Every critic I’ve read so far loves Damian Szifron‘s Wild Tales — easily the biggest breakout hit thus far of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. I knew it was a home run less than five minutes after it began. It’s safe to say that if you don’t love this film there’s almost certainly something wrong with you. Raves have been posted by Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Hitfix.com‘s Drew McWeeny, The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney, Variety‘s Jay Weissberg, etc.

I was waiting in my Salle Debussy seat for the 7 pm screening of Alice Rohrbacker‘s Le Meravaglie when my iPhone slipped off my lap and through the crack at the the rear of the seat. I realized it was missing a minute or two later and started searching around. I got down and reached around on the floor…nothing. Then I sat down again. I noticed my seat wasn’t collapsing all the way to a sitting position, and — genius engineer that I am — it didn’t occur to me that the missing phone, which was lying inside the seat-hinge mechanism, might be the cause. So like an idiot I flopped down on the seat and in so doing crushed my iPhone to death. I reached into the seat crack and pulled out the damaged remains. Lights off, inoperable, glass cracked, ruined Mophie charger — totally destroyed.

Now the same process that I went through in Germany last year begins again — buy a new iPhone for the maximum price in New York, have my son send it over via Fed Ex for God knows how much money…an instant death-hit of $1200 or more.

Until the new phone arrives I’ll just have to make calls on Skype. A pain but not that much of a problem — just expensive. It would be a howling nightmare if all this had happened, say, five or ten years ago. Synching issues are not the problem they used to be. It’s not that bad. Tonight so far this problem has eaten Le Meravaglie and the 9 pm screening of Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York.

As I hear it, Hilla Medalia’s The Go-Go Boys — a largely sympathetic, warm-hearted documentary about former Cannon honchos Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus — was made to counterbalance the impact of a forthcoming, less-compassionate doc about the Israeli-born moguls from Mark Hartley called Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. I was therefore expecting an overly fawning portrait from Medalia’s doc, which I saw last night, and it does constitute a charitable view. It looks the other way at loads of lively material that could have been used. (Having worked for Cannon as a press kit writer during ’86 and ’87, I know whereof I speak.) But as obliging portrayals go, The Go-Go Boys is a reasonably accurate and fair-minded one. It feels as if it was made by an intelligent member of Golan or Globus’s inner family — intimate, admiring and even faintly critical from time to time.

The problem is that The Go-Go Boys won’t acknowledge the elephant in the Cannon room. The reason Menahem and Yoram made almost nothing but crap is that they loved the action and the chutzpah in their veins (winning awards, making money, signing big names, the crackling excitement of “being there”), but they never really got it. Their affection for movies was enthusiastic but primitive. An under-educated rug-merchant mentality could never really fit into a business that is also, at heart, a kind of religion. The best filmmakers have always operated on a devotional Catholic principle. I believe that Menahem and Yoram were never devoted enough to the faith and traditions of great, soul-stirring cinema. They never really respected the idea of wearing cinematic monk robes.

I’ve decided to once again blow off Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep, which screens today at the Salle du Soixantieme at 2:30 pm. I’ll get to it one of these days or weeks, but the dispiriting reviews (reactions from Hitfix‘s Guy Lodge and Indiewire‘s Jessica Kiang) that came out of yesterday’s debut showing are enough to persuade me to wait and see it down the road. I will always respect and admire Ceylan, but currently other obligations are opportunities are elbowing his latest aside.

My plan for today is to see the much-buzzed-about Wild Tales at 11:45 am, followed by the 2 pm Salle Debussy screening of Ned Benson‘s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, the 6:30 pm showing of the 150-minute-long Saint Laurent (perhaps only an hour or 90 minutes’ worth…we’ll see) and then, finally, Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York at 9 pm, which will be followed at 11 pm by some kind of press schmoozer with Gerard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset.

“Ever wonder about Terrence Malick‘s 30-years-in-the-making Voyage of Time? Well, it seems the film will now emerge at the [2014] Cannes market. Wild Bunch and Berlin-based Sophisticated Films are set to present first images from the feature to festival buyers. They’re saying [the film] will hit theaters in a feature-length version in 2016, with a 40-minute version in the IMAX format.” — 5.13.14 post by Indiewire‘s Beth Hanna.

Early last evening Harvey Weinstein & Co. hosted a Majestic Hotel preview of the Weinstein Co.’s 2014 and ’15 slate. St. Vincent costar Naomi Watts and Woman in Gold star Ryan Reynolds said a few words before the product reel was shown. The films included Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes (which looks really good), Suite Francaise, The Giver, Macbeth, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them (which screens twice on Saturday), Begin Again and the afore-mentioned St. Vincent (a relationship comedy with Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts and Chris O’Dowd, formerly titled St. Vincent de Van Nuys). Also previewed were The Imitation Game, a cuddly CG bear comedy called Paddington and a forthcoming Antoine Fuqua-directs-Jake Gyllenhaal boxing movie called Southpaw.

I was struck by the absence of any florid Shakespearean verse in the footage for the Michael Fassbender-and-Marion Cotillard Macbeth (due in ’15) so I asked Harvey if the film contains any of that. “It’s cut down,” Harvey said. “[The film is] very conducive to mainstream audiences.” So this new Macbeth doesn’t resemble the 1971 Polanski version? “No, no…it’s somewhere in the middle but it’s very understandable,” Harvey replied. So instead of Fassbender saying “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” he’ll just say “tomorrow”? Here’s the mp3 of our brief discussion.

Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army is a soulful humanistic doc about Russian hockey, struggle, destiny, love of country, recent Russian history and the things that matter deep down, which is to say the things that last. In a marginal or tangential sense you could also call Red Army the flip side of Gavin O’Connor‘s Miracle, the 2004 sleeper about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s victory over the Russians at Lake Placid in 1980. In that film Russia’s Olympic hockey team was depicted as a gang of formidable ogres — here they’re revealed as men struggling with loves and longings like anyone else. The central figure is Vyacheslav Fetisov, the Russian hockey superstar who reigned from the mid ’60s to late ’90s, initially as a Russian player and then with the New Jersey Devils and the Detroit Red Wings. His story is the story of Russia from the bad old Soviet days of the ’70s to the present. The film is crisply shot and tightly cut — it moves right along with efficiency and pizazz, and is augmented by Polsky’s dry sense of humor and a general undercurrent of feeling. Cheers to Polsky, Fetisov, producers Werner Herzog and Jerry Weintraub and the two dps — Herzog collaborator Peter Zeitlinger and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko.

Kidnapping thrillers don’t — can’t — get much dumber or cheaply teasing in a foggy smoke-and-mirrors sense than Atom Egoyan‘s Captives (aka The Captive), which screened this morning at the Cannes Film Festival. Intentionally confusing by way of coy misdirection, this is one of those “can you guess what’s really happening here?” melodramas that use time-shift games to throw you off the scent. I only know that Captives, a wildly ineffective stinker with some of the worst over-acting in a film of this type that I’ve ever seen, was making me groan less than five minutes in. Then I began to flinch, throw up my hands, pitch forward in my seat, cover my face with my hands, etc. Then I settled into a state of numb resignation. “Go on, pour it on, poison me,” I told the movie. “Inject your awfulness into my veins.”

It’s only the third day of the Cannes Film Festival, but I’m willing to say at this point that Captives is the winner of the Only God Forgives Cote d’Azur Wipeout Award of 2014. Stab me in the chest with a pencil…please!

Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos (the not-hot-enough wife of Brad Pitt in World War Z) are Canadian working-class parents of ginger-haired Cass (Peyton Kennedy as a child, Alexia Fast as an eight-years-older version), who abruptly disappears from the back seat of Reynolds’ truck as he’s picking up food in a diner. For help the couple turns to Rosario Dawson and Scott Speedman, independent investigators (or possibly legit cops — I wasn’t sure) who specialize in child predators and kidnappers. Most of the action happens eight years after the kidnapping but the movie shifts back and forth in order to keep things fuzzy and inconclusive.