This final wrap comes with a reminder that all our reviews, interviews and coverage of the coverage is indexed right here.
"Throughout her nearly half-century career, actress Charlotte Rampling has rarely shied away from exposing herself onscreen," writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. "In the new bio documentary The Look, she bares it all yet again, but this time in a series of compelling discussions with different artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers." Karina Longworth for the Voice: "Director Angelina Maccarone intersperses well-chosen clips from Rampling's greatest acting hits, which hammer home the larger themes, and also offer a much-needed reminder that Max, Mon Amour exists. It's breezy and entertaining, but only occasionally more than superficially insightful. Ideal catch-it-on-cable-on-a-hungover-Saturday viewing."
More from Mark Adams (Screen) and Boyd van Hoeij (Variety). Catherine Shoard interviews Rampling for the Guardian. Clips: 1 and 2. Until The Look hits cable, we have the Charlotte Rampling gallery at everyday_i_show.
For the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan reports on the "newly restored, vivid color edition of Georges Méliès's 1902 short A Trip to the Moon, a version that was thought lost forever after it had disappeared from sight decades ago. 'It's one of the most famous films in the world. The shot of the man in the moon with a rocket in his eye is one of the 10 images everyone knows, except no one has seen it like this,' said Serge Bromberg of France's Lobster Films, the driving force behind the restoration, a project some 20 years in the making."
"In a series of interviews filmed during the summer of 1960, at the height of the Algerian War, anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin asked for the most part ordinary, working-class people whether they considered themselves happy." Agnieszka Gratza, blogging for Sight & Sound: "What made Chronique d'un été groundbreaking for generations of filmmakers, starting with the French New Wave, is not so much the enduring relevance of the subject as its experimental approach to documentary-making, from the then-revolutionary use of hand-held cameras and portable sound-sync equipment to the consciously self-reflexive structure that sees the directors film participants' responses to the screening of the rest of the documentary."
Charles H Meyer saw the newly restored Despair (1978), adapted from Vladimir Nabokov's 1936 novel, and argues in Cinespect that "it is precisely the manic intensity with which Fassbinder's authorial presence constantly risks crowding out Bogarde's portrayal of Hermann that makes this film so tense, so taut, so imbued with such a dreadful, dizzying degree of madness. Thus, what in one light appears to be this film's greatest weakness is revealed in another light to be its greatest strength."
For the L, Simon Abrams caught Le Sauvage (1975), "a slight but very satisfying romantic comedy starring a sometimes naked Catherine Deneuve and Yves Montand as accidental lovers…. The newly restored stereo soundtrack is a bit distracting since only composer Michel Legrand's score was originally recorded in stereo. It's a good thing I wasn't expecting the film to live up to director Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac adaptation or his Bon Voyage."
Jean-Paul Belmondo was presented the Palme d'Honneur and the Festival posts Gilles Jacob's speech.
Xan Brooks talks with Roger Corman for the Guardian: "A new film, Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, offers a brashly entertaining trip through his life and times. Alex Stapleton's documentary shows how he identified the teen demographic before Hollywood even knew it existed, how he saw a gap in the market and proceeded to plug it with cheap exploitation pictures; shot without a permit, on the fly, with the actors doubling up to play both the cowboys and the Native Americans, the earthlings and the Martians. Little Shop of Horrors, for instance, was filmed in three days flat. 'By mistake Roger would actually make a good picture every once in a while,' recalls Jack Nicholson, who toiled in the Corman vineyard for almost a decade. 'But I was never in it.'"
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter on Danish director Frederikke Aspöck's feature debut, Out of Bounds (Labrador): "Aspöck calls the film a cinematic chamber play, and with just three characters, a single setting, and an intense focus on psychological conflict over physical action, the austere drama certainly fits that description. Yet while the bleak location and blistering weather plant expectations of unyielding Scandinavian severity, Aspöck (an MFA filmmaking graduate from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts) brings a delicate touch, even to some of the more emotionally freighted moments in Daniel Dencik's screenplay." Mark Adams in Screen: "Young Danish couple Stella [Stephanie Leon] and her journalist boyfriend Oskar [Carsten Bjørnlund] visit her artist father Nathan [Jakob Eklund], who lives a solitary life alone with his Labrador dog on the remote Swedish island of Gotland. Stella is pregnant and looking forward to the birth of her baby, but Oskar appears to have doubts, and succumbs to Nathan's provocations and feels bewildered by the relationship between father and daughter. A clash between the two men is inevitable with Stella caught in the middle." At Little White Lies, Matt Bochenski finds the film "serious and solid, austerely beautiful with the frigid landscape accentuating the emotional isolation of these characters."
Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter: "Best viewed as a companion piece to his 2002 documentary, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Cambodian auteur Rithy Panh once again delves into his homeland’s bloody historical record in Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell. This one-on-one interview with a former Khmer Rouge party secretary explores his tenure as director of two prisons specializing in what we now call 'enhanced interrogation techniques.'" The film "is essentially an almost two hour-long speech by a man who does not even bother to deny that he is responsible for everything that took place in the S21 death factory," notes Dan Fainaru in Screen. "On the contrary, he simply argues he did it all in the spirit of the regime he has faithfully served — an obedient and dedicated soldier of a revolution which intended to put an end to the corrupt system ruling the country until then and start everything from scratch, for a more equitable and just society." Micropsia average: 8.05.
"If you only knew jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani through his recorded music, you’d know this was an extraordinary individual," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "His phrasing, the electricity of his right hand and the cleanness of his improvisations take jazz to the very heights of artistry. But as many jazz aficionados know and Michael Radford’s film Michel Petrucciani will make known to many more, one needs a better word than 'extraordinary' to describe this man." Jonathan Romney in Screen: "Petrucciani’s life is a story of exuberant triumph over challenge, and of the pleasures and prices of living life to the full. The film takes a four-square but effective documentary approach, stitching together archive footage with interviews, and features enough of Petrucciani’s performances to make this a must for jazz buffs, whether or not they’re fans of the subject himself (major jazz names interviewed include Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano and John Abercrombie)." Micropsia average: 6.89.
"With the documentary currently enjoying a renaissance of innovative work and cutting-edge investigations, how strange the Festival de Cannes, itself host to such landmark films as Fog of War and Fahrenheit 9/11, chose to foist such a stodgy, old-fashioned doc as Leadersheep (Tous au Larzac!) into the 2011 Official Selection," finds the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "No doubt the selection of Christian Rouard's film has to do with politics, which is to say its portrait of the birth of a political movement of French farmers in the region of Larzac against the expansion of an army base that would have gobbled up their farmland."
Dan Fainaru in Screen on Josh and Rebecca Tickell's The Big Fix, a documentary on last year's Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico: "Picking up where last year's Inside Job left off, this documentary revealing the corruption, graft and massive cover up of one the greatest man-made ecological calamities in recent times, should make a lot of people uncomfortable. Given the system in which they operate, though, they are most likely, just like the culprits in Charles Ferguson's Oscar-winning essay on the collapse of the American economy, to wipe away the tears of shame from their eyes while rushing all the way to their banks." More from THR's Kirk Honeycutt.
Cannes 2011. Index: Reviews, interviews, coverage of the coverage. For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @thedailyMUBI on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.