Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

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Laurent Cantet’s The Class takes Palme D’Or - ScreenDaily Article

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

Screen Daily - Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre Les Murs) has taken this year’s Palme d’Or.

The film is a Paris classroom drama-documentary based on a novel by Francois Begaudeau, who plays a teacher in the film working in a tough Parisian neighbourhood.

Screen’s four-star review describes it as offering “a rich microcosm of today’s multi-ethnic French population.”

Jury president Sean Penn said the decision to give the award to Cantet’s “amazing, amazing film” was unanimous.

It was the first Palme D’Or win for a French film since Maurice Pialat’s Sous Le Soleil De Satan in 1987.

The jury Grand Prix went to Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah. Screen described the film as “probably the most authentic and unsentimental mafia movie ever to come out of Italy”.

The Jury Prize was won by Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, which Screen described as “enjoyably original, lurid, sardonic political opera.”

Best director was Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Three Monkeys.

Steve McQueen’s Hunger about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands took the Camera d’Or prize.

Benicio Del Toro won best actor for Steven Soderbergh’s Che (click for review), while Sandra Corveloni won best actress for Linha De Passe… [Full Story]

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Cannes. Tulpan - GreenCine Daily

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

GreenCine Daily - Shy courtship, stark landscapes and a spirited supporting cast of livestock make Tulpan a vivid, intensely enjoyable debut feature from former documentarian Sergei Dvortsevoi. The Kazakhstan-set film hardly breaks new ground, in both setting and mood pitching its tent very close to The Story Of The Weeping Camel. But it similarly blends intimate, gentle fiction with a strong dose of ethnographic observation, to immensely charming effect. Received rapturously at its screening in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard strand, the film will be an audience-pleaser at festival s and, though not specifically targeted at children, should play well at events with a kids’ angle. Theatrical exposure is likely to be modest, but robust ancillary life seems likely.

The setting is a windblown, dusty plain - Betpak Dala, or ‘Hunger Steppe’ - in southern Kazakhstan, where young Russian-speaking sailor Asa (Kuchinchirekov) has travelled from Sakhalin to join his sister Samal (Yeslyamova) and her family. Samal’s husband Ondas (Besikbasov) is a herdsman tending a large flock of sheep. Asa’s dream - which he has illustrated, as per tradition, on his sailor’s collar - is to have his own herd one day. But to do that he needs to find a bride. The film starts with his nervous courtship of the coy Tulpan, daughter of a neighbouring couple, whom Asa tries to impress with his tales of the sea. But the couple are apparently deterred by Asa’s wildly embellished description of encounters with marine life, while the bashful Tulpan, who stays stubbornly out of sight throughout the film, is turned off by the size of Asa’s ears. The courtship scenes are a hoot, with photographic evidence produced to show that Asa’s ears are smaller than those of England’s Prince Charles.

Getting nowhere with Tulpan, Asa is also falling foul of his brother-in-law, who’s not convinced the lad has the makings of a herder. Meanwhile, Asa’s breast-obsessed, tractor-driving buddy Boni (an exuberantly entertaining performance by Baisakalov) tries to persuade the landlocked mariner to try better times in the city. But Asa sticks to his guns, and eventually wins his spurs as a shepherd by delivering a lamb - and giving it the kiss of life - in an extraordinary extended take that’s shot for real, and that combines the ‘yuk’ and ‘aah’ factors to showstopping effect… [Full Story]

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Palermo Shooting - ScreenDaily Review

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

Screen Daily - Wim Wenders muses on love, death and his perennial bugbear, the ‘Crisis of the Image’ in The Palermo Shooting, a metaphysical thriller cum philosophical essay that marks another step on the downwards slope for this once-vital film-maker. Unwisely cast, leadenly written and ultimately farcical in its earnestness, The Palermo Shooting is a glossy travelogue-thriller with metaphysical pretentions, and one of the low points of this year’s Cannes Competition. Unlikely to fare well in the market, the film may also find festivals preferring to tactfully take a rain check.

An overbearingly-glossy first half centres on the travails of Finn, played by German rocker and moody scowler Campino. Finn is a successful photographer with a major reputation in the art world, but has a sideline working on slick fashion shoots with the likes of actor-model Milla Jovovich - seen here very pregnant and playing herself. Fascinated by digital photography and its possibilities for visual manipulation, Finn is accused by a high-minded student of betraying ‘real’ images. Meanwhile, he suffers from elaborate, vaguely Cocteau-esque nightmares involving his dead mother and a mysterious bald cloaked figure (Hopper), whose true identity isn’t too hard to guess.

After a close shave in his sports car, Finn wakes up in a tree, has a whimsical conversation with an amateur shepherd, then decides to visit Palermo, ostensibly to take more photos of Jovovich in a ‘real’ setting, but really to pursue his own metaphysical quest… [Full Story]

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Parking (Ting Che) - ScreenDaily Review

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

Screen Daily - A man is rushing back home to his wife but a double-parked car blocks his way. He searches in vain for the driver and encounters a variety of persons who cannot or do not want to help him. When he finally gets home the next morning, he is a different person - not only because he is adorned with a gigantic black eye, but because he has learned to see the world differently.

Moving confidently from one episode to the next and one style to another in the tracks of his main character, director/cinematographer Chung Mong-hong has made a distinctive calling card here, smartly zipping through the different genres from tearjerker to gangster. Though not 100 percent convincing by itself as a story, such reservations fade in the light of strong performances from a solid ensemble cast with impeccable credentials, including some of the better known faces in Taiwan and Hong Kong cinema. Arthouse seems likely, and perhaps more in Asia where handsome lead actor Chen Chang is a sought-after name. Undoubtedly, Chung Mong-hong has established himself as a name to watch here and his next will be eagerly-awaited – if only to work out which genre he’ll plump for.

Once Chen Mo (Crouching Tiger’s Chen Chang) parks his car next to a patisserie called Cream (just like the film’s production company), troubles start to pour in, one after the other. First he offends the sales lady, then he finds out he can’t leave because someone has double parked next to him. This being Mothers’ Day in Taipei, the police are too busy to help. In his efforts to unearth the owner of the vehicle and convince him to move it away, he stumbles upon an old couple and their grandaughter; a former Chinese cop turned ruthless pimp (Leon Dai) and one of the girls he exploits (former model Peggy Tseng); a one-armed barber (Jack Kao) cooking fish-head soup; and an unemployed tailor (Chapman To) on the run from the mafia, to name but a few. In every case, there is an expansion plus flashbacks to support the characters… [Full Story]

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Cannes Review: Adoration - Cinematical

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

Cinematical - Adoration, the newest film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan, is a beautifully evocative film, though some may find its convoluted storyline distracting. In many respects, the film very much evokes one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan’s 1997 Palme d’Or and Oscar nominee*. Where The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of guilt and grief in a small community following a tragic school bus accident, in Adoration Egoyan deals with grief and loss on a more personal level, while also blending in ideas about the subjective nature of reality and identity in a technological age. In a world where who we are can be invented, reinvented, and broadcast to the world via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really know another person — or even ourselves?

The story centers on a young boy, Simon, (Devon Bostick), who, while completing a school assignment translating a newspaper story about a man who planted a bomb on his pregnant girlfriend, spontaneously re-imagines the story as if the couple were his own parents, and he the unborn child his father plotted to blow up along with his mother and 400 other innocents on a flight to Israel.

Simon’s French teacher, Sabine (Egoyan’s wife, Arsinée Kanjian) who also teaches drama, encourages him to read his story to the class as if he really is the son of the couple in the newspaper story. When he puts his story out on the internet, though, it starts to have an impact he never imagined: His friends, random folks philosophizing about terrorism, and the actual survivors of the botched bombing attempt are all drawn into his story and react to it… [Full Story]

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Wendy And Lucy - ScreenDaily Review

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Screen Daily - Kelly Reichardt’s third film is another small story revolving around seemingly banal events which, like its predecessor Old Joy, builds into a moving cry of despair for its alienated lead character, a young twentysomething woman called Wendy. But Reichardt is no pessimist and her compassion for Wendy and belief in the kindness of strangers make for an optimistic film which should serve to build her already strong US reputation on an international scale.

Also serving to boost the film’s commercial appeal is Michelle Williams in the lead role. Although by no means a bankable star on her own, Williams is developing a sterling reputation as one of the most adventurous and versatile actors of her generation and this film, combined with upcoming titles from Charlie Kaufman, Lukas Moodysson and Martin Scorsese should continue to cement her name in both financing and critical circles.

Williams is superb here, unbeautified and effortlessly natural as a woman driving a clapped out Honda from her homestate of Indiana to Alaska in search of lucrative work at a fish cannery. Whether they are dead or estranged, she has no parents to lean on and one disinterested sister; in fact the primary relationship in her life is with her golden yellow dog Lucy… [Full Story]

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The Class (Entre Les Murs) - ScreenDaily Review

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Screen Daily - Laurent Cantet’s wildly diverse oeuvre takes another turn with this absorbing improvised docu-drama revolving around teacher-pupil relationships in a school classroom and shot using real teachers and students from a Paris school over the course of a school year. The film focuses tightly on the dynamics and concerns of the classroom, never straying into details of the lives of kids or adults outside. Yet even though it takes place entirely “entre les murs”, it offers a rich microcosm of today’s multi-ethnic French population and fascinating insights into the complicated dilemmas and misunderstandings which teaching – and indeed learning – can entail.

The film demands that the viewer pay attention to long talkative sequences in the classroom which may be offputting to some, although the characters of the kids are so colourful as to render all these sequences humorous and lively. The universal themes of education could help sales outside France, and while it will never be more than an arthouse title, it could galvanize discussion in the press wherever it is released on the challenges of educating pupils from underprivileged immigrant backgrounds.

Cantet worked with co-screenwriter Robin Campillo and teacher Francois Begaudeau, who plays the teacher himself and whose book inspired the film, to come up with a backbone for the situations in the film, then used real 14 and 15 year-old students to create characters before improvising the classroom scenes. Although the events that happen are based on true-life incidents, the film is fiction, not documentary, and the schoolkids are acting roles… [Full Story]

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Tulpan - ScreenDaily Review

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Screen Daily - Shy courtship, stark landscapes and a spirited supporting cast of livestock make Tulpan a vivid, intensely enjoyable debut feature from former documentarian Sergei Dvortsevoi. The Kazakhstan-set film hardly breaks new ground, in both setting and mood pitching its tent very close to The Story Of The Weeping Camel. But it similarly blends intimate, gentle fiction with a strong dose of ethnographic observation, to immensely charming effect. Received rapturously at its screening in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard strand, the film will be an audience-pleaser at festival s and, though not specifically targeted at children, should play well at events with a kids’ angle. Theatrical exposure is likely to be modest, but robust ancillary life seems likely.

The setting is a windblown, dusty plain - Betpak Dala, or ‘Hunger Steppe’ - in southern Kazakhstan, where young Russian-speaking sailor Asa (Kuchinchirekov) has travelled from Sakhalin to join his sister Samal (Yeslyamova) and her family. Samal’s husband Ondas (Besikbasov) is a herdsman tending a large flock of sheep. Asa’s dream - which he has illustrated, as per tradition, on his sailor’s collar - is to have his own herd one day. But to do that he needs to find a bride. The film starts with his nervous courtship of the coy Tulpan, daughter of a neighbouring couple, whom Asa tries to impress with his tales of the sea. But the couple are apparently deterred by Asa’s wildly embellished description of encounters with marine life, while the bashful Tulpan, who stays stubbornly out of sight throughout the film, is turned off by the size of Asa’s ears. The courtship scenes are a hoot, with photographic evidence produced to show that Asa’s ears are smaller than those of England’s Prince Charles… [Full Story]

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Il Divo - ScreenDaily Review

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Screen Daily - Sometimes referred to ironically as Il Divo – an honorific title given to his ‘divine’ namesake, Julius Caesar – 89-year-old Giulio Andreotti is the eminence grise of Italian politics (2008 marks his uninterrupted 62nd year as a parliamentarian). Paolo Sorrentino’s enjoyably original, lurid, sardonic political opera tries to anatomise the character and explain the longevity of a man who has been prime minister three times and has emerged unscathed from no less than 26 separate court cases on charges that include corruption and Mafia involvement. If the director never quite gets to the heart of the man, that’s part of his point: Andreotti emerges from the film as a collection of fragments: a slippery strategist, a political opportunist, a purveyor of witty bon mots, a dutiful but opaque husband, a worldly Catholic.

Though Andreotti is less of a topical figure in Italy than current prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, he is if anything even more deeply branded on the nation’s consciousness. The film has already begun to generate a flurry of media interest that will turn into a full-scale storm in the days around Il Divo’s May 28 Italian release, and shepherd it towards the brisk takings enjoyed by Nanni Moretti’s Berlusconi film The Caiman. It will be a different matter outside of Italy: despite the wide arthouse tour of his second film, The Consequences Of Love, Sorrentino is not yet a poster name, and neither is Andreotti. Receptive, politically-aware audiences who take a gamble, though, should have a good time.

A glossary at the beginning fills us in on some of the key players around the time of Andreotti’s political ascendancy: the Christian Democrat (DC) party he belonged to, the sinister, power-broking P2 masonic lodge he was suspected of favouring, and Aldo Moro – the fellow DC leader who was murdered at the hands of the Red Brigades after 55 days of imprisonment, during Andreotti’s second stint as PM. But Sorrentino makes it clear that this is not a history lesson in his very first take, a garishly-lit, wide-angle tableau showing the politician with a forehead halo of accupuncture needles (a failed cure for his frequent migraines). Stagey lighting, direct camera eye matches, surreal set pieces reminiscent of Fellini’s Roma and a quirky soundtrack stress the fact that this is political theatre, an operetta of power… [Full Story]

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Synecdoche, New York - ScreenDaily Review

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Screen Daily - Charlie Kaufman is a past master of ingenious conceits and wild flights of fantasy as witnessed particularly in Being John Malkovich and Enternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His talent has always been filtered through the vision of a sympathetic director but with Synecdoche, New York he assumes the director’s role for the first time. The result is a film of staggering imagination, more daring in content than form as it explores the unbearable fragility of human existence and the sad inevitability of death.

Flashes of comic genius and melancholy insight into the human condition are woven into an increasingly elaborate canvas in which the boundaries between artifice and reality are slowly erased. Mainstream audiences are likely to find it simply too weird and unfathomable for their viewing pleasure but surely nobody expected Kaufman to make What Happens In Vegas? Fans of his previous work, admirers of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and open-minded curiosity seekers should be enough to give the film a fighting chance of box- office returns on a level with previous Kaufman screenplays.

Synecdoche begins with material that lulls the viewers into the false expectation of a much more conventional film. Theatre director Caden (Hoffman) is staging a production of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman and all around him there are a signs and portents reminding him that life is short, death is always around the corner and time is running out to leave his mark on the world. His young daughter is concerned by the colour of her poo and his wife, artist Adele (Keener) confesses that she has fantasized about Caden dying and having the freedom to start over. This is the stuff of a Woody Allen comedy or a Philip Roth novel and written with the kind of bitter wit and eye for the offbeat that makes it both extremely funny and engaging… [Full Story]

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