Sometimes it’s comforting to know that certain filmmakers, like dogs with meaty bones, never let go of their favorite subjects. With Michael Haneke, you know you’re going to get a study of the human capacity for cruelty, explored in its many facets. Terry Gilliam loves his flights of fancy. Alain Resnais? Absurdist sentimentality with a soupcon of dark fatalism. And Gaspar Noé brings the sex, drugs and violence—all with a healthy dose of nihilism.

So it has gone here at Cannes, as each auteur has dutifully fulfilled critical expectations. Most triumphant was Austria’s Haneke, whose commanding, austere and deeply disturbing period piece, The White Ribbon (above), plays upon the director’s fascination with dark moral relativism. The film captures the flavor of a rural German town in 1913, the year before the start of World War I. A devastating critique of society’s penchant for intolerance, The White Ribbon follows a series of traumatic murders, injuries and acts of vandalism that, in turn, inspire child abuse from the adults who oversee the village. One example: Want to stop your little boy from masturbating at night? Just tie his hands to the bedpost. (The title refers to one man’s system of making his children wear a white ribbon to remind them of moral purity.) The historical setting is a refreshing departure for the director, as is the crisp, ravishing black-and-white cinematography that envelops the murky action. One of Haneke’s strongest works, The White Ribbon should now be considered a serious front-runner for the Palme d’Or (buzz on the Croisette pits it against Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, my early pick). Read more »

What do you do when the B-movie namesake of your new feature actually has better action, deeper themes and a more deliriously dirty group of soldiers? Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, his long-in-the-works WWII movie that cribs its title from the correctly spelled 1978 Enzo G. Castellari Italian action flick, is a predictable pastiche of film references and genre influences. It borrows musical stylings from Ennio Morricone, pays homage to spaghetti Westerns and Hollywood war flicks, and even turns a collection of nitrate 35mm films into high-gauge explosives used against the Nazi high command. (Get it? Cinema has the power to destroy the Third Reich.) By its end, though, this slice of self-reflexivity feels more like homework than entertainment, preferring hermetic in-jokes over good, tightly crafted fun. Read more »

Every year, there’s at least one Competition film to remind American festgoers that Cannes is a distinctly European affair. And the frisky working-class comedy Looking for Eric, from Palme d’Or alum Ken Loach, did not disappoint in this regard. Footballers with a religious zeal for U.K. powerhouse Manchester United will revel in Loach’s kitchen-sink realism and cornball sense of humor. But most others will probably have to stand on the sidelines and nod with benevolent goodwill. It’s an undeniable crowd-pleaser, and the reception from Continental viewers was absolute joy. How will it travel across the Atlantic? About as well as David Beckham.

The plot walks a sentimental line. Inspired by his self-help supervisor, a frazzled postal worker imagines pep-talk conversations with his favorite soccer player, Eric Cantona, on all things amorous and parental. The single dad and multiple divorcé soon finds himself on the road to repair, in episodes that veer from genuinely gritty to downright cheesy. The message is universal: Channel inspiration from your idol to improve your lot in life. But Loach’s dialect is very localized. Imagine Billy Crystal being life-coached by Reggie Jackson, and you’ll get the picture. (Gentlemen, call your agents.) Read more »

Nothing stirs up Cannes’s hornet’s nest of international film critics like a new Lars von Trier film: the haunting images, the explicit cruelty, the mischievous misogyny. The director’s latest, Antichrist, which made its debut tonight to a cacophony of cheers and jeers, delivers the goods with devilish predictability. Love it or hate it, Antichrist has thrown gasoline on the warm embers of a solid but otherwise unsurprising festival. Would you expect anything less?

No stranger to tales of domineering men and the sensitive women they push to extremes, Von Trier once again invokes his favorite archetypes in this story of a married couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) trying to cope with the death of their child by retreating to a forest enclave. The husband, a cocksure psychologist, is determined to cure his wife’s severe depression no matter how unhinged she becomes. What follows is a collision of reason and emotion, a struggle between rational thought and primitive action, and ultimately a fatal confrontation between masculine hubris and the feminine mystique.

There are oblique references to witchcraft persecutions and a pseudo-astrological map, not to mention images of child abuse, hardcore penetration, feverish finger-fucking, indoor and outdoor boinking, burial of the living, bludgeoned testicles, a snipped clitoris, a leg bolted to a grinding wheel, a doe delivering a stillborn fawn and a self-eviscerating fox who howls, “Chaos reigns!” (Take a breath.) Eliciting everything from whoops of laughter to wincing cries of shock, the onscreen grotesqueries easily kept this audience on the edge of their seats until the very end—when a precredit dedication to the memory of Andrei Tarkovsky was either the last straw or the cherry on top, depending on which side of the quickly polarized critical argument you preferred.

I personally had a ball. Claiming the picture was his way of working through a bout of severe melancholia, Von Trier writes in the Cannes press notes that “the script was finished and filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity.” Then, by the end of his statement, he calls Antichrist “the most important film of my career.” What’s it going to be, Lars? Don’t ask Denmark’s chronic prankster, whose provocations stand as some of the most reliably satisfying in cinema today. This is gonzo drama at its most feral, an instinctive and wry mash-up of dreamlike images (lusciously lensed by the talented Anthony Dod Mantle) and fairy-tale logic. It touches on primal nerves while stubbornly exuding a childish petulance for conventional resolution. Be shocked. Be awed. But don’t forget to laugh, wickedly.

You want blood splattered on that art-house silver screen? You got it. Always open to a few token genre selections, Cannes this year is fully embracing the more sordid aspects of cinema—and displaying a few head-cracking flashes of brilliance. Leapfrogging over its competitors for the Palme d’Or is A Prophet, an epic prison film from French underworld auteur Jacques Audiard that commanded forceful applause from the morning crowd.

Following the rise of illiterate teen Malik El Djebena (an electrifying Tahar Rahim) in the hierarchy of cell-block dominance, A Prophet expands to become a keen analysis of ascendant Franco-Arab identity during the Sarkozy era while staying firmly rooted as an absorbing character study of survival by any means necessary. It’s a shiv to the senses that confirms director Audiard as a gangland humanist without peer.

There are no grandiose set pieces or orchestral refrains in Audiard’s bag of tricks. As with his previous two films, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Read My Lips, the director uses stylistic flourishes in short doses, such as a mammoth flash of sans-serif font announcing a new chapter in the film’s episodic structure. When Audiard wants sparks, he simply lets the story unfold in all its harrowing glory. Watching Malik navigate the dark waters of his fellow inmates is fireworks enough.

A gang of Corsican thugs give Malik protection for slicing another Arab’s jugular by hiding a double-edged razor in his mouth. From there, his incremental education builds, both in the prison classroom and among the goons who chronically disparage his race. As one opportunity opens into another (including more and more furloughs to the outside), Malik gradually becomes a power broker all his own, drifting toward his Arab compatriots and a sense of the holy despite his unholy acts.

All the ingredients point to exploitation: bricks of hashish, dirty money, corrupt guards, vicious gunplay. But they’re also mixed with surreal touches, such as a fever dream of forest deer or a recurring vision of the first Arab Malik murdered. The running time is generous, just over two and a half hours, but it’s necessary to allow Malik’s character the time he needs to truly mature. Both lurid and profound, A Prophet is transformative stuff, adding up to a stirring portrait of personal invention amid dead-end options and temptations toward self-destruction. As a summation of Audiard’s previous themes, it’s surely his crowning work.

Oh, were there any other movies afterward? Pity the pictures that shared their premiere day with  A Prophet. Among the films in competition were Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay, a minor but ghoulish tale of a young police academy cadet lured into institutional crookedness and one breathtaking act of human depravity. And Un Certain Regard premiered the satisfying if murky Mother, a turn for its director, Bong Joon-ho, away from monsters (The Host) and back toward his earlier noirish themes (Memories of Murder). The film is a portrait of an overprotective mama shielding her slow-witted son after the police accuse him of homicide. With both flicks, the blood and vomit flow freely. One of them even has the sudden and brutal dismemberment of a dead body: “Get me another machete,” commands a frustrated cutter. You wouldn’t exactly call any of these directors hacks, but their movies certainly felt like lowbrow fun.

Some people lead fascinating lives—but that doesn’t mean they’ll make for fascinating movies. Two celebrated directors took their shot at docudrama yesterday, both stumbling through the chronic malaise of true-life stories: inevitability. What is the takeaway when history’s already been written? Jane Campion, director of The Piano, sunk her teeth into the romance of doomed poet John Keats in the swooning but shallow Bright Star, while Ang Lee dropped a tab of bad acid for his hopelessly square look at an iconic baby boomer moment, Taking Woodstock. Deft hands have elsewhere worked reality into cinematic epiphanies; what went wrong here?

The better of the two is Campion’s Bright Star, mainly because her sensual camerawork makes the tortured love affair between sensitive soul Keats (a pallid Ben Whishaw) and uptight Fanny Bawne (Abbie Cornish) downright palpable. Languid strolls through fields of violet, tender recitations of illuminating stanzas and stolen glances from one amour to another make this otherwise static costume drama linger in the heart longer than it should. (Horndogs trying to score with lit-major crushes, take note.)

But the clear-eyed will see a superficial summation of one young woman’s devotion to a dying young man, dressed up in costume-drama icing and a sheen of feminist harrumphing. Complicating the attraction is Keats’s Scottish writing partner, Brown (Paul Schneider, bleating an aggressive brogue), whose overprotective bromance with his friend adds a certain frisson in light of Bawne’s advances—but not enough to supply emotional heft. Overall, it’s stuffy treacle. You can see the SNL parody already.

Hardly groovier is Taking Woodstock—but would you expect any less from auteur Ang Lee, master of buttoned-down longing and quiet reserve? His take on the counterculture’s August 1969 festival is a watered-down theme park tour. Throw in a few naughty glimpses of free-love nudity (these long-haired hippies are straight from central casting) and a rose-tinted slice of milquetoast emerges—safe enough for a grandma to gum without any risk of sharp, pointed insights.

Comedian Demetri Martin, making his acting debut as upstate gatekeeper Elliot Tiber, does a yeoman’s job carrying all the nonsense on his lanky frame as the young innocent whose plan for a classical-music concert balloons beyond his control into three days of mud-soaked peace, love and music. His emotional conflict with an overbearing Jewish mother (scenery-chewing Imelda Staunton, practically spitting matzoh in people’s faces) is tiresome and makes Elliot’s inevitable break from parental control all the more obvious. Most perplexing is his timid emergence out of the closet. In the book upon which Lee’s movie is based, Elliot lives an aggressively gay double life in New York City. But Lee would have you think that it’s his contact high with the far-out festivalgoers that gives him the strength to discover his attraction to men. The Oscar-winning director of Brokeback Mountain dialing down gay content? Truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

Quiet is not a word I ever thought I’d use for the Cannes Film Festival, but on this first full day of screenings, there’s a surprisingly subdued vibe in and around the venues of the world’s most prestigious cinema event. Shorter lines abound, smaller crowds gather on the Croisette, and the French villagers are genuinely courteous. A cautious start in a slow economy? Not surprising, but not encouraging, either—especially when so many previous winners of the Palme d’Or (Lars von Trier, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, Quentin Tarantino) pepper this year’s slate with their latest and (knock on wood) greatest.

Critics are still floating from the seventh-heaven heights of Wednesday’s opening selection, Up, Pixar’s soon-to-be-blockbuster and the first animated film ever to kick off Cannes’ two-week orgy of voyeurism. But the clutch of competition movies thus far haven’t flown quite so high. Buzz was weak on Lou Ye’s gay romance Spring Fever and Andrea Arnold’s teen meltdown melodrama, Fish Tank, both of which had earned shrugs or eyerolls from fellow journalists (plus an inevitable defender or two) by the time I landed in town.

Indeed, the strongest response so far has been the mixed reaction to Thirst, Park Chan-wook’s grim tale of a bloodsucking priest. Despite the hoary conceit of vampirism, Park finds some clever twists by making his creature of the night a reluctant, guilt-ridden man of the cloth, whose weakness for a maniacal woman leads him into a downward spiral of homicidal debauchery. The movie bites off more than it can chew (heh) when it starts feeling like an Asian ghost story, but overall there’s a lovely melancholy to the genre antics, one that Park delivers with aplomb, giving his film some wonderful visual flourishes and a much deeper resonance than expected. Read more »