Cannes 2009: Pedro Costa, Our Favorite Melancholy Romantic
fabrizio maltesePhoto by Fabrizio Maltese/EF Press/fabriziomaltese.com.
Cannes
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Cannes 2009: Favorite Moments, Days 4 & 5
Daniel KasmanIn Vengeance: the small and the large: how to unlock a hotel door that is chained shut, and the "that must have been Wai Ka Fai's idea" shootout using giant compressed squares of trash on an empty field
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Cannes 2009: Pilgrim’s Progress (“A Prophet,” Audiard)
David PhelpsAs in most gangster movies, character interest and plot interest are the same in A Prophet: a man’s identity is the moves he makes. Which is why the movie holds on as an investigation into who the main
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Cannes 2009: Day 6
fabrizio maltesePhoto by Fabrizio Maltese/EF Press/fabriziomaltese.com.
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Cannes 2009: Agent Provocateur ("Antichrist," von Trier)
Daniel KasmanHip-hip-hurray for Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, a ballsy B-movie riff off Bergman and Tarkovsky by way of Evil Dead that treads over the whole gamut of art-house clichés, was clearly improvised day in
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Cannes 2009: High Midnight ("Vengeance," To)
David PhelpsLike Bresson, Melville, or Boetticher, Johnnie To makes movies about men surveying their possibilities to do a job, then doing it as neatly as possible—To’s method too, diagramming characters in a
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Cannes 2009: An American Multiplex in Seoul ("Mother," Bong)
Daniel KasmanBong Joon-ho, in South Korea, is making the movies Hollywood should be making—formally precise and inventive, slyly engaging but never overturning popular genres, directed with sincerity and assurance
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Cannes 2009: Night, I Love Thee and Thy Darkness ("Kinatay," Mendoza)
Daniel KasmanDedicate a movie to one thing, respect the singular attention of the camera, and a film should be rich enough to overcome just about anything. Brillante Mendoza gives almost half of his film Kinatay
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Cannes 2009: A Host of Fools ("Mother," Bong)
David PhelpsThe weird thing about Bong Joon-ho’s Mother is that Bong keeps the thing back from burlesque exactly by going too far: a mother-loving idiot touching his mom’s breast as they curl up together at night
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Cannes 2009: The Quiet Smart Aleck ("Like You Know It All," Hong)
Daniel KasmanHong Sang-soo’s new film is not what I expected at all. His last three (Tale of Cinema, Woman on the Beach, and Night and Day) all seemed subtle but substantial evolutions of a filmmaker unjustly
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Cannes 2009: Favorite Moments, Days 3 & 4 (with a dash of 1)
Daniel KasmanIn The Molly Maguires: the opening shot, a deeply zoomed picture of the sun, then has the camera slowly pan and reverse zoom so that the monolithic, artificially looming buildings of the mine suddenly
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Cannes 2009: Leave Her to Hell ("Abrazos Rotos," Almodóvar)
David PhelpsThere’s one great image in Abrazos Rotos, and it’s straight from Godard’s Prenom Carmen: a hand, in silhouette, hovers over a blue, static TV screen. It’s not a great image because it’s pretty. Almodóvar