Okay, I’ve popped for Delta’s onboard wifi…we’re now over the Atlantic (southwest of Keflavik) and the signal is surprisingly strong.

I’m only just starting to monitor ticket-buyer reactions to George Miller’s Furiosa (5.24) and the negatives seem higher than I expected. Many agree with my viewpoint. I called it a visually handsome but unimpressive revenge saga — shallow, overlong — in my 5.16 review.

…are going to upset me, at least to some extent. They always do. I’ll be among the last to read about the winners, as my Nice-to-JFK flight (departing 35 minutes hence) doesn’t land until 5something Manhattan time or 11sonething in Cannes

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)!