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(2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick 1968) Though he’s still never been invited to present one of his own films at the festival, Christopher Nolan became the center of attention during the first weekend of Cannes this year. On Saturday, his master class in the relatively small Buñuel Theater at the Palais very nearly caused a mob scene, with ticket and passholders scrumming with each other and arm-interlaced guards to access the theater—hundreds were unsuccessful—all for the privilege of witnessing the erudite but not especially gregarious director answer an inordinate number of questions about 2000’s Memento, of all things....

Holy Motors The discussion continues… now with a larger table! Participants: Joumane Chahine, Stefan Grissemann of Profil, Marco Grosoli of La Furia Umana, and Amy Taubin, Gavin Smith, and Scott Foundas of Film Comment. Gavin Smith: This has been one of the least strong editions of Cannes that I’ve attended in a long time, even though there are certainly strong films, as there are every year. Stefan Grissemann: The Carax [Holy Motors] was a very interesting, daring, courageous piece, sprawling in all directions but fresh and unique....

Once upon a time, Nagisa Oshima was a beautiful boy. Beautiful not in countenance, but in the ways he tore Japan—and Japanese filmmaking—apart. In the Sixties and early Seventies, Oshima was one of the most important names in world cinema. Today, he’s remembered mainly as the guy who 25 years ago, made that arty porno film, In the Realm of the something—you know, the one about the chick and the severed dick....

When it comes to Marvel movies that aim for family audiences and contain a female superhero in the title, I vastly prefer the nimble, playful Ant-Man and The Wasp to the confusing, labored Captain Marvel. In the first MCU film to headline a solo female superhero, writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson, Sugar) try too hard to mix empowerment with action poetry while depicting an alien incursion in Los Angeles and an intergalactic war and preparing for Avengers: Endgame....

The main reason Kingsman: The Secret Service leaves you feeling rooked is that it wastes a once-in-an-actor’s-lifetime opportunity. Casting Colin Firth as a lethal gentleman super-spy and stranding him without elegant derring-do is like catching lightning in a bottle, then opening the stopper and letting it flash out. Firth plays Harry Hart, code name Galahad, a member of an independent British secret service that patterns itself on King Arthur’s Round Table....

At the start, ex-sailor, current graduate student, aspiring dramatist, and seasonal lifeguard Mickey Rubin (Justin Timberlake) announces from his lookout chair, “Coney Island, 1950s, the beach, the boardwalk.” In this era it’s a fraying urban dream spot that still attracts New Yorkers starved for a sea breeze, as well as tourists seeking “cheap thrills and great hot dogs.” But the story Rubin and his creator, Woody Allen, actually tell in Wonder Wheel reflects another Gotham fantasy zone: postwar Broadway, where serious playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, and that returning 1930s wunderkind, Clifford Odets, strive to craft first-class catharses and win critical and popular acclaim....

3½ Minutes Awards for “social impact”—U.S. and World, respectively—were given to 3½ Minutes, the tragically sad narrative of another stand-your-ground murder, that of African American teenager Jordan Davis, underlining again the urgency of the #blacklivesmatter protest, and to Pervert Park, an impressively nonjudgmental look at a community in Florida where men and women who have served sentences for sexual crimes can live and work toward some sort of reconciliation. Other new special jury prizes were awarded for “verité,” won by Western, which portrays two unusually friendly towns on the U....

Longing The 55th edition of the Viennale was unmistakably a transitional one. With the passing of the festival’s beloved director Hans Hurch in July, just three months shy of his 20th Viennale, the atmosphere this year was marked by reflection on Hurch’s highly regarded tenure as well as speculation about what might become of this most esteemed and pleasurable of film festivals. Three-quarters of the typically eclectic slate was programmed at the time of Hurch’s death, effectively rendering the 2017 edition both his last at the helm and the first in his absence, a slightly paradoxical superimposition that Derrida might’ve appreciated....

Discussions about film history in the Philippines usually resemble elegies. Due to government neglect and a lack of funding for preservation, thousands of Filipino films have been lost over the years, creating what film scholar Bliss Cua Lim has called an “archival crisis” that places the country’s moving-image heritage at risk. The Kalampag Tracking Agency, a program of experimental shorts curated by Shireen Seno and Merv Espina, moves past the tendency to merely lament the loss of these works....

Sunset, László Nemes Academy Award–winner László Nemes (Son of Saul) returns with an audacious, spellbindingly shot new film about an orphaned young woman searching for her mysterious brother in Budapest at the beginning of the 20th century. Read more: Waste Lands: Sunset and A Fortunate Man by Imogen Sara Smith Interview: László Nemes by Tina Poglajen Film of the Week: Sunset by Jonathan Romney High Flying Bird, Steven Soderbergh During a pro basketball lockout, a sports agent (André Holland) pitches a rookie basketball client on an intriguing and controversial business proposition....

All images from In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2019) Play a game of word association, and the first thing someone is likely to blurt out in response to “English” is “eccentric.” Yet eccentricity is strikingly thin on the ground in British cinema these days, and has been for a long time: experiment, waywardness and what’s often disparagingly termed “artiness” are generally anathema to a cinematic mindset that favors realism and social responsibility above all things....

David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is—as far as its story goes—an old-fashioned horror film with an immensely simple premise. There is this malevolent being, and if you’re unfortunate enough to become Its target, It will come and get you.* Just what It wants with you, and why, is never quite clear. One of Its victims in the film is killed, with a leg bent horribly out of shape, while someone else suffers a fate that’s differently distressing, not only because of what It does, but because of the guise It takes while doing it (you’ll have to see; suffice to say, things get a little oedipal)....

It’s become an article of faith that cinema today has reason to feel bitterly envious of its smarter, more sophisticated relative, television. How can that clumsy throwback, the movie, hope to rival the fleet-footed elegance of long-form TV drama, which enjoys the leisure to develop complexity, subtlety, and multistranded intrigue over weeks or months? There’s little doubt that the best new TV shows have set a steep challenge to the self-contained two-hour fiction film....

Whether or not Pixar films have great stories to tell, whether or not they succeed in wringing childlike tears from the most hardened viewers, the studio can always be relied upon for one thing: it is surely cinema’s most advanced research-and-development unit for aesthetic effects. It’s hard to think of a Pixar production, even among the feebler ones, that doesn’t offer at least one significant breakthrough or refinement in terms of a specific visual challenge: water in Finding Nemo, the organic-metallic sheen of insect wings in A Bug’s Life, fur in Monsters, Inc....

A recent viewing of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, the brand-new feature by the Brothers Quay, reminded me of the very first time I visited the directors’ ­studio in London. As an admirer of their animated work—Street of Crocodiles, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, The Comb, et al.—I was struck rum-giddy by their workspace, crammed as it was with all the miniature sets and puppet stars of their cherished masterpieces, and seemingly everything else these twin directors had ever put into their brains along the way to becoming the sovereigns of such intensely scrimshawed dreamscapes....

Crazy Mama “Jonathan Demme embodies the best and worst of the New World school. His first two films, Caged Heat and Crazy Mama, are by and large self-conscious exercises in camp, with no more substance or conviction than the average episode of Charley’s Angels—the clear products of an overtly sophisticated director contemptuously slumming among lesser genres. But as soon as Demme moved onto the augmented budgets of Fighting Mad and Citizens Band, something clicked....

Over the weekend, news broke that Stanley Donen—master of the golden-age Hollywood musical with the likes of Singin’ in the Rain and On the Town and director of several more outstanding films ranging from Charade to Two for the Road to Bedazzled—had died at 94. His work spanned eras and genres, and he remains a titanic and pivotal figure in Hollywood’s history, for which he was recognized in 1998 with an Honorary Academy Award....

Gitai, Israel’s favorite filmmaking son, wounded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, whose Bauhaus architect father Munrio Weinraub had fled Hitler’s Germany to become a heroic figure as the designer of Haifa’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, went into self-imposed exile. “The turmoil and the hostile reactions were such that I had to leave the country,” he recalled later. The renegade filmmaker, with a PhD in architecture from Berkeley, became not so much a man without a country as a man of several countries....

At Cannes this year, it was hard not to raise an eyebrow at the strangely divergent pair of fates afforded two former Palme d’Or winners. Gus Van Sant, the top prize-winner in 2003 for Elephant, received one of the coveted slots in the main competition for his weepie Sea of Trees, starring Matthew McConaughey as a suicidal physics teacher. For Apichatpong Weerasethakul, however, the historic 2010 Palme for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives seemed to have been treated as an aberration, and his latest, Cemetery of Splendour, was tucked among the self-consciously global smorgasbord of Un Certain Regard....