaker or the cast, sometimes you need more context than a review to give you a sort of firmer grasp of the shape, texture and tone of a movie. Clips from the festival are landing left and right, so we thought we'd grab a smattering and ground you a little deeper than some of the reviews and pictures your may or may not have seen. So here we go.

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Cannes: Alexander Payne May Do His Sci-Fi Film Soon; Bruce Dern Calls Him One Of 6 Directing Geniuses

By Rodrigo Perez
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May 23, 2013 5:18 PM
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3 Comments

Features

This morning, Alexander Payne's black and white, father/son roadtrip film, "Nebraska," debuted in Cannes. Starring the unlikely trio of Bruce Dern, comedian Will Forte and Stacy Keach, “Nebraska” centers on a poor old man (Dern) living in Montana who repeatedly escapes from his house to try to go to Nebraska to collect a sweepstakes prize he thinks he has won. Frustrated by his increasing dementia, his family debates putting him into a nursing home -- until one of his two sons (Forte) finally offers to take his father by car, even as he realizes the futility of it all. It’s a comedy, and while our reviewer didn’t necessarily love it, she called it a “small-scale quixotic adventure about the importance of dreams,” and coming from Alexander Payne it's probably worth giving a shot, even if it didn't surprise us as much as we’d like.

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5 Things You Can Expect From Nicolas Winding Refn's Polarizing, Moody & Brutal 'Only God Forgives'

By Kevin Jagernauth
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May 23, 2013 12:09 PM
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9 Comments

Features

As you may have heard by now, the reception for Nicolas Winding Refn's latest "Only God Forgives" was mixed at the Cannes Film Festival, with a smattering of boos mixed in with applause during the press screening on Wednesday morning. Our review by Jessica Kiang didn't find much substance beyond the gorgeous stylization, but I would beg to differ that there is much more going on than just a twisted, Oedipal, coming-of-age story (of sorts). I would wager that beneath the slick surface is a story about breaking a cycle of violence...and that's all I can really write about it, without spoiling things further.

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Watch: First 2 Clips From Steamy 3-Hour Cannes Entry 'Blue Is The Warmest Color' Starring Lea Seydoux

By Kevin Jagernauth
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May 23, 2013 10:38 AM
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15 Comments

Abdellatif Kechiche's 'Blue is the Warmest Color', Lea Seydoux

News

If you have a thing for Lea Seydoux, this was a good year to be at the Cannes Film Festival. The French actress spends most of "Grand Central" (read our review here) either naked or strutting around noticeably bra-less in a jean shorts and a one piece body suit. And then there's "Blue Is The Warmest Color," an epic three hour lesbian love story with love scenes that are already creating chatter, with Jeffrey Wells noting that one sequence in particular earned applause during the movie. Damn.

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Cannes Review: Alexander Payne’s ‘Nebraska’ An Overfamiliar Tale Of Connections Broken & Remade

By Jessica Kiang
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May 23, 2013 6:32 AM
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5 Comments

Reviews

There’ve been great masses of critical laurels laid at Alexander Payne’s door over the years, some, in our eyes, more earned than others. When it really hits home, the director’s quiet humanism and wry humor can yield perceptive insights, especially into certain trademark areas of expertise: family dynamics, the vanities and follies of aging men, the reluctance to let go of old dreams. But the downside to this kind of blanket approbation is that, because we know what to look for in an Alexander Payne movie, sometimes we might kid ourselves that we find things that aren’t really there. And so, we come trundling to "Nebraska," already being buzzed about as a major player here in Cannes, and certainly not a bad film in any way, but one that failed to engage us with anything like the kind of witty perceptiveness we found in, for example, “Sideways,” to reference the other two-man road trip-style film of Payne’s.

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