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((++)) WaaHoo! / ((+)) Yea / ((=)) Mixed / ((-)) Ummm / ((--)) Uggghh
Inspired by a real-life fellow who found a fine-print loophole in a frequent flyer coupon program that enabled him to translate $3,000 in pudding purchases into 1 million free miles Entirely unpredictable and marked by audacious strokes of directorial bravado, individualistic comedy is notable. (Variety, Todd McCarthy)
A major disappointment. At 94 minutes, it's obviously meant to be a mere bagatelle, a rest-stop on the way to something grander.The film does have its humorous moments now and then, but unfortunately, the film will not please Sandler's fan base because it's too weird, and won't be liked by the indie crowd either because there's simply too little there. (IndieWire, Peter Barnett)
A delightfully idiosyncratic romantic comedy that manages to give convention a swift jab in the gut while still pushing all of the genre's requisite buttons... boasting a terrific Adam Sandler lead performance. (Hollywood Reporter, Michael Rechtshaffen)
The Religion Hour (My Mother's Smile) - Marco Bellocchio - Italy ((+)) IN COMPETITION
A deeply bizarre film. Startlingly original, but with an undertow of absurdity, it is about Ernesto, an atheist painter who discovers that the Vatican is proposing to canonise his mother. (The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw)
...a densely textured, intensely personal drama about a confirmed atheist confronted with lingering ties to the Church. Many of the themes touched on here resurface from earlier Bellocchio films -- matricide, insanity, blasphemy, the power of the Church, the passive acceptance of religious dogma and the sinister, secretive underbelly of family life. [Cinematography] brooding chiaroscuro treatment gives the film the arresting, somewhat forbidding look of a Caravaggio painting. (Variety, David Rooney)
Russian Ark - Alexander Sokurov – Russia ((++)) IN COMPETITION
"No cut = Director's cut," playfully announces the movie's press notes.(IndieWire)
Magical visual style, recalling the way we glide through dreams. Not only is it the first feature length film to be shot in one single take using an HD digital video camera suspended on a steadicam, but it performs this feat moving through some 33 different rooms inside the Hermitage, in the midst of more than 2,000 extras in full historical costume. (Variety, Deborah Young)
Culminates in a resplendent dress ball where the camera seemingly floats untethered through a swirl of bodies and costumes and lilting music. [A] joyous achievement but ultimately a melancholy movie. (Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt)
The one continuous take is used as the subjective view of a dreamer/spectator who is taken on a temporal and spatial journey around the great halls by a 19th-century French diplomat - an extraordinary indefatigable performance by Sergei Dreiden. There is no doubt that this revolutionary (in more than one sense) film, which could never have been made a few years ago, is one of the significant landmarks in the history of cinema. (Film Festivals.com, Ronald Bergan)
Searching for Debra Winger - Rosanna Arquette - USA ((-))
Actress Rosanna Arquette asks herself and 34 other accomplished actresses how they balance the demands of a career and celebrityhood with the demands of life. There is much redundancy in this film that Arquette seemingly doesn't know how to end. Not as endlessly absorbing a topic as she seems to think. (Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt)
Sex Is Comedy - Catherine Breillait - France ((=))
Enjoyable but light, until it becomes apparent that Breillat is not simply waxing narcissistic but fashioning a simultaneous critique, explication, and demystification of the most remarkable scene in her strongest movie—the lengthy, near single-take defloration from Fat Girl. (Village Voice, J Hoberman)
Her film is neither sexy nor particularly funny but it is quite clever. The most memorable scene is Grégoire Colin having doubts about wearing a monstrous false erection. Not a memory to treasure. (The Times- UK, James Christopher)
‘Sex Is Comedy" is an altogether gentler, more introspective Breillat. (Hollywood Reporter, Judith Prescott)
The Son (aka Le Fils) - Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne – Belgium IN COMPETITION
Claustrophobic and deadly serious tale about a blue-collar worker whose life has been ruined by tragedy and who unexpectedly finds himself confronting the cause of that tragedy, is a less successful work than its predecessor, (Rosetta). [It] is both more indulgent and less emotionally involving, and critical response is likely to be wildly uneven, ranging from the very positive to the extremely negative Part of the problem lies in the filmmakers' decision to shoot in hand-held style and their penchant for keeping extremely close to their characters. (Variety, David Stratton)
A deceptively simple tale of a carpenter and his recalcitrant recruit … is less immediately appealing than Rosetta. [T]here are dullish patches in the film. One of those films you tend to think about afterwards - in no way an obvious piece of film-making but certainly an audacious, unblinking one. And in the end, which it would be churlish to give away, a moving one too. (Film Festivals.com, Derek Malcolm)
The Songs of My Homeland – Bahman Ghobadi – Iran ((+))
Quite a high-spirited change of pace from "A Time of Drunken Horses… is another insider's portrait of the Kurdish people, and, after wandering through some pretty surreal comedy terrain, ultimately a very moving work of cinema. It describes the Kurds living on the border of Iran and Iraq not only as victims, but also as people who love music, life and children and have a wicked sense of humor that enables them to survive persecution. (Variety, Deborah Young)
Spider – David Cronenberg – Canada ((=)) IN COMPETITION
Slow but brilliantly sustained journey into madness is fronted by a remarkable performance from Ralph Fiennes and superb backup from Miranda Richardson in a triple role. Film inhabits a dank and grimy, seamless world of austere brick lanes, murky canals, ugly industrial structures, overgrown allotments and shabby interiors. (Variety, David Rooney)
A conventional, boring psychodrama that takes place in the East End of London during the 1960s and '80s. Problem lies mainly in the script. (Film Festivalscom, Amir Emary)
A scrupulously austere portrait of madness that finds the director leaving behind the trademark visceral special effects in favor of a spare, internalized approach to the subject matter. (Hollywood Reporter, Michael Rechtshaffen)
Sweet Sixteen - Ken Loach - England ((++)) BEST SCREENPLAY
Combine[s] humor and compassion with honesty and despair.This is a superbly modulated drama, steadily increasing its heart-wrenching quality via quiet, unmanipulative means. Setting is the Greenock and Inverclyde areas of Glasgow, where 75% of children leave school early without qualifications, facing rampant unemployment, poverty and often domestic violence, crime, drug abuse, abandonment and homelessness. (Variety, David Rooney)
[A] moving social drama. The beauty of the landscapes surrounding the Scottish capital (rendered by an amazing cinematography [by] Barry Ackroyd) is the only element that relieves the audience from a suffocating atmosphere. (Film Festivals.com, Gregory Valens)
One of Loach's strongest, most affecting works. (LA Times, Turan)
Ten Minutes Older - Collection of short films by 7 directors ((=))
A multipart meditation on the passage of time from seven prominent international directors.
Victor Erice - mesmerizingly poetic interlude representing the most impressive 11 minutes of film unveiled in Cannes this year. Aki Kaurismaki - typically idiosyncratic mini-mystery Werner Herzog - plays like a brief footnote to some of his earlier ethnographic docus. Jim Jarmusch - a virtual wash-out…thoroughly unimaginative. Wim Wenders – Isn’t much better. Spike Lee - barbed, rapid-fire, partisan, black-and-white docu [about Presidential election] very good agit-prop. Chen Kaige - aims for whimsical poignance but plays as just silly. (Variety, Todd McCarthy)
Tomorrow La Scala! - Francesca Joseph – England ((=)) IN COMPETITION
Some prison lifers and a visiting opera troupe make highly chromatic, finally harmonious music together… [A] mildly amusing comedy-drama centered on a staging of Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" in which performances help give some shape to an all-which-ways script. the various gears of docudrama, character comedy and social correctness grind uneasily together. Film only develops an emotional undertow near the very end. [Variety, Derek Elley]
To Young To Die - Park Jin-pyo - South Korea ((+))
South Korean cinema pushes the sexual envelope again ... a kind of "Empire of the Senses," wrinklies style. Based on a real-life couple who fell in love in their 70s and found that sex still keeps them young, pic's main claim to notoriety is showing two oldsters naked and going at it in reasonably energetic style. Initially eyebrow-raising but never shocking, thanks to their lack of embarrassment and sheer joie de vivre. The Latino music on the soundtrack gives the whole thing a joyful bounce. (Variety, Derek Elley)
The Uncertainty Principle - Manoel de Oliveira - Portugal ((=)) IN COMPETITION
…pic is a quintessential recap of Oliveira places, themes and paradoxes. Fans will enjoy the breezy, sardonic narration style he has developed into an art form and the amusing metaphysical banter underlying his work from “Valley of Abraham” on. (Variety, Deborah Young)
Without being schematic, the film exposes the dreadful conformity of the Portuguese bourgeois, especially in a marvellous set piece of a dinner party. The characters seldom address or look at each other directly, but take up stylistic poses that, from time to time, resemble inner monologues. (Film Festivals.com, Ronald Bergan)
Unknown Pleasures - Ren Xiao Yao – China ((=)) IN COMPETITION
Offers further evidence of his talent as a distinctive visual stylist and his vocation as a chronicler of the aimlessness and uncertain future of young people in China, struggling to make freedom and independence an individual as well as societal reality. But the new drama is far more diluted thematically, touching on a number of interesting points but failing to bring them together in any cohesive way…requires greater staying power than many audiences will possess. (Variety, David Rooney)
The Way Home – Lee Jung-hyang - South Korea ((+))
The simplest of tales, about a spoiled boy and his aged grandmother passing an uneasy summer in the countryside together…. Pic has an acute sense of place and detail, beautifully caught … sharp, full-bodied camerawork. One of the unlikeliest but most remarkable pairings in recent cinema, separated by a mere 70 years in age. (Variety, Derek Elley)
