What The Critics are Saying about the Films at Cannes
Distance (Japan)
"Annoyingly out of focus. The film is about personal responsibility but with so little backgrounding and detail to the characters, it's impossible to care much about any of them. After the emotionally involving "After Life" "Distance" is threadbare."
Variety Derek Elley
Eloge de l'amour (France)
"...a
dense, breathless meditation on everything including love and death, time and memory, history vs. invention and art vs. commerce -- finds the French New Wave veteran far from settled.... ostensibly a vague love story, it doesn't take long to realize that it's really an all-purpose sounding board allowing [Jean-Luc] Godard to voice several highly personal concerns. Hollywood Reporter

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"Director Jean-Luc Godard launched a caustic attack on Hollywood at the Cannes film festival Tuesday. 'I thought that cinema was made to show things in large, in an original fashion, but it...soon
fell under the influence of California and very quickly became a commodity', the 70 year-old-director told reporters." Reuters

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"
Americans have no past," one of Godard's characters says, "so they buy the pasts of others." Godard from LA Times

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"Perhaps Mr.
Godard's strongest and most accessible feature since the mid-1980's, "Éloge" demonstrates that there is still abundant life in the director's lyrical, meditative and deeply pessimistic cinematic vision." New York Times, A.O. Scott
I'm Going Home (Portugal)
"
The richest expression of the humanist impulse at the festival so far could be found in "I'm Going Home." Some of the scenes are filmed without dialogue, and its moments of humor are conducted with the rigorous panache of classical silent comedy." NY Times A.O. Scott

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"wise and witty...is like a precious and finely cut diamond, magnificent to behold in its sparkling beauty yet in reality it's one tough rock. Hollywood Reporter, Kirt Honeycutt
Kandahar [Sun Behind the Moon] (Iran)
"Mohsen Makhmalbaf weaves two threads together in a visually exalting, emotionally horrifying view of Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. Reading like a humanitarian cry for help, it is the first major film to describe the Afghans' current suffering and oppression to audiences in vivid, inescapable terms. It is a film hard to ignore and one likely to have a strong impact on audiences willing to be caught up in its urgency." Variety, Deborah Young

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"Captivating...the  latest film from Iranian master filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf  is a
dazzling odyssey through an ancient land that appears to be caught in its own perpetual eclipse.  It's a journey filled with startling, often surreal images that stand in bold, vibrant relief against the bleak, forbidding landscape." Hollywood Reporter, Michael Rechtshaffen
The Man Who Wasn't There (USA)
"Tonally sophisticated, formally deft, the elegantly vicious poetic crime movie by Joel and Ethan Coen, inhabits a vivid, peculiar place of loss and corruption. Neither pastiche nor parody, the movie suffers from an academic veneer, though it removes the deconstruction of genre and the assorted subdivisions of "post-noir" and "neo-noir" that continuously threaten to render the form irrelevant." Indiewire, Patrick McGavin

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"Joel and Ethan Coen's latest film, unveiled at Cannes Sunday, is a dazzling take on the film noir genre infused with murder, mystery and a lot of smoking." Reuters
Moulin Rouge (USA)
"Strictly in terms of razzle dazzle, Luhrmann outstrips anything Hollywood has produced in years and now bears comparison to the likes of Busby Berkeley in his ability to conceptualize and physically energize production numbers. {But] tale is so clearly a synthetic recycling of "La Boheme" elements that the characters remain constructs, exaggerated caricatures that are vibrant yet bloodless."
Variety Todd McCarthy

"Only one thing would have saved "Moulin Rouge": a sense of romance, a belief in the overpowering nature of love in a sordid, thrill-seeking world. But Luhrmann takes no time to establish such a mood. He has constructed
a monument to artifice, and anything real or emotional would only get in the way." Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter

From Yahoo Reuters

"A fabulous ode to the art of the show. There is no anachronism, because the film creates a time beyond which is the very essence of lyricism''
Le Figaro,Marie-Noelle Tranchant

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``It's like the very worst Disney, only dripping in camp.This has got nothing to do with cinema -- it's more like an ad for a fizzy drink.'
' Le Figaro,Marie-Noelle Tranchant
Mulholland Drive (USA)
"The film will also, no doubt,
divide audiences and critics. But few will be able to resist its heady sense of intrigue and two riveting lead performances by Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring.  Lynch creates enough suspense moment to moment that the viewer is compelled to enter his hypnotic, disturbing netherworld of Los Angeles, a city of sun-blasted streets and dark places where the human soul can shrivel." Hollywood Reporter, Kirt Honeycutt

"...a riveting, highly bizarre dreamscape that represents the director's best work since Blue Velvet." Eonline, Lael Loewenstein

"...is a dreamy, colorful Southern California noir that is slow, gorgeous and utterly puzzling. Its tangled story will be experienced by some as an offense against narrative order, but the film is an intoxicating liberation from sense." New York Times, A.O. Scott
No Man's Land (Bosnia)
"Equally humorous and tragic, the film tells the tale of soldiers Ciki and Nino, one Bosnian and the other Serb. They are trapped together in No Man's Land -- a trench between Serbian and Bosnian positions -- with an injured Bosnian soldier lying beside them on a booby-trapped mine....generated a rare buzz, winning
a 10-minute standing ovation and huge interest from global distributors. - Reuters

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"...heavy-handed in the extreme, but the main story is
compelling enough to overcome its forced style." Indiewire, Michael Giltz