Cannes
Nick Hasted
Stéphane Brizé’s film is about the grubby tyranny and humiliation of working life. Middle-aged Thierry (Vincent Lindon, Best Actor at Cannes and the Césars) has a hangdog face which fails to mask his anger after being unjustly laid off. He seems traumatised, tense. And every time he attempts to work, more self-respect is chiselled from him. At the job centre, or in an unexpected interview by Skype, his manner, posture and age are picked over as if he’s raw material or a coat on a rack, not a human being. Thierry lacks, he is told, “amiability”. He can’t quite bring himself, in other words, to Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sweet Bean is one of those slow, gentle Japanese fables that one either loves or finds infuriatingly sentimental. Directed by documentarian Naomi Kawase, a film festival favourite whose features rarely make it to the UK, it played in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section and divided the critics. The French and Americans loved it, while hard-nosed British critics scoffed. Adapted from a novel, it’s the story of Sentaro, who makes dorayaki (little pancake purses stuffed with sweet red bean paste) and sells them from a corner shop in a Tokyo back street. Masatoshi Nagase plays Sentaro as a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When least expected, comedy has come stumbling into the work of French auteur Bruno Dumont. In his seven films to date, from the Cannes-winning Humanité of 1999 through to the stark Camille Claudel 1915 from two years ago, the director, frequently working with non-professional actors, has marked out a distinctive territory defined by its bleakness and emotional intensity.Which makes his latest, P’tit Quinquin, a departure indeed, both in mood and format. Though thematically the comedy is distinctly dark, its sense of the absurd is often laugh-out-loud funny, resulting in an ambiguous feeling Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are moments in observational documentary that sometimes seem to rise to the drama of fictional cinema, and Ilian Metev’s Sofia’s Last Ambulance (Poslednata lineika na Sofia) has plenty such. They come when the viewer becomes in some way so engrossed in what is on screen that the standard distinctions of form seem to be lost.Given both its subject and origin in Bulgaria, the obvious feature counterpart to Metev’s film must be the Romanian ambulance drama The Death of Mr Lazarescu by Cristi Puii from 2005 (though viewers may find themselves recalling Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, too Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn will raise many questions for its viewers, not least the practical one: just how was it made at all?Rasoulof has had plenty of problems with the regime in his native country over the years, including arrest back in 2010, in the same campaign that saw his fellow director Jafar Panahi imprisoned and later banned from working in cinema. Just as Panahi responded to those circumstances by working outside any official structures with his This Is Not a Film, so Rasoulof made Manuscripts…, which arrived at Cannes last year shrouded in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You can almost feel the dust on your skin in Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez’s debut feature The Golden Dream. It’s the dust of the precarious journey from Central America towards the US, undertaken by four teenage Guatemalan kids intent on finding a better life north of the final border. And of the gritty immigrant experience of jumping train after train, and struggles with the authorities, where each new stage presents new challenges, and more acts of betrayal than of kindness are to be found along the way.We are introduced to the protagonists only gradually. Juan (Brandon Lopez) looks Read more ...
ronald.bergan
There is a very old joke about a Hollywood actor, waiting to hear whether he has landed a plum role in an upcoming production, who gets a call from his agent. "I’ve got some bad news for you," says the agent. "Your mother has just died." "Oh, thank goodness!" says the actor. "I thought you were going to tell me I didn’t get the part." That says everything there is to know about the cutthroat world of the movie business, something that takes David Cronenberg almost two hours to say in this redundant and pointless evisceration of contemporary Hollywood.The television soap opera plot - which Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Any synopsis of Two Days, One Night is bound to make it sound like a worthy, sub-Loachian drama: A young mother, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), recently off work with depression, is made redundant from a small factory. In her absence, 14 of her 16 colleagues have voted to take their bonuses rather than let her keep her job. But she persuades her boss to host a second round of voting two days later, to allow her the weekend to persuade her fellow workers to support her.However, none of the above takes into account the brilliance of the Belgian brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, or the Read more ...
ronald.bergan
For decades, film audiences have known the craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones as an actor, mostly playing pugnacious, oddball, characters, way beyond the borders of respectability. Here, in his second film as a director, consolidating his credentials as a director-actor after his impressive directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), which drew favourable comparisons with Sam Peckinpah, he portrays a bitter, seen-it-all outsider, cajoled into helping a lonely 35-year-old, "bossy and plain" virgin (the splendidly unplain Hilary Swank) transport three insane married women back Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The lakeside beach that is the only scene of action in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake is a concentrated crucible of desires. The sense of languid summer and the limpid beauty of the lake itself, beautifully and compellingly caught throughout in Claire Mathon’s widescreen cinematography, are deceptive: this gay cruising area is a place of urgent, largely silent action, and deadly undercurrents, where sexual fascination can become potentially fatal.The film opens with the arrival of the goodlooking Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who parks his car, strips down, and goes into the water. Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
The 65th Cannes film festival acts as the backdrop for this compelling, if somewhat misguided documentary from James Toback. Accompanied by Alec Baldwin, Toback sets out to shame Hollywood for its decision to continually churn out megabuck franchises and mediocrity rather than investing in risky, original cinema as the pair try to get funding for their own film project.From the outset their plan to reinterpret Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (set in Iraq starring Alec Baldwin and Neve Campbell) is questionable; is this a real project, or are they simply trying to provoke a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Romanian New Wave continues producing cinema with a visceral power that’s hard to match anywhere in Europe, though to say it was alive and well would hit the wrong note, given the bleakness of the world it goes on depicting. Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, his lacerating abortion story set in Ceaucescu’s Romania, and last year his Beyond the Hills took high honours there again - the best screenplay and best actress awards, the latter shared between its two newcomer leads, Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan.Alina, played by Flutur, Read more ...