Due respect to the Fox Searchlight team and their just-announced decision to pay $12 million for Terrence Malick‘s A Hidden Life, but the universal reaction among Cannes-attending journos (or at least the ones I spoke to yesterday) is that Malick’s pastoral, moralistic period drama is looking at an uphill struggle to land a Best Picture nomination, which is presumably Fox Searchlight’s strategy.

The headline of a 5.20 Indiewire story by Anne Thompson proclaimed that “with Fox Searchlight Behind It, A Hidden Life Could Go Far,” adding that “a robust Oscar campaign is forthcoming.”

Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy and Brent Lang reported yesterday that “the reviews have been strong,” but they’ve actually been mixed. What they seem to have meant is “Justin Chang and David Ehrlich adore it.”

A Hidden Life was in fact panned by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy, Time‘s Stephanie Zacharek (who called it “pious“) and A.V. Club’s A.A. Dowd, among others.

Keslassy-Lang: “Malick movies have been box office duds in recent years. He hasn’t had a film that cracked $1 million at the domestic box office since 2011’s The Tree of Life, which Searchlight also released and pushed to a $13.3 million haul.

“Malick tone poems such as Knight of Cups ($566,006), Song to Song ($443,684), and To the Wonder ($587,615) collapsed on the shoals of audience indifference.”

Originally posted six years ago by antdavisonNZ. The only rendering of the Zapruder assassination footage that looks and feels relatively clean and fluid, partly due to motion-smoothing and partly to the Cinerama-like aspect ratio. This enhancement of the original 8mm, 18fps film, originally shot by the late Abraham Zapruder, was interpolated to play back at 30 frames per second; the slow-motion portion has four interpolated frames for each real frame. Optimum viewing in 1080p HD.

From “Push Comes To Shove,” originally posted on 5.15: “Start to finish Les Miserables is rough, riveting, incendiary — written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard. It generally feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a little Do The Right Thing plus a dash of the anxious urban energy of William Freidkin‘s The French Connection.

“But it’s about more than just urban action beats. It’s a racially charged tragedy, injected with sharp social detail and several strong (if somewhat sketchy) characters on both sides of the tale. It’s a bit splotchy and slapdash at times, but is quite the ride. Part policier and part social-canvas suspenser, Les Miserables is basically about conflicted cops (including one bad apple) under pressure vs. a crew of scrappy, rambunctious, vaguely criminal kids in the ‘hood. It takes the side of Montfermeil natives (director Ladj Ly was raised there) but also portrays the cops in reasonably fair and humanistic terms.”

I wouldn’t want my immersion in the Cannes Film Festival to allow for an ignoring of Olivia Wilde‘s Booksmart (Annapurna, 5.24). For what it is (i.e., within the bounds of an edgy teen odyssey), it’s really quite good — as fulfilling and well-honed as a 21st Century high-school farewell thing could reasonably be. Perhaps not quite in the same league as George Lucas‘s American Graffiti but it certainly deserves to be regarded in the same general realm. Two or three days ago a clip containing the first six minutes appeared on YouTube…voila.

Orignally posted on 4.25.19:

The concluding passage in Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review of Ira Sachs’ Frankie: “Isabelle Huppert, drawing on a wit that too many of her roles have buried, makes Frankie a celebrity who is all-seeing, and who regards the illness that’s taking her away too early with a tough-shelled irony that refuses all pity. Huppert, reveling in her aura, doesn’t make a wrong move, but I wish Sachs had allowed her to express a sadness that we didn’t just have to read between the lines.

“There are a few surprises in Frankie, and the movie, in its placid way, wants to deliver a tug of revelation of what life is about. The trouble is, life at the end of this day doesn’t look very much different than it did at the start of the day. Even Eric Rohmer himself might have watched this movie and said, ‘Nice! But is that all?'”

It’s straight-up noon on Tuesday, 5.21 — four hours away from the 4 pm Salle Debussy press screening of Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

Hollywood Elsewhere saw three films yesterday — one great, one a mitigated middle-ranger with a transformative ending, and one shortfaller.

The kickoff was Celine Sciamma‘s Portrait Of A Lady on Fire (Grand Lumiere, 8:30 am) — by my sights as close to perfect as a gently erotic, deeply passionate period drama could be.

The second was Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Young Ahmed (Grand Lumiere, 4 pm), an 84-minute waiting-game movie about a young Islamic psychopath and would-be Jihadist (Idir Ben Addi) planning to murder his female teacher out of blind adherence to Islamic derangement syndrome, but which actually ends rather profoundly. The last couple of minutes are so good, in fact, that I wound up forgiving the first 80 or so.

The final film was Ira Sachs‘ Frankie (Salle Debussy, 10:30 pm), a morose, ploddingly-written, Eric Rohmer-like thing about three middle-aged couples looking at dour futures involving death, separation and loneliness. All the actors (Isabelle Huppert, Marisa Tomei, Brendan Gleeson, Greg Kinnear, Vinette Robinson, Jéremie Renier, Ariyon Bakare, Carloto Cotta) wear out their welcome in record time, and behave as if they’d rather be somewhere else. To me if felt almost entirely unsatisfying — each and every scene struck me as underwhelming if not draining.

The only moment that sparked a strong reaction was a compassionate sex scene between the ailing Huppert, playing the titular lead and a film actress, and her bearded, walrus-like husband, played by Gleeson. On one hand it reminded me of a somewhat similar sex scene in Robert Altman‘s Three Women; on another level it almost made me convulse with discomfort.

Donald Trump‘s “tweets are…I don’t care! I get it. It’s mesmerizing. It’s hard for anyone to look away. Me too. It is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away.” — Pete Buttigieg to Fox News’ Chris Wallace during a 5.19 Fox News Town Hall. “I think if you look at the conduct of this administration and the conduct of this President, there’s no question that it is beyond the pale morally…to put it politely, it is legally questionable too…[Trump] may well have done things that deserve impeachment, but that’s for the Congress to decide.” Buttigieg got a standing ovation, by the way, from the Fox News-watching crowd.

God save us from the lazy, nostalgic plague of Joe Biden.

This Cannes Film Festival prelude has played before each and every film that has shown at this festival since…I don’t know when. I know it’s been playing since I became a Cannes regular 20-odd years ago. I can’t remember if it was playing during my very first visit in ’92.

I know that 85% or 90% of the time somebody will shout out “Raoul!!” when the prelude finishes. Ten years ago Roger Ebert wrote that the “Raoul!!” howl has “survived for 35 years that I know about.” Four years ago Evening Standard critic Derek Malcolm told BFI.org’s Charlie Lyne that it “dates back a good five or six years but not much more than that.”

The fact that Once Upon A Time in Hollywood director-writer Quentin Tarantino is asking Cannes journos and other first-lookers to refrain from spoiling the film after tomorrow’s big premiere tells you plenty. He’s essentially announcing that some “whoa!” plot element is threaded in.

“I love cinema, You love cinema,” Tarantino has posted on Instagram and Twitter. “It’s the journey of discovering a story for the first time. The cast and crew have worked so hard to create something original, and I only ask that everyone avoids revealing anything that would prevent later audiences from experiencing the film in the same way.”

Hollywood Elsewhere hereby pledges to not spoil whatever Tarantino is referring to, but c’mon…he gave half the game away four weeks ago.

In a 5.3 interview with USA Today‘s Brian Truitt, Tarantino described Brad Pitt‘s Cliff Booth character as “an indestructible World War II hero and one of the deadliest guys alive who could kill you with a spoon, a piece of paper, or a business card. Consequently, he is a rather Zen dude who is troubled by very little.”

HE conclusion: “Okay, but how and why would an indestructible killing machine figure into a film that’s allegedly focused on hippy-dippy, head-in-the-clouds, peace-and-love-beads Hollywood? Why bring up killing at all when the 1969 Hollywood milieu was all about getting high and flashing the peace sign and reading passages from the Bhagavad Gita? Exactly — at a crucial moment Cliff will somehow go up against some folks who need to be corrected or otherwise interfered with.”

Third reposting of 1.27.19 Sundance rave: “Triple grade-A doc…the antithesis of a kiss-ass, ‘what a great artist’ tribute, but at the same time a profoundly moving warts-and-all reflection piece…hugely emotional, meditative, BALDLY PAINFULLY NAKEDLY HONEST…God!

“There’s a special spiritual current that seeps out when an old guy admits to each and every failing of his life without the slightest attempt to rationalize or minimize…’I was a shit, I was an ayehole, how is it that I’m still alive?,’ etc. Straight, no chaser.

“It’s about the tough stuff and the hard rain…about addiction and rage and all but destroying your life, and then coming back semi-clean and semi-restored, but without any sentimentality or gooey bullshit.”

Sony Pictures Classics will open David Crosby: Remember My Name on 7.18.19.

First the coffee cup, and now this — a water bottle hiding behind a guy’s leg.

Is Celine Sciamma‘s Portrait Of A Lady on Fire the Barry Lyndon of quietly (but intensely) erotic, layer-by-layer, 18th Century lesbian love stories?

Maybe that’s not quite the right way to describe it (especially given that Sciamma’s film is much more heated and desire-driven than Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 period classic, which is nothing if not dryly ironic, emotionally chilly and 100% asexual) but it’ll do until a better description comes along.

It’s only a period-flavored story of suppressed attraction and the gradual striking of sparks, but it’s about as perfectly done as this sort of thing could possibly be. Especially the coded use of the number 28. Double especially the final shot of Adele Haenel emotionally quaking as she listens to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”

Photo caption: Costars Noemie Merlant, Adele Haenel, director-writer Celine Sciamma at beginning of Portrait of a Lady on Fire press conference, following this morning’s 8:30 am screening.