Tag Archives: Cannes

Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, three times president of Brazil, was born in 1945. He grew up poor in Sao Paulo and left school early to help support his family. Having trained as a lathe operator, he reached a milestone when he became the first member of his family to …

Not long into Coralie Fargeat’s campy body horror The Substance, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is unceremoniously fired from her gig as the celebrity host of a daytime exercise program. The former actress’ credentials — an Academy Award, a prominent place on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — aren’t enough to …

Have you ever dreamed about being a better version of yourself? With her second film, Coralie Fargeat not only addresses this question but takes aim at ageism and sexism in the entertainment industry with a riotous, dreamlike horror-thriller that ends in a delirious symphony of blood, guts and otherwise undefinable …

There can be no doubt if there is one person bound and determined to keep Hollywood’s long history of Westerns alive it has been Kevin Costner. Okay, well Clint Eastwood too. And that has been true right from the beginning of his career when he played the freewheeling scene stealer …

Kevin Costner has been in the saddle long enough to know the difference between a big-screen feature Western like Dances With Wolves, a miniseries like Hatfields & McCoys or a longform like Yellowstone. All those projects have done well by him and he’s done well by them. His connection to …

Remember the communiqué from the Rambouillet G7 conference back in 1975? Of course they do. Tramping through a wooded estate somewhere in Germany, pursued by the zombie remains of Iron Age chieftains recently exhumed from the grounds of the nearby stately home, the leaders of the world’s richest democracies recite …

Recalling the first time one of his films screened at the Cannes Film Festival, a young filmmaker remembered how the duration of the standing ovation the audience gave seemed to grow with every retelling in the media. In the room, he clocked about “a six-and-a-half-minute standing ovation, [but] by the time …

In Japan the very first few snowflakes begin to fall signaling the change of seasons. Another clue is we see young Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama) and his baseball-playing buddies taking those final swings at bat and moving on to ice hockey. That is basically how this quiet and lilting charmer of …

Oliver Stone is in Cannes today for a Special Screening of Lula, a documentary he co-directed with Rob Wilson about the unbelievable comeback of Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The film chronicles his extraordinary journey in 2022 to regain the Brazilian presidency after spending 19 months in prison. …

Reflecting the peculiarities and contradictions of the man who gives the film its title, Limonov: The Ballad is a strange, stilted, inventive, kaleidoscopic, challenging, imaginative and — above all, and perhaps entirely intentionally — irritating biopic of the Russian poet-punk-prisoner-gadfly-neo-Fascist Eduard Limonov (né Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko in 1948). To paraphrase …

World leaders at a G7 conference politely bicker, copulate in the bushes and work on wafty, content-free speeches while a worldwide apocalypse commences — politicians, they’re just like us! — in collaborating Canadian directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s frequently hilarious latest feature. Although they’ve kept busy with …

Eight years after his stop-motion breakout debut My Life as a Zucchini, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight, Swiss director Claude Barras is back at the Cannes Film Festival this year with Sauvages (Savages). My Life as a Zucchini was an Academy Award nominee in 2017, and Barras’ new feature is, if anything, even more …