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In recent years, the Cannes Film Festival has weathered considerable criticism for failing to welcome female filmmakers. Yesterday, two women made their mark in the press yesterday: competition jury president Jane Campion, the only woman to win the Palme d’Or, and Nicole Kidman, whose Hollywood image has been complicated by films that have premiered at the festival. With Campion’s role this year, journalists and critics are wondering whether she will bring attention to a female filmmaker come awards night....

In picking this subject were you concerned about repeating The Class in any way? This film really finds its own direction and energy. From the start it was really important to me that the film couldn’t just stay in the workshop. It had to go out, because everything that is said or takes place in the workshop is going to have a mirror in the uncomfortable relationship formed by Olivia and Antoine and in the violence running throughout, which is acceptable in novels but not acceptable in real life....

Cable shows like The Big C and now New Zealand writer-director Kirstin Marcon’s comedic drama, The Most Fun You Can Have Dying, exemplify a new attitude toward cancer and how to dramatize it on screen. Once a cue for morose tragedy, cancer is starting to being used by filmmakers as a portal into a kind of ironic existentialism, less a death sentence than a means to look back in anger, and possibly in head-scratching bemusement....

Charlotte Garson: film critic for France Culture, the cultural national public radio Joumane Chahine: former critic for daily An-Nahar in Lebanon, programmer for the Beirut Film Festival, and Film Comment contributor Alex Horwath: director of the Austrian Film Museum and critic for the Austrian daily Die Presse Gavin Smith: editor of Film Comment Party Girl AH: I would like to start with the Caméra d’Or for Party Girl. I do not have a full list of the debut films in front of me that were eligible, but I find this an extremely weak Caméra d’Or, considering the history of this award....

In 1964, Bel Kaufman, a middle-aged, Berlin-born New York City schoolteacher, published her first novel, Up the Down Staircase. It was the story—told innovatively in notes, memos, essays, fragments, suggestion-box insults, and jottings—of Sylvia Barrett, an idealistic young woman getting her first taste of the realities of working in a rough-and-tumble, ethnically mixed urban public school. The novel was an instant success, selling 1.5 million copies within the first month of its publication....

Fat City Bold, intuitive actors who spend a professional lifetime in movies can achieve a style so unique and expansive that they elevate every scene they’re in. It was true of Burt Lancaster 30 or 40 years ago, and it’s true of Jeff Bridges today. Bridges has become his own kind of great American artist—the Westerner who embraces experience and exudes unpretentious, often humorous wisdom. Bridges has been giving lived-in performances from the start, in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and John Huston’s Fat City, Lamont Johnson’s The Last American Hero and John Frankenheimer’s The Iceman Cometh....

The narrator of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a key influence on Noah Baumbach’s blissful mad comedy Mistress America, muses that Holly Golightly is “a lopsided romantic.” Where a realist would study a menu “for its nutritional value,” Holly would be “gluttonous for everything on it.” The same goes for Brooke Cardinas, the muse, heroine, and crackpot in the script Baumbach has written with the woman who plays Brooke, Greta Gerwig....

Operation Finale bears the same name as the mission of Mossad and Shin Bet agents who, in 1960, ambushed Eichmann (played here by Ben Kingsley) in a Buenos Aires suburb and wrested him away from fascist Argentines and émigrés, including his rabidly anti-Semitic son Klaus (Joe Alwyn). The movie attempts to recapture the historical moment when Third Reich atrocities started to fade from public consciousness for multiple reasons: the escalating Cold War and its rehabilitation of Nazi scientists, Israel’s need to firm up and defend its fledgling state, German leaders’ resistance to looking back, concentration-camp survivors’ reluctance to relive past horrors, and their children’s determination to obliterate the “Jewish victim” stereotype....

A gleefully sensual and inventive comedy, Tampopo was an art-house smash in 1987. Director Juzo Itami drew on American noirs and gangster films and Westerns and probably comic books, too, to come up with a quintessentially Japanese lark that blissed out audiences around the world. More than wacky and funny, it’s flavorful. If Itami had managed to revive AromaRama or Smell-o-Vision, or had come up with scratch-and-sniff cards to match the scents of soy, onion and wasabi, the movie might never have stopped running....

Most Western moviegoers think that Abkhazia was where the wizards kept their prison in the Harry Potter saga, but Tangerines, a potent, intimate war movie about this contested pocket of the former Soviet Union, has the emotional force and intelligence to break through apathy and ignorance. A co-production of Georgia and Estonia (and the first Estonian film to be nominated for an Academy Award), it unfolds during unpredictable pitched battles between Georgian soldiers and Abkhaz separatist forces in 1992....

The BFG Roald Dahl’s big idea for The BFG, as he noted in his “Ideas Book” years earlier, was to explore “the man who captured and kept in bottles—Ideas from the brain—Thoughts—Pieces of knowledge—Jokes—I saw them thrashing around furiously in their jars.” But when Dahl finally got down to writing the book, these captive ideas, thoughts, pieces of knowledge, and jokes turned into dreams. The dream catcher became the Big Friendly Giant, the non-cannibalistic runt in a colony of man-eating giants who roam across the globe at night, looking for juicy “human beans....

If you feel like being tickled to death with a high-tech version of a feather duster (and there are worse ways to go these days), The Lego Batman Movie is the film for you. As for me, after 45 minutes my funny bone became insensate. Either that, or the laugh-activation center of my brain fizzed out. It was as if the movie collapsed under the burden of its own weightlessness: the unbearable lightness of plastic being....

Note: Only works exhibited in the Film Society’s upcoming Fassbinder series, spanning his first five years as a filmmaker (1969-74), are discussed here. Hanna Schygulla (b. 1943) is the sole member of Fassbinder’s stock company to achieve international stardom and arguably the foremost actress of the New German Cinema. She met Fassbinder at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio for actors in Munich, beginning her creative partnership with him in 1965 and playing the starring role of Joanna in his first feature, Love Is Colder Than Death (69)....

Frontier of Dawn “Idiotic . . . naïve . . . looks like a perfume commercial.” These were among the comments I heard about Philippe Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn, whose press screening offered a muted variation of the now-legendary Brown Bunny incident of 2003. This didn’t surprise me. Frontier of Dawn was as out of place in Cannes as a factory-sealed Polaroid Swinger on display in a Mac store. Of the above charges, the one that sticks is “naïve....

—Věra Chytilová Compared to the cultured arrogance of other big festivals and their catwalks of polite hypocrisy, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is a quasi-communal affair. Almost everyone and everything is genuinely welcoming, from the Russian-owned thermal town to the festival staff. People can take advantage of a convenient bike rental service to reach out-of-the-way venues, and all screenings and other festival areas are accessible to visitors on wheelchairs....

Yellow Fever Located in Germany’s industrial Ruhr area, Oberhausen has a gritty appeal all its own. The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen has none of the glamour and rigid hierarchy of, say, Cannes; its egalitarian spirit and inclusiveness facilitate exchanges between directors, critics, programmers, professionals, and amateurs alike. Founded in 1954 and now approaching its 60th edition, Oberhausen is one of the oldest festivals specifically dedicated to short films. (In 1962, it was also famously the launching pad for the Oberhausen Manifesto by German filmmakers....