If there is any movie this year at Cannes that is absolutely brimming with promise on paper, it's Guillaume Canet's "Blood Ties." With an extended cast featuring Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Mila Kunis, Matthias Schoenaerts, Zoe Saldana, James Caan, Marion Cotillard, Noah Emmerich and Lili Taylor among...
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Director Rebecca Zlotowski scored big in 2010 when her debut feature “Belle Epine” (aka “Dear Prudence”) won the Prix Louis Delluc for best first film, and snagged star Léa Seydoux a nomination for Most Promising Actress at the Césars. Three years on and Seydoux has certainly made good on that promi...
Read More »It's hardly any surprise for people who follow film news (or read this site) that cinema, at least as far as the major Hollywood studios go, is mostly a dead art. With a shift toward four-quadrant, brand pushing, sequel spawning blockbusters, the days of the $50 million drama are a distant memory. A...
Read More »Caustic, surreal, creepy, and blackly funny, Dutch polymath Alex van Warmerdam’s “Borgman” is the trickster god in this year’s Cannes competition pantheon. Tonally similar to recent cultish favorites from Yorgos Lanthimos and Ben Wheatley (“Dogtooth” feels like a particularly close and favoured firs...
Read More »Long hours on the road, sleeping on sofas, eating very little, playing shows for little money; it's a wonder why anyone struggles to make it as a musician. But for Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) there really isn't any other option to playing music. "...And what, just exist?" he counters, when his sister...
Read More »Ooh-ed and aah-ed over, but largely in more arcane cinephile circles, Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke (Venice winner “Still Life,” Cannes 2012 doc ”I Wish I Knew,” “The World”) has made a name for himself to date with detailed, glacially paced, social realist films, often in the documentary tradition,...
Read More »If Freddie Quell came back from World War II as an unhinged animal, Jimmy Picard (Benicio Del Toro) is the polar opposite, an intensely quiet but no less wounded man, who is out of sorts in post-war America. But he is also a Native American, which brings to his life a whole set of experiences (espec...
Read More »How is being a parent defined? By your actions, or does the simple virtue of being related by blood automatically give you that title? Those questions and more lie at the core of "Like Father, Like Son," a tender and involving portrait by Kore-Eda Hirokazu that centers on two set of parents -- and o...
Read More »Finally from our roundup of tonight’s Weinstein Company 2013 preview reel (you can read about “The Immigrant” here and the rest of the movies teased here), and well, we’ve kind of saved the best for last. Or at least, the best received on the night. Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Only God Forgives” is with...
Read More »If Michael Haneke's "Amour" presented death as a sobering inevitability, one that will test the bounds of our ability to love, actress Valeria Golino has a slightly more nuanced perspective in her directorial debut "Miele." While the subject of euthanasia is the entryway into the story, Golino wisel...
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