For 11 days I’d been staying away from restaurant cuisine, confining myself to common-man vittles (sandwiches, fruit, coffee, yogurt, sparkling water, Coke Zero) in HE’s Napoleonic-era crash pad.

And then all my restraint collapsed last night, or more precisely this morning at 12:30 am, following a 10:15 screening of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, which I found phenomenal.

The after-midnight joint was the famous La Pizza, which serves until 2 am or thereabouts. I dove into an oven-hot Marguerite halfer plus a sizable buffalo mozarella & tomato salad. I rarely eat after 9 pm as a rule and certainly no later than 10 pm, and there I was violating this sensible regimen by three and a half hours.

I bought this yesterday…approved.

This morning I finally saw Sean Baker’s Anora, which everyone seems to believe is destined to win the Palme d’Or. I’m onboard with this prediction, and it’ll be doubly satisfying (for me at least) if Baker’s film prevents Jacques Audiard’s audacious but flawed (as in totally unbelievable) trans musical Emilia Perez from snatching the big prize.

I’ve been searching high and low for a Cannes film that would take the strut out of Perez, and now…glory hallelujah!

On top of which Anora isn’t the least bit wokey — no militant trans or gay stuff, no #MeToo currents, no POC or progressive castings, no 2024 Academy mandate inclusions for their own sake and in fact blissfully free of that whole pain-in-the-ass checklist mindset.

Baker’s loud, coarse and emotionally forceful film, mostly set in southern Brooklyn (an area close to Coney Island and Little Odessa) with two side journeys to Las Vegas, is entirely about straight white trash, and yet a certain amount of soul, grace and dignity are allowed to emerge at the very end.

It’s basically a social-conflict, family-values story (written as well as directed by Baker) about money, sex, arrogance, rage, outsider sturm und drang and a truly bountiful blend of incredible bullshit, screaming hostility and straight talk.

The first act is exasperating (mostly vulgar behavior by profligate 20something party animals) but once a certain family gets involved…look out.

The Anora battle is between the cynical, sex-working, Russian-descended titular character (Mikey Madison, who played the hysterical, screechy-voiced Susan Atkins in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) who prefers the colloquial “Ani” vs. a demimonde of vulgar, grotesquely wealthy Russians, principally Mark Eydelshteyn’s Ivan, the wasteful-idiot son of a Russian oligarch, and one or two none-too-bright Armenians.

And yet it ends on a note of honest emotional admission and revelation even. There’s actually a decent dude in this film, played by Yuriy Borisov…a Russian fellow who isn’t a ferociously propulsive wolverine…imagine.

Madison is a revelation — she deserves to win the Best Actress prize. Out of the blue, her career has been high-octaned and then some.

Neon is distributing Anora — easily the strongest film they’ve ever gotten their mitts on.

Friendo on “okay” Emilia Perez: “It feels like AI Almodóvar. It checks 17 boxes, but it’s not moving — you don’t swoon. It’s actually rather conservative when it comes to the trans thing. Ten years from now, it’ll play like a trans minstrel show.”

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Who reunites with an old girlfriend, falls in love again, gets married, parades around and then two years into the renewed relationship decides that it was all an ill-considered impulse thing? Whoops!

We’ve all made the occasional mistake or acted intemperately with romantic partners, but who decides to get married twice (Las Vegas, Savannah) on a half-assed romantic whim…a whim that doesn’t hold up after a year or two? Who does this?

The cliche about love with a certain person being better “the second time around” is apparently untethered to the reality of human experience.

19 days ago I predicted that certain Cannes critics would take issue with Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (which HE is seeing on Monday morning, 5.20, at 8:30 am). The issue, I wrote, would be a complaint that the Native American side of the settler saga hasn’t been explored with enough thoroughness or deference.

From an early Horizon review by Screen Daily ‘s Lee Marshall:

“It’s curious that, almost 35 years on from Dances With Wolves — a revisionist Western that still feels radical in the way it reframed the genre’s moral and narrative point of view to Native American peoples — Costner has turned traditionalist in Horizon.

“That’s in the nature of the well-researched story, co-written by Costner and newcomer Jon Baird, which centers on the enormous challenges facing early settlers in the American West, who were trying to make a life in an untamed land which didn’t belong to them.

“But you choose your stories, and the single, underdeveloped narrative thread that is dedicated to a First Nation community here feels like a corrective, rather than a commitment.”



Kevin Costner’s Campari Lounge sitdown with THR exec editor Scott Feinberg ended about 40 minutes ago. It lasted a good 65 or 70 minutes, and Costner looks so “movie star”, really great — radiant golden-gray hair, magnificent white suit, slender physique, cool black shades, sheepish grin. Plus he had the charm + candor levels turned up to 11.

While the Horizon director-star passed along many inspirational insights and some great stories about Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Robert DeNiro and Burt Lancaster, Feinberg’s meticulous, career-spanning questions appeared to drain Costner’s energy toward the end (“You’re gonna wear these people out”) and his patience was wearing thin (“Fuck, this is taking long!”, although he said so joshingly).

Quote: “Writing is the blood of what we do.” Quote #2: “I like movies the way you guys do…when the curtain opens I want something to happen…and I miss that curtain!” Quote #3: “I need some more money [to shoot parts 3 and 4 of Horizon with]…I really do, although I’ve shot three days’ worth of chapter 3 and when I get back I’ll be shooting another six days.” Quote #4: “When you go see Horizon and when the lights start to dim, go back to being a little girl or a little boy, close your eyes for two or three seconds, and then open them and go for a ride with me.”

We met in the down elevator after it ended. We’d gotten to know each other during the promotion of Mike Binder’s Black and White. Small talk, chit-chat. And it meant something (to me at least) when Kevin gave me a bro back-pat.

Scott Feinberg’s Awards Chatter podcast interview with Horizon maestro Kevin Costner begins in a few minutes so distraction levels are high, but there’s no question whatsoever that Halfdan Ullmann Tondel’s Armand, which I caught earlier this morning, is the finest film here, and I mean way, WAY above the level of Emilia Perez. All hail Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World)!

…at the end of yesterday afternoon’s Salle Debussy screening.

It’s a kind of darkly humorous, oddly grotesque, Bunuelian satire of middle-class misery…an attempt to capture the cold, deathly emptiness of things…the self-loathing, the horrifying banality. It’s basically a surreal elevated horror film…dead-eyed zombies and slithering serpents and empty robots eating food, talking about their fears, manipulating each other, indulging in wife-swapping, diving into empty pools, a husband asking a wife to cut off a finger and serve it as a snack, and then deciding to give it to the cat instead…you get the idea.

There’s a point to all this cold repellent antiseptic shit, and I respect that the humanity-hating Lanthimos had a deeply perverse vision in his head as he put it all together, but unlike Bunuel he hasn’t much chuckle in him, and when a film gets booed, even if only by two or three malcontents, it usually means something.

…of ticket buyers don’t regard “insane” (as in unstable, directionless, subject to whim, blown by the wind) as a cinematic virtue.

Most viewers want filmmakers to show a sense of control, discipline, assurance and command.

One of the most unappetizing “crazy” films ever made was and is Philip Kaufman’s Quills (‘00). I hated Geoffrey Rush’s Marquis de Sade, especially when he began using fecal matter with which to paint on prison walls.

So far the Cannes reviews of Francis Coppola‘s Megalopolis, which screened this morning for elite crickets and late this afternoon for schlubs like myself, have been a mass exercise in “c’mon, give Coppola a break…he’s a visionary who spent $120 million of his own dough…be creative and find ways to offer charitable impressions…this film may be a surreal exercise in whatever, but you do not want to pan it…c’mon, it’s Francis.”

I mean, IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich has given Megalopolis a B-plus grade, for Chrissake. Talk about the delusion of too much compassion. Remember A Clockwork Orange‘s “Cat Lady” sneering at Malcolm McDowell and saying “cut the shit, sonny“?

It’s 12:10 am and I’m really too whipped to tap out a review — I intend to expand and polish tomorrow morning but for the time being allow me to share a few post-screening notes and texts, written in a rather crude fashion.

(a) “Coppola has seemingly lost his mind. Watching Megalopolis just now and listening to random moo-cow boos as the closing credits began to roll was a very sad and sobering experience. It’s not just an embarassment and a calamity — I almost feel like weeping for the poor guy — but a film that hasn’t a prayer of attracting any Average Joes or Janes whatsoever, and you can totally forget any sort of fall awards campaign or any distributor even flirting with paying for same…no way, man!”

(b) “On the other hand…Jesus, I don’t know what to say or think as I don’t want to dump on a film that is so nervy and creatively ludicrous and out-there bonkers. I’m not surprised by how Megalopolis played with the Salle Debussy crowd, and I’m certainly not angry about having sat through it, but holy fucking moley.”

(c) “It’s such a head-in-the-clouds goofball thing with such an overload of pompous-sounding, smarty-pants dialogue that it’s almost like a 1965 philosophical psychedelic fantasy flick by the Merry Pranksters, shot in 16mm and edited by a guy who’d been chewing peyote buttons.”

(d) A friend has compared portions of the dialogue as well as the narration (voiced by Larry Fishburne) to Ed Emshwiller‘s “Unveiling The Mystery Planet.” HE is hereby advising the readership to see Megalopolis while tripping. (Not acid necessarily but maybe some soft mescaline?)

(e) Jon Voight‘s Crassus character, adorned in black silk pajamas, during a third-act comic-detour scene: ““Whadaya think of this boner I’ve got here?”

(f) “All this said, I feel MUCH better about having seen Megalopolis than having seen Fast X or any of the shitty, soul-draining, post-Iron Man franchise movies because at least it’s about something other than the usual corporate bullshit and is at least alive with quirky indivduality, and that ain’t hay.”

(g) Journalist friend to HE five minutes after Megalopolis ended: “What the fuck was that?”