Asghar Farhadi’s “Forushande” or “The Salesman” was a last-minute addition to the official competition and it is a refreshing, intelligent watch coming in the wake of the vampire-top-model hokum of “The Neon Demon” and the mawkishness of “The Last Face” this late in the festival. Unlike most of the other competition entries, “The Salesman” boasts …
Xavier Dolan’s new film seemed like the event so far at Cannes judging by the longest press queue since the beginning of the festival, as well as the hustlers offering hugs in exchange for a screening invitation. Unfortunately, it seems destined to join the ample list of other highly anticipated big-name entries that didn’t quite …
“Aquarius”, former film critic Kleber Mendonça Filho’s second feature film starring Brazilian screen legend Sonia Braga, had quite an eventful Cannes premiere yesterday with the film’s crew taking out printed A4 sheets with slogans against President Rousseff’s impeachment while mounting the red carpet staircase. This was met with applause inside the Grand Théatre Lumière, that …
Last year, we got underdog “Dheepan” and “Dheepan” got the Palme D’Or. This year, the same day saw the bourgeois artifice of Pedro Almodóvar’s uninspiring “Julieta”, “Aquarius” from Brazil that fetishes its glamorous, ageing bourgeois muse in a quasi Almodovarian fashion, and small-time Manila drug-dealer drama “Ma’ Rosa” from the Philippines’ Brillante Mendoza screening in the …
It’s hard not to like Jeff Nichols’ latest drama “Loving”, a biopic of real-life couple Richard and Mildred Loving, who in the late 1950’s were expelled from the state of Virginia for contracting an interracial marriage in Washington DC. Its politically correct (and topical) subject matter, beautiful cinematography and charismatic lead characters make this the …
Olivier Assayas seems to have taken more than a purely directorial liking to Kristen Stewart which is just as well seeing that her face and body (acting is a whole different story) are probably the best thing about his ridiculous Palme D’Or contender “Personal Shopper”. Set largely in Paris, with cameo appearances by a haunted …
Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” is the second film at this year’s festival with poetry as its central theme, though unlike Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surrealist extravaganza “Endless Poetry”, “Paterson” deals in the so-called poetry of the everyday and the ordinary, or prosaic poetry – and I spent the entire film unable to figure out if Jarmush was pulling …
Three-hour or so films are all the rage this year! Andrea Arnold joined this club today with the premiere of her fourth feature and first-US set drama “American Honey”. Arnold is one of my favourite directors and I had loved “Red Road” and “Fish Tank” (“Wuthering Heights” slightly less so). “American Honey” is closest to …
Technically, Red Ken is an adjective reserved for London’s ex mayor and socialist extraordinaire Ken Livingstone, but nothing stops one from applying it to this most leftist of British film-makers, Ken Loach, who for some mysterious reason – probably his exotic status as a communist, working-class championing Englishman – as virtually assured of a Cannes …