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Category Archives: Movie Review
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Cannes Preview: What to Expect When You’re Inspecting…
The 65th Cannes Film Festival may be short on directorial star quality but high on Hollywood glamour
By MARY CORLISS AND RICHARD CORLISS
VALERY HACHE / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
An employee workd to fix a giant official poster of the 65th Cannes’ film festival featuring late Marilyn Monroe on May 14, 2012 on the facade of the Festivals’ palace in Cannes, France.
Inspecting movies, that is, in the role of a professional film watcher at a major international festival. Several hundred features are on view at the 65th Festival de Cannes — the proprietors of the world’s largest annual convention figure you know it’s a film festival — and the couple thousand critics know they are expected to see four or five movies a day. Plus check out the press conferences, plus go to the parties and schmooze the stars, plus file daily coverage for their print, online or video outlets.
Not that we’re complaining, mind you. This is our 39th Cannes — 31 years reporting for TIME and a dozen for TIME.com — and we haven’t lost the Riviera addiction yet. The Venice Festival may have more charm, and Toronto more clout in the American movie marketplace, but Cannes remains the greatest concentration of film talent, glamour and power this side of George Clooney’s home when he throws an Obama bash.
(MORE: Downtown Gabby: Top 15 Chatter-Worthy Films from Tribeca)
Last year, Cannes hosted world premieres of three of the nine films that the Motion Picture academy nominated for Best Picture: Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life and the winner, The Artist. The Festival also presented Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which, though neither great cinema nor a good movie, did peddle enough tickets to become the ninth picture in film history to register $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Another Cannes movie, Kung Fu Panda 2, earned two-thirds of a billion.
Not that Oscar éclat and blockbuster status are priorities for Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’ selector-in-chief. He simply seeks the finest movies, in the fairly narrow, Eurocentric definition of film artistry: assured, demanding, often grim and with a much slower pulse than the standard Hollywood product. But Cannes does love its Hollywood stars. The 2012 Festival’s iconic image, splashed 60 feet wide above the red-carpet entrance to the Grand Palais, shows Marilyn Monroe blowing out a birthday-cake candle. (This summer marks the 50th anniversary of Monroe’s death.)
The name value of the directors is lower than last year — when Woody Allen, Terrence Malick, Pedro Almodóvar and, most notoriously, Lars von Trier were represented — but Cannes’ star wattage is predictably incandescent. Among those with films here: Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Shia LaBeouf, Reese Witherspoon, Bill Murray, Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey and, in different films, both top stars of The Twilight Saga: Robert Pattinson in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and Kristen Stewart in Walter Salles’ film of the Jack Kerouac novelOn the Road.
Gilles Jacob, the former Festival boss who still hovers paternally over Frémaux’s shoulder, has said the American movie royalty really knows how to work the red carpet. And who better than Pitt, the patron star of Cannes? The actor came to the Côte d’Azur with Babel (2006), Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009) and The Tree of Life (2011) and escorted Angelina Jolie in 2008 when she starred in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling. Pitt will be here again, starring in the crime drama Killing Them Softly.
(PHOTOS: The Craziness of Cannes)
There’s no Johnny Depp blockbuster showing out of competition, which is fine: Cannes has plenty of pirates roaming the Croisette trying to sell or buy films, or steal a cell phone. But the official competition, which culminates in the awarding of the Palme d’Or and other big prizes a week from Sunday, contains many works by esteemed directors, from the art-house A and B-plus list, such as the Austrian master Michael Haneke, former Palme winners Ken Loach and Abbas Kiarostami and the 89-year-old French grandmaster Alain Resnais, whose first Cannes film was Hiroshima, mon amour in 1959.
Here’s a preview of 10 Cannes enticements: six Competition films with brand-name actors, four that have the critics hoping for revelations.
BIG STARS, BIG RISKS
Moonrise Kingdom. When two young lovers flee their 1960s New England town, the boy’s parents (Murray and Frances McDormand) and the local sheriff (Willis) follow the trail. In this change-of-pace period romance for deadpan comedy director Wes Anderson, the cast includes Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton and Harvey Keitel. (Wednesday’s opening night film at Cannes; opens in the U.S. May 25.)Lawless. LaBoeuf and Tom Hardy are brothers making moonshine in 1930s Virginia. Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska and Guy Pearce costar in this adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s historical novel, The Wettest County in the World. The script is by musician Nick Cave, the direction by the Australian John Hillcoat, who in 2009 adapted Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic family drama The Road. (Plays here here Saturday; opens in the U.S. Aug. 31.)Killing Them Softly. Pitt reunites with Andrew Dominick, the New Zealand visionary who directed him in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. In this filming of George C. Higgins’ novel Cogan’s Trade, Pitt is a mob enforcer is the Boston underworld. His suspects include James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Richard Jenkins, Sam Shepard and Ben Mendelsohn, who was scary-great as the mama’s boy killer in Animal Kingdom. (Plays here next Tuesday; opens in the U.S. Sept. 21.)
(PHOTOS: On the Red Carpet at Cannes ’09)
On the Road. Stewart has a nude scene, reportedly (avidly reported), and Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Terrence Howard and Elizabeth Moss are among the Beats and off-beats in this film of Kerouac’s influential, famously unfilmable novel. Garrett Hedlund (Friday Night Lights) gets the role of the saint and hell raiser Dean Moriarty. Eight years ago, the Brazilian director Salles put another young rebel — Che Guevara — on the road in The Motorcycle Diaries. (Plays here Wednesday the 23rd; no U.S. release date set.)
The Paperboy. Another young hunk goes indie. In this adaptation of the Pete Dexter novel, Efron is a reporter investigating a murder case. John Cusack is the man on Death Row; Kidman and McConaughey costar in Lee Daniels’ first feature since Precious, a hit at Cannes three years ago. (Plays here Thursday the 25th; no U.S. release date set.)
Cosmopolis. Pattinson plays a 28-year-old billionaire financial guru tripping across Manhattan in his stretch limo and risks crashing along with the market he so ruthlessly plays. One way or another, everyone’s a vampire. Cronenberg, a veteran connoisseur of creepy, films Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel. (Plays here Friday the 26th; no U.S. release date set.)
CRITICS’ DARLINGS
Beyond the Hills. Cristian Mungiu’s powerful 4 Months, 2 Weeks and 3 Days — also known as “the Romanian abortion movie” — took the Palme d’Or in 2007, beating the Coen brothers’ Oscar winner No Country for Old Men. Mungiu’s first feature since then heads every critic’s must-see list. (Plays Saturday.)
Amour. Haneke, whose 2009 Cannes Palme-winner The White Ribbon you will find on a Very Important TIME list later this week (subtle plug for our forthcoming Millennium Movies package), is back with a story of elderly music teachers and their daughter. Ageless French stars Jean-Louis Trintignant (Brigitte Bardot’s beau in the 1956 And God Created Woman) and Emmanuelle Riva (star of Hiroshima mon amour) join three-time Haneke veteran Isabelle Huppert for an encounter that should be both dark and illuminating. (Plays Sunday.)
Seven Days in Havana. A week in Cuba’s capital: one day for a short story from each of seven directors. Four of the filmmakers are world-class: Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), crazy-great Gaspar Noë (Into the Void), Palestinian satirist Elia Suleiman (The Time That Remains) and 2008 Palme d’Or champ Laurent Cantet (The Class). We’re hoping for four or more vignettes of wonder. (Plays Wednesday the 23rd).
Mud. Jeff Nichols and Michael Shannon, director and star of last year’s indie pleasure Take Shelter, team again for Nichols’ tale of a fugitive and the teen boys who share his secret. With Reese Witherspoon, Matthew McConaughey and Sam Shepard. (Plays Saturday the 26th, the last day of the Competition.)
So many tantalizing journeys beckon over our next 12 days in Cannes. The deepest hope of these two film inspectors is that you will share the trip, virtually, with us.
There’s certainly nothing evil about Charlize Theron’s sheer dress. Kristen’s, not so sure
Charlize Theron turns up to the London premiere of Snow White wearing a sexy see through dress
Charlize does a bit of bewitching with her eyes
She plays the evil queen in Snow White and the Huntsman and although she had a black dress on, like what we’d imagine evil queens wear, there was nothing nasty about Charlize tonight as she arrived at the premiere of her latest film.
Wearing a floor length number, Charlize swanned into London’s Leicester Square with her lovely long legs on display through the sheer material and almost showing a bit of boob too.
Sexy and evil – Charlize ticks all boxes
Sheer loveliness – it’s an old cliche – but most appropriate
She’s sexy and she knows it
Liberty Ross also went for a see through dress
We’ve studied these pictures quite hard and are pretty sure her modesty is being protected by some flesh coloured material under there – unfortunately.
Kristen Stewart also stars in the movie as Snow White and Charlize told Celebuzz she thinks she’s got a great future ahead of her: “I think that she is going to have an amazing career,” she said.
Sam Claflin and Laura Haddock are a pretty pair, aren’t they?
Yeah, we’re not so sure about Kristen attempt at the whole see through, sheer thing
It’s just a bit weird rather than sexy, no?
Kristen would like you to see the back too
And a smile – there’s a first
“I think, as an actor, she’s doing it, because she really loves her job and she is really good at it. My experience has been, if your reasons for doing this is authentic as that and you have the tenacity and guts that she has, then I think you have the right personality for this job. I think she has that.”
Nothing evil about her at all.
Lily Cole slinked up too
This all looks a little awkward
NBC Will Reportedly Gently Cancel 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Community [Updated]
by Julie Miller
BY ALI GOLDSTEIN/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK/GETTY IMAGES.
Tina Fey, Tracy Morgan, Jane Krakowski, and Alec Baldwin in a 30 Rock scene.
Update, 5/11: NBC tells Vanity Fair that it has renewed Parks and Recreation for a 22-episode season and ordered 13-episode seasons of Community and 30 Rock. The network declined to say whether these would be the final seasons for any of the series.
A trio of devastating television developments today: NBC reportedly plans to raze 75 percent of its beloved Thursday-night comedy lineup. The rumored casualties: 30 Rock, Community, andParks and Recreation—all three of which represent some of the smartest (if only moderately watched) comedic output by any network right now. Instead of canceling the shows outright, the Peacock network will reportedly announce shortened final seasons for each at next week’s annual “upfront” presentation in New York City. The fourth Thursday-night sitcom, The Office, which is in its eight season, is predicted to remain on the air.
The network has already confirmed series orders for six new comedies, including Go On, from NBC alum Matthew Perry; The New Normal, from Ryan Murphy; 1600 Penn, the White House comedy starring Bill Pullman and Jenna Elfman; Anne Heche’s Save Me; and Animal Practice, a veterinary-clinic-set sitcom starring Justin Kirk. Judging by NBC’s recent comedy batting average, at least one of these shows should make you laugh.
Next year will mark 30 Rock’s seventh season, the fifth for Parks and Recreation, and the fourth for Community. Earlier this year, 30 Rock star Alec Baldwin, who has won two Emmys for his portrayal of Jack Donaghy, alluded to a near-future exit from the network, when he covertly tweeted, “I think I’m leaving NBC just in time.” To deal with this blow, we defer to a piece of Jack Donaghy’s immortal wisdom: “We all have ways of coping. I use sex and awesomeness.”
Touch Episode-Nine Recap: “If Music Be the Food of Love”
by Emily Gerard
BY ISABELLA VOSMIKOVA/FOX.
“The Music of the Spheres” builds on the mathematical theme of the previous episode. Jake has been using his new tablet to make musical notes with numbers. Martin is hopeful that the next step might be for him to make words with numbers, and tries to show Jake an app that would let him do so, but Jake is not interested. Telling Sherry he’s taking Jake out for a day in Central Park, Martin calls Clea and tells her to get a head start on sorting through Teller’s research- he and Jake will meet her there. Having been taken off the case, Clea is free to go rogue. Naughty children, you two!
On the way, Jake bumps into a woman (and as we have learned, people don’t bump into each other on this show without a reason) who spills her coffee on them both. Everyone leaves to get a change of clothes. When the woman goes upstairs to the music shop she owns to get a new shirt, she inadvertently interrupts a robbery by an unlikely suspect: a 13 year-old boy. The child pulls a gun on her but flees.
At home changing, Martin tries to press the app on Jake again. Instead, Jake pulls out the gun, which he somehow picked up from the alleyway through which the Robber Boy fled. Martin is not pleased. He makes Jake take him back to the alley, where they find the kid. Martin confronts him, and he fires back, asking what’s “the matter” with Jake. “My son uses numbers to talk,” Martin says. This strikes a chord: “My brother doesn’t talk either. Maybe he could show my brother how to talk with numbers?” the kid asks. Before we know it, they’re all en route back to his house.
Meanwhile, Clea is busy getting the inside scoop about Teller from his former roommate Abram, who also appears to be a researcher. He claims they were best friends, but Abram is jarringly nonchalant about Teller’s death. Martin calls to explain that they have wound up in the Bronx with two kids named Elliot (Robber Boy) and Andre (his disabled older brother) who seem to be completely on their own. After she hangs up, Abram shows her a picture of Amelia (the Amelia of the Amelia Sequence). Clea recognizes the little blonde girl in the photo from the facility! Teller was working with her, Abram explains, but, under pressure to produce results, pushed her too hard and caused some sort of setback. He lost his tenure and blamed himself for hurting Amelia, which sent him into a deep depression.
To temper all the grimness with a little music, we are introduced to Felipe, a mop-haired guitar player in Portugal or Brazil (global locations are anyone’s guess on Touch). He’s singing to Yarah, a classy café-owner. He asks her to run off to the beach with him, and when she demurs he proposes running off to New York instead. The happy times don’t last long: a man arrives who is trying to buy the café, causing Yarah to admit she can no longer pay its mortgage. Still, she’s desperate to hang on to the business: her grandmother built it and after her mother and sister died, it’s all she has left of her family.
OR IS IT? Clea discovers that Elliot and Andre have an aunt who was never contacted when their mother died years ago. Andre and Jake are currently bonding: Jake plays music on his tablet, and Andre uses it to spell out that he’s hungry. It’s a small miracle that we hope Jake will be capable of soon. Elliot tells Martin the story of how he got stuck caring for his older brother all alone: first their mother died, and then their father took off when Andre got shot in the head a year ago, causing permanent brain damage. Just then, Elliot gets a text and abruptly asks them to leave. On their way out, Martin and Jake hear a middle-aged man threatening him about the botched robbery. Martin begs Elliot to let him help. “No one can help me,” the boy sorrowfully replies.
So they finally meet up with Clea, and Abram immediately identifies Jake as “one of the 36” people who are blessed and work to alleviate suffering, “to repair the universe, if you will.” Heavy stuff.
Martin goes to visit Elliot’s probation officer, John Tenney, claiming to be Elliot’s basketball coach. They speak in veiled threats to each other as Martin expresses his concern that someone is harassing Elliot. On his way out, Martin recognizes a guy from the alleyway by the music store. It turns out he and Elliot share the same probation officer. He says he works at the music store, and that he told John about how the owner lets cash pile up in the store throughout the month.
Felipe has resolved to sell his guitar so that he can help Yarah keep her business afloat. His friend tells him about a music shop in New York that will pay “top dollar” for such a fine instrument. It’s the same music store that was almost robbed earlier, and the owner is on her way to the bank with the money that Elliot tried to steal that morning. Elliot intercepts her and gets her purse this time. Martin finds him, crying in the alleyway, as the police arrive.
Felipe gives Yarah all the money he got from selling his guitar and announces that he wants to be her partner. Just as she’s about to decline his offer, she gets a voice message from Martin informing her that she has nephews who need her help. Yarah wisely decides to accept Felipe’s support and money.
Elliot comes back to Tenney with the purse. “What the hell took you so long?” Tenney asks aggressively. Elliot hands over the money and the gun that Tenney gave him. But he’s wearing a wire this time and Tenney is immediately arrested by the police. Phew!
The episode concludes with Felipe and Yarah, who got to New York remarkably quickly, serving a nice dinner to Elliot and Andre. Meanwhile, back at the facility Sherry asks where Jake’s tablet went, and Martin proudly tells her that he gave it away. “How could you do that? He could have used it to talk!” Sherry demands. “Maybe he doesn’t want to talk,” Martin realizes. “Maybe it’s my job as his father to be okay with that.”
Connections forged:
Jake and Andre, Martin and Elliott, Felipe and Yarah, Yarah and her long-lost nephews, Tenney and comeuppance.
Dark Shadows Movie Review: Johnny Depp Carries a Crummy Movie, Part XVII
BRUCE HANDY ON CULTURE
by Bruce Handy
An ode of sorts to Johnny Depp: I’d see him in pretty much anything—which, alas, is the approach you have to take with Johnny Depp, since he has spent most of his career being consistently terrific in mediocre to awful movies, the dish by Thomas Keller tarting up an Applebee’s.
This bittersweet epiphany was prompted by having just watched Dark Shadows, his eighth collaboration with director Tim Burton (see our photos of the Dark Shadows cast here). It’s a big, sloppy mess of a film with all kinds of wasted talent, most notably Helena Bonham Carter, playing a nicotine-voiced middle-aged lush so routinely conceived as to ward off the actress’s usual flair for the perverse; and Chloë Grace Moretz, who sulks uninterestingly through a handful of scenes until (spoiler alert) she gets to turn into a werewolf at the end, but even then she only has time for a few good snarls. (Throughout the film she holds her lips in an exaggerated, bee-stung curl that my daughter, a teenager herself and possessed of some familiarity with temperamentality, tried to imitate. “It hurts,” she said.) Eva Green, the previously boring French actress who played the Bond girl in Casino Royale and made a notably naked debut in a Bernado Bertolucci movie (The Dreamers, 2003), is funny and vampy as the villainess here—who knew?—though a whiff of misogyny clings to her character like the kind of low-lying night fog that drifts through so many Burton films. If only he were as good and careful a storyteller as he is a production designer.
But as you surely figured, with or without having seen the trailer, Depp is a joy as Barnabas Collins, infusing the gothic camp of Jonathan Frid’s original Barnabas, from the old ABC soap opera, with extra helpings of doomed, Byronic corn. It’s a hammy performance in the most wonderful, calculated way, simultaneously committed and winking. That’s harder to do than it looks, I’m guessing, but Depp is unique in having fashioned an A-list career primarily by submerging himself in eccentric roles. Most movie stars play variations on themselves, or if not themselves then fixed screen personas; Depp is more of a shape-shifter, like Meryl Streep, but if she were possessed by the ghost of Mel Blanc. He single-handedly makes Dark Shadowswatchable, and if there were an Oscar equivalent of Most Valuable Player, he would be the early front-runner.
Like always. Movie stars are supposed to carry pictures; that’s the job description. But I can’t think of another so essential to his film’s successes. Tom Cruise flashes a great grin and sweats an excellent sweat in the Mission: Impossible films and surely earns his salary—I’m not being dismissive here, though can’t you imagine the films working just as well with Matt Damon or Will Smith? And yet, who aside from Depp could play Captain Jack Sparrow? Jim Carrey? Ugh. Robert Downey Jr.? Well, maybe, but I doubt to quite as effervescent effect. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are possibly the least deserving blockbuster hits of the last decade—I’ll admit I’m going out on a limb here; it’s like trying to choose the most Reggie Mantle–like Mitt Romney gaffe—but even the franchise’s most ardent fans would have to concede there’s nary a non-Depp reason to keep an eye open. Did anyone other than IMDB even notice that Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley weren’t in the last one?
Here’s a thought experiment: has Depp ever been in an unrelievedly great movie, one that had lasting virtues aside from his own performance? Naturally, I haven’t seen everything he’s done, so I’ll leave you to make the cases for Chocolat or Don Juan DeMarco, but I can think of one: 1994’s Ed Wood, a small masterpiece and, to my taste, far and away the greatest of his collaborations with Burton, possibly because its subject was making art—even if it was bad art—and not just art direction. Still, it was their biggest failure at the box office. I wouldn’t put theirAlice in Wonderland in the same category as Ed Wood, or even near it, but I did enjoy the film, partly because Alice in Wonderland doesn’t ask to be coherent, which plays to Burton’s strengths, and partly because, for once, Depp had a worthy foil in Bonham Carter, whose Red Queen stole the movie out from under his Mad Hatter. That was a first, and surely a last, in Depp’s career.
Rihanna @ “Battleship” American Premiere
“Battleship” American Premiere
Rihanna attends as Universal Pictures presents the American Premiere of “Battleship” at the Nokia Theater L.A. Live in Los Angeles, CA on Thursday, May 10, 2012 (Michael Underwood/ABImages) AP
Rihanna @ Facebook
That’s one way to make an entrance! The Dictator is towed into his own world premiere in an orange Lamborghini
He’s already shocked at the premieres for his previous controversial movies Borat and Bruno.
And thanks to his antics at the 2012 Oscars earlier this year, Sacha Baron Cohen was always bound to shock at the premiere for his new film The Dictator tonight.
There was no doubt the funnyman was going to ensure the event arrived with a bang – and that it did as the actor turned up in a bright orange Lamborghini that had to be towed by a truck.
Scroll down for trailer…
Making an entrance! Sacha Baron Cohen turned up to London’s Royal Festival Hall for the world premiere of his film The Dictator dressed in full costume
Golden boy: The actor had just one prop in the form of a gold gun
Dressed in costume complete with a full beard, Sacha even drew a gold pistol out on photographers as he remained in character as Admiral General Aladeen.
And in true style, he made a huge impact as he turned up on the red carpet at London’s Royal Festival Hall flanked by a number of scantily clad females.
The horde of girls all had their legs out as they wore military-style khaki costumes with dark red berets and skyhigh black stilettos.
Controversial: The funnyman ensured he made an impressive entrance as he showed up in an orange Lamborghini that was towed by a truck
Hands up! Sacha was surrounded by scantily clad ladies in military costume while he waved a gold gun around
In character: Cohen was all smiles as he wore his large beard and drove into the premiere grounds holding an umbrella to shield him from the drizzle
Sacha stood in the sports car as he held a white umbrella to shield him from the drizzly weather as he jokingly announced to fans that he’d like to grant political asylum to his ‘wrinkled old buddy’, media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
And while the funnyman actor went all out in his controversial costume, his wife Isla Fisher was on hand to support him.
She turned up looking stunning in a pair of red heels and a lace mini-dress, while her hair was worn in a messy plait to the side.
Star turn out: Mohamed Al Fayed showed up to pose for photos with Cohen at the Thursday night premiere
Support: Sacha’s wife Isla Fisher was on hand at the premiere, but she opted for a glamorous mini-skirt and red heels
Oops! But her demure look was slightly ruined as the front split rode up to reveal her underwear
Different looks: Jessica Wright wore a floor-length blue and yellow dress while Kristina Rihannoff (R) opted for a shorter style
The Avengers Wows the World: $178.4 Million Overseas Haul!
Marvel/Disney Enterprises
How huge is The Avengers?
The comic-book event has now grossed more money than all but our moviegoing nation’s biggest box-office hits of the year—and, as you may have noticed, it hasn’t opened here yet.
A look at the The Avengers’ fast and furious international start:
Moderator
Tommy Z.™
Geek For Life™ 