Cannes Film Festival handicappers have been asking which film in the line-up, if any, will be this year’s Anora…a bracingly honest, non-downish diversion of sorts…a film that might emotionally touch bottom and actually pay off.
I know nothing but my gut is telling me that Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, which will screen late on Wednesday, 5.21, and twice more the following day…I’m going out on a limb by predicting that this comedy-drama costarring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, Inga Lilleaas and Cory Michael Smith might be the shit…I really like and admire Trier and this feels like the right movie at the right moment.
Friendo: “Trier is good. And I think this is his time, his year…you can feel it.”
A Cannes regular is picking up good buzz about Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling, a German-made Competition film about “four generations of women connected by a farm in the Altmark region.” I’ll see it on Wednesday, 5.14.
Friendo #2: “Sound of Falling has no reason to be in Competition unless it’s actually good. It’s from a second-time, basically unknown German director and no big stars in the cast, so there’s no reason for the Cannes team to program it unless it’s an actual discovery.”
I’m also being told to expect a little something extra from Scarlett Johansson‘s Eleanor the Great, which stars June Squibb. The script by Tory Kamen (daughter of Mark Kamen, who penned Taken and Karate Kid) is kind of like an eldercare American Fiction by way of Alexander Payne.
“It basically revolves around June’s Eleanor Morgenstein appropriating the life story of a late friend who was a Holocaust survivor. Eleanor shares this after accidentally stumbling into a support group for Holocaust survivors and family of survivors. It’s this little white lie that she tells that snowballs and snowballs into this bigger thing, and soon she’s at a loss to stop it because it creates this whole kind of celebrity status for her in her new social circle at the retirement home, and she ends up befriending this college student who wants to write a paper on her, etc.”
The source says if (I say “if”) the movie delivers on the promise of the script, it’s a total award-season role for Squibb. And yet a friend who’s seen it says “meh.”
The other hotties are Ari Aster‘s Eddington, Lynne Ramsay‘s Die My Love, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent, Sebastian Lelio‘s The Wave, Harris Dickinson‘s Urchin, Kristen Stewart‘s The Chronology of Water, Christian Petzold‘s Miroits No. 3, Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague, Raoul Peck‘s Orwell, Jafar Panahi‘s A Simple Accident, Oliver Hermanus‘s The History of Sound (12 — 15 counting the top three).
What am I forgetting or unfairly dismissing?
I’m very wary about seeing Splitsville.
HE letter sent to friends this morning:
“I’m not sensing that we’re about to experience a weak Cannes, per se, but that the ‘25 edition may be a bit of an underwhelmer. Who knows? The real goodies, as usual, will show up in the early fall. Apart from the Trier and the Aster and the Jennifer Lawrence going crazy and I’m forgetting what else, have you been hearing any semi-encouraging buzz about anything? Anything at all?”
Friendo #3: “Every May there’s always a gem or two, but Cannes is mostly a bunch of unimportant films that people like Justin Chang and Guy Lodge, doing two weeks’ worth of cartwheels, insist are world-changing works of art.”
Yesterday morning I read a 5.7.24 Richard Brody appreciation of the late N.Y. Times film critic Andrew Sennwald, who served as the paper of record’s senior film authority between 9.18.34 and 1.12.36.
Hired by the Times as a reporter at age 23, Sennwald soon became a top-tier, unusually perceptive examiner of the art and hoopla of film, Brody writes. Sennwald was an ardent admirer of director Josef von Sternberg, for one thing.
I’ve since read a few of Sennwald’s reviews. He wrote confidently and well, and certainly knew the realm.
It’s a shame that this highly respected guy died at age 28 and suddenly at that, and possibly by his own hand despite reportedly being in excellent health, not to mention in the professional prime of his life.
Weird as it sounds, Sennwald died of gas-stove poisoning, apparently or at least possibly a suicide.
On top of which the gas, which Sennwald, being dead, was unable turn off, exploded and wrecked his penthouse apartment at 670 West End Avenue, and not just the penthouse but the top three floors of the 17-story building. Investigators found Sennwald in his pajamas, on the floor of his kitchen.
Was this an accident? Why in heaven would a young man who’d quickly vaulted to a highly eminent position in his chosen field (it doesn’t get much better than being a top critic at the Times), a guy who lived in a fairly swanky abode and presumably had everything to live for…why would he off himself on a Saturday around midnight, and in his pajamas yet?
If I intended to do myself in, I would do so in my finest apparel — silk shirt, knotted tie, spit-shined shoes.
Sennwald’s last review focused on Rene Clair‘s The Ghost Goes West. Sennwald was succeeded at the Times by Frank Nugent.
Sennwald’s marriage to journalist Yvonne Beaudry, whom he met while going for his journalism degree at Columbia University, had apparently gone south. Sennwald’s Wiki page describes her as an ex-wife, although they were reportedly on cordial terms. Beaudry was out on the town when he died.
Sennwald may have been suffering from a serious eye ailment called Uveitis, but there’s not much info on this. He was also an insomniac.
While reporting that Sennwald’s death was seemingly a “suicide”, Brody otherwise focuses entirely on his film criticism. I respect his decision to ignore the curious circumstances that attended Sennwald’s passing, but that’s still one hell of an ignore.
It’s not like Sennwald swallowed some pills and slipped away quietly while slumping on a bench in Central Park. His death triggered a violent spectacle and a major neighborhood trauma — collapsed walls, fellow residents evacuated, a busted water main…bluh-DOOM!!
Brody could have just as easily have written about the Skull Island life of King Kong (wrestling an occasional T-Rex, killing Teradactyls, roaring a lot) and then blown off what happened on his final day of life in midtown Manhattan.
Not to mention the fact (I’ve made this point but indulge me) that a top N.Y. Times critic would never kill himself inside his West End Ave. penthouse at a fairly young age…does this make any sense to anyone at all?
A film critic hypothetically pulls the plug when (a) he/she can’t find decent employment, (b) is past his/her prime (65 or older) and (c) is barely making ends meet in a grubby flat in the East Village.
Reported by The Brooklyn Eagle on 1.13.36:
The Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost, now known worldwide as Pope Leo XIV, seems like a mild-mannered devotional…sensible, practical, political-minded…a facilitator type…perhaps a Ralph Fiennes-y type of guy. What do I actually know? He doesn’t strike me as a fire-and-brimstone type. He has a face that says “okay, I get it, we be cool.” Willing to forgive.
