The Playlist

Cannes Review: Droll, Louche & Languidly Playful 'Only Lovers Left Alive' Is Jarmusch At His Most Enjoyable & Accessible

By Jessica Kiang
|
May 24, 2013 6:52 PM
|
7 Comments

Reviews

From the very first opening titles, written in a Germanic font that immediately conjures everything from “Triumph of the Will” to images of big-busted ladies screaming in campy close-up in 1970s cheapie horrors (it may be the only time in Cannes that a film got a big laugh for a typeface) it’s perfectly clear that the Jim Jarmusch in whose company we’re about to spend a couple of hours is not the wilfully obscure surrealist of “The Limits of Control,” nor the considered, melancholic philosopher behind “Dead Man,” nor even the oddball ragtag troubadour of “Down By Law." In fact, “Only Lovers Left Alive,” Jarmusch’s take on the vampire myth starring recent muse Tilda Swinton and Tom “fast becoming everyone’s favorite actor” Hiddleston, finds the maverick filmmaker on playful, referential and mischievous form with hugely enjoyable, if not exactly weighty or important, results.

More:

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

By Jessica Kiang
|
May 24, 2013 4:31 PM
|
5 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.

More:

Review: Visual Grandeur Of ‘Epic’ Undone By Undercooked, Rote Story

By Mark Zhuravsky
|
May 24, 2013 9:05 AM
|
0 Comments

Reviews

Let’s get one thing out of the way: “Epic,” the latest from Blue Sky Studios (the “Ice Age” films, “Robots” “Horton Hears a Who” and “Rio”) is at times breathtakingly beautiful. The Chris Wedge-helmed feature presents a visual step-up for Blue Sky and we are luckier for it. The film features a rich and compelling vision of a forest populated by a variety of tiny creatures and protected by the Leafmen.

More:

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

By Jessica Kiang
|
May 24, 2013 6:46 AM
|
16 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.

More:

Review: 'Nancy Please'

By Gabe Toro
|
May 23, 2013 11:39 PM
|
2 Comments

Reviews

We've all known people like Nancy. The title character of Andrew Semans' "Nancy, Please" is a real pill, dark eyes, slumped shoulders, and an eternal pout. There's always drama in Nancy's life, and she's always expressing it physically. She's always impetuous, always difficult, and frequently nasty, as if lashing out not against a single person but the world at large. In spite of it all, her punk sneer and angular sensuality is also sharp like a knife, tight like a fist. And for young potential PhD Paul, she is an out-and-out boogeyman.

More:

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

By Jessica Kiang
|
May 23, 2013 7:18 PM
|
10 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.

More:

Review: 'Before Midnight'

By Rodrigo Perez
|
May 23, 2013 7:04 PM
|
1 Comment

Reviews

What happened at the cliffhanger ending of 2004's "Before Sunset?" Did Jesse (Ethan Hawke) manage to catch his flight back to the United States or did he and Celine (Julie Delpy) finally re-consummate their nine-year-after-the-fact romance? These questions are answered in Richard Linklater's trilogy-concluding "Before Midnight," a charming and funny, but much more emotionally difficult and pained picture than one might have imagined. Those expecting another swooningly romantic movie are going to be in for a rude awakening. While "Before Midnight" certainly has its appealing moments of allure and levity, it's ultimately more "This Is 40"-style pain with much more honesty and real bite than Judd Apatow would likely ever go for, and when "Before Midnight" bares its fangs and becomes uncomfortable there are few moments of comedic relief or a new jaunty scene to cut to.

More:

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

By Jessica Kiang
|
May 23, 2013 6:32 AM
|
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.

More:

Cannes Review: Cannibal Tale ‘We Are What We Are’ Threatens To Give Horror Remakes A Good Name

By Jessica Kiang
|
May 22, 2013 12:55 PM
|
1 Comment

Festivals

“When I saw his movie,” said director Jim Mickle in his opening thank you to Jorge Michel Grau, the director of “Somos Lo Que Hay,” “I was jealous of everything: the idea, the plot, the style, and jealous that it was playing at Cannes in Director’s Week.” And so Mickle went about securing the rights to remake the hit Mexican film, co-opting the idea, the plot and elements of the style for his English-language “We Are What We Are,” which played yesterday in Cannes, as part of, oh yes, Director’s Week. It’s a nice narrative to have surround your picture, and the admiration between the directors is mutual, as we reported recently, with Grau giving Mickle’s take fulsome, glowing praise, even calling it “an improvement of my story.” We admired the original, so could that dirtiest of concepts, the US remake, possibly live up to all the excited chatter? Happily, it does, pulling off the rare trick of remaking a strong original into a strong new version that honors the story but provides a different slant on it that feels as authentic to its transposed environment as the original did to its setting. It does a “Let Me In,” shall we say, rather than a Platinum Dunes.

More:

Review: Provocative Doc 'We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks' Is Essential Immediate Viewing

By Gabe Toro
|
May 22, 2013 11:35 AM
|
6 Comments

Reviews

Titles can be sticky, none moreso than “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.” The “we” mentioned could be speaking in first-person perspective in regards to the muckracking online collective, which helped power the biggest security breach in government history. Then again, is the story of WikiLeaks anything other than our story? The story of anyone online who’s ever wanted to know more, who ever wanted to remove the veil of secrecy? If anything, director Alex Gibney might have shot himself in the foot: he could never begin to grasp the magnitude of our collective societal curiosity that has helped bring down walls during the current administration.

More: