Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
“The Phoenician Scheme” is, for better or worse, an archetypal Wes Anderson movie. The Cannes Film Festival competition entry is, once again, a timeless motion storybook about affluent eccentrics that’s symmetrical, pastel and droll. While Mr. Anderson’s rigorous mise en scène is always to be admired, telling a tale like this in the techbro oligarchy era is a choice – sort of like the cinematic equivalent of let them eat cake.
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
A Brighter Tomorrow (2023)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that once a middle-aged male artist hits a certain level of success, his works of art become only about the struggles of a middle-aged artist to maintain that level of success. Though normally this happens in literature – cf. every campus novel about a professor sleeping with his students – director Nanni Moretti is here interested in how a middle-aged filmmaker and former radical is meant to achieve genuine artistic success without the help of Netflix. And there is one mercy – the woman having a relationship with a much older man is the director’s daughter. So, time is marching on and looking up at least? Sometimes, yes, but for the most part this is a movie for making, not for watching.
Guy Ferrandis/Mars Distribution
MOVIE REVIEW
Venus in Fur (2014)
Roman Polanski revisits his fascination with the psychosexual realm in a big-screen adaptation of David Ives’s Off-Broadway two-character piece “Venus in Fur,” which itself is a meta-reimagining (think Charlie Kaufman) of Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella “Venus in Furs” that famously spawned the term masochism.
Stone Angels
David Cronenberg's skills as an adapter of existing stories (eight of his movies have originated in other works, says a back-of-the-envelope calculation, even without counting "The Fly") are seeming more robust than ever, as he moves away from body horror and dives deeper into the life of the mind. And it's appropriate that, after "A Dangerous Method" dramatized debates about human sexual drives in the form of two erudite talking heads, he should tackle Don DeLillo's "Cosmopolis," in which a deeply disturbed young man wanders off the edge of sanity under his own steam, talking constantly while articulating hardly anything definable at all.
MOVIE REVIEW
Cosmopolis (2012)
Stone Angels
The two prospective core audiences for this collaboration between cerebral auteur David Cronenberg and teen heartthrob Robert Pattinson will each have a pertinent question in mind before entering the cinema: Younger Pattinson fans looking for more of his tortured “Twilight” smoldering may ask themselves just how digestible this apparently adult and difficult film will be. Cronenberg watchers may be equally curious as to how the film stacks up at this particular juncture of his career. The director is currently three films into a relatively restrained mainstream phase of a recurring cycle. Last time, in the early 1990s, he brought a similarly respectable diversion to a juddering halt with “Crash” following the failure of “M. Butterfly.” With “Cosmopolis” being the first Mr. Cronenberg-penned screenplay since “eXistenZ” and “A Dangerous Method” widely criticized for lacking bite, hopes are high that “Cosmopolis” might be a return to the edgier Mr. Cronenberg of old.
MOVIE REVIEW
Chicken With Plums (2011)
Le Pacte
Marjane Satrapi has carved herself a very particular niche, firstly as a cartoonist with an extremely distinctive black-and-white drawing style shown off her in her graphic novels, which are based on her life growing up in Iran. Now living in France, Ms. Satrapi has further branched out into making films based on her graphic novels; the first was 2007’s “Persepolis,” an animated, autobiographical film drawn in her style co-written and co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. And now they have reteamed for the live-action — though stylized — “Chicken With Plums.”
MOVIE REVIEW
Wild Grass (2009)
Christophe Jeauffroy/Sony Pictures Classics
The English title is a direct translation of the French word for those little weeds which sprout up in the cracks in sidewalks; in French the phrase is a metaphor for people who are a little bit unconventional. This movie certainly is different, but it works neither as a straight story nor as a genre exercise; and it seems the director wanted it that way.
MOVIE REVIEW
Quantum of Solace (2008)
Karen Ballard/Columbia Pictures
James Bond is suffering an identity crisis. The series – which began with 1962's "Dr. No" – has always had its ups and downs, not least the changes of lead actor. Despite 22 installments of varying quality and silliness, the franchise has always bounced back, mostly unscathed by the changing times or the parodies and imitators which have also filled our screens. Then came Bond's greatest adversary, 2002's "The Bourne Identity," in which Matt Damon picked up a pen and changed permanently how violence could appear on screen. What was previously stylized or intentionally amusing now looked dated and ridiculous. EON Productions, which controls the series, has been running scared ever since. Based on "Quantum of Solace," Bond has yet to find himself.