Of all the world’s major film festivals, the Cannes Film Festival is the one where the makeup of the jury is quite notable each year. That’s because the personality of the jury seems to have an effect on how awards are doled out. Quentin Tarantino’s jury gave Oldboy the Grand Prix, and last year Isabelle Huppert’s jury gave top prize to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. (Haneke having directed the film that earned Huppert a Best Actress win at Cannes.)
For 2010, the President of the Cannes jury will be Tim Burton. The director has served on both the feature film and short film juries in the past, but this is his first year serving as jury president. He’ll oversee eight other chosen artists (actors and directors, mostly) to decide the 2010 festival’s selections for the Palme d’Or, Grand Prix, Prix du Jury and awards for Best Actor, Actress, Screenplay and Director. “After spending my early life watching triple features and 48-hour horror movie marathons, I’m finally ready for this,” Burton said of his selection.
The Cannes Film Festival runs May 12-23. Read here about the jury’s deliberation process for last year’s awards.
If a male filmmaker desires to throw up grim truth and reality before the eyes of moviegoers and also swoon critics, many of whom subsist on darker themes, he will at some point consider making a film about war or prison. There are no greater immediate settings for tapping perennial sentiments of a mad world, or for demystifying masculinity by scraping it and reducing it to a primal essence. Unlike the ambitious gangster or mob film, reputable prison dramas tend to feature a protagonist that is closer to us, a person thrown to hell rather than embodying it, nakedly amidst wolves as opposed to running with them. (Ironic, given these characters’ punishments at the hands of society and/or government.)
Engrossing and well-crafted but formulaic and borderline genre-fare, A Prophet is the latest prison film to follow this mold and punch its way creatively outward. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, A Prophet has landed on a number of top 10 lists for 2009; with a domestic release forthcoming, we’ll likely see its inclusion on many of this year’s as well.
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If I were putting together a ‘most anticipated films of 2010′ list one of the highest-ranked entries would be The Tree of Life, the new Terrence Malick generational family drama that has been simmering in an edit bay for months. Once positioned as a possible release late last year, the film wasn’t finished in time, and has been penned in for the best possible release date: when it’s done.
But a few buried nuggets of info in recently published articles suggest that we’ll definitely see the film this year (not a given, with Malick) and that it will have a world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. There’s also a new synopsis, which should be considered spoilerish; it’s at the bottom of the post. Read More »
Ahead of the release of Michael Haneke’s Palm D’or winning The White Ribbon this Friday in the UK and on December 30th in the US, we have the exclusive unveiling of a new online scene from the film to tempt you with. Thankfully, the digital encode here has gone a long way in preserving the astonishing shimmer of Christian Berger’s cinematography. You can check out the clip below the break.
Haneke’s film is set in a German village shortly before the outbreak of the first world war where a mysterious set of circumstances lead to ritual punishments that threaten to get completely out of hand. Indeed, Haneke has said his themes are the origins of all forms of terrorism “be it of political or religious nature”. As well as being a Cannes darling, this is the film Germany has put forward as their Best Picture contender for the Oscars next year.
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Three new video clips from Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus have appeared on the Comme Au Cinema site and have also been embedded below the break in this story. One of them features a scene we’ve seen already - twice before, in fact - but now finally in what would appear to be the correct aspect ratio. The others are new, however, and show us both storylines and special effects that the first clip didn’t even hint at.
As well as showcasing Heath Ledger as Tony, the clips give us a very good look at Andrew Garfield as Anton, Lily Cole as Valentina and - best of all - Christopher Plummer as the titular doctor.
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Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus has finally premiered in Cannes. Reviews have been surfacing all day and most of them, unsurprisingly, focus on two key factors - that this film contains Heath Ledger’s final performance and that a Gilliam film is somehow difficult or appeals only to a few. I can’t argue with the first part, but the second doesn’t add up.
Below the break you can see a scene from the film that clocks in at just under a minute. It has been circulated as a promotional piece for the Cannes fest by Canal Plus and as such has French subtitles ‘burnt in’. The short clip we saw last week comes from this longer piece, so you can now get more context, more Ledger and more of Gilliam’s magic.
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Lars Von Trier’s latest film Antichrist has premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and according to Reuters, the film “elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of applause and loud boos.”
I have rounded up some of the reviews, which range from “I think I might have loved it, I’m not sure” to “this film needs to be burned”. Check out the excerpts after the jump.
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The website of French TV station Canal + is playing host to a video of the entire Cannes Film Festival opening ceremony. Easily the most exciting section is a long montage of clips from different films that will be playing there over the next couple of weeks though you might enjoy the rest, perhaps most particularly Bryan Ferry’s tidy performance of She.
The film clips section starts at around the 15 minutes and 40 seconds mark, and lasts for seven minutes or so. Most films get a 15 to 30 second showcase, which might not seem like much, though in many cases this is the first footage of the films to have turned up online at all. While I found a lot of the material quite exciting none of it compared to the giddiness I have for the 18 seconds of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. The clip focuses on Heath Ledger, dressed in the costume shown in the picture at the head of this post, and addressing the audience of the traveling Imaginarium. I want to see this film right now.
After the break, a list of other films presented in the montage that I think will be of particular interest to /Film readers.
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Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro has premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to a mixed to lukewarm response. It seems like most critics aren’t too impressed with Coppola’s first original screenplay since 1974’s The Conversation. Here is a quick round-up of the early festival buzz:
Variety: “Tetro is still a work of modest ambition and appeal.” … “Coppola’s gradual lifting of the dramatic lid over the course of more than two hours frankly feels old-fashioned and labored.” … “Coppola lacks the writerly flair to make the big scenes soar or resonate with multiple meanings and dimensions; rather, they more often than not seem abruptly curtailed and somewhat unsatisfying.”
More after the jump.
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Promotional billboards and posters for Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables are on display at the Cannes Film Festival. I have compiled a collection come of the photos and even cleaned some of the images up (like above) for better web presentation. There is some discussion that these photos are fan created, and I understand why people would think that. But I have been sent some of these photos by a publicist from the film, so… who knows? Check out all the photos after the jump.
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