Film
Demetrios Matheou
Michael Haneke likes to challenge and provoke us, whether it’s with intellectual puzzles (Hidden), bleak character studies (The Piano Teacher) or a brand of horror that makes us feel uneasily complicit (Funny Games). He’s a brilliant director, and a tough one. So while Love may not be a sudden ray of sunshine, it still feels like a departure for the Austrian, a softening of the provocateur, in which he eschews his customary ironic distance for an intimate and essentially positive account of love in adversity. It is as immaculately made as ever, but also touching and terribly sad, with two Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s a normal day in Cannes, which means that I’ve just chatted to Mexican heart-throb Gael García Bernal on the beach, while a mini sand storm battered the doors of our marquee. Bernal is in town with his new film, No, about the events leading to the fall of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. But he took a moment to reminisce about his first year here, in 2000, when Amores Perros took Cannes by the scruff of the neck. The film that helped to ignite the Mexican New Wave was not even in the official competition that year, but it was the title on everyone’s lips.As the first week of this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
She Monkeys comes with a “note of intent” from its Swedish director Lisa Aschan. “She Monkeys plays with rules that surround human behaviour. I want to explore society’s contradictions by allowing young women to perform brutal actions. To show these taboos in contrast to the innocent and what seems to be naïve. The story’s focus is a power play between two teenage girls and the world around them. They’re in constant competition.”Aschan continues, but that about sums up this dispassionate, spare and disquieting Gothenburg-filmed examination of teenage interaction. The note of intent Read more ...