“Damian Szifron’s Wild Tales [is] moviegoing heaven presented as a farcical national hell. The nation is Argentina, as seen in a quintet of stories. The first is set on airplane, the last at a wedding. Each has a pungent sense of tone and dramatic irony, and respective peaks of hilarious surprise. It’s O. Henry phoning in a terrorist threat.

“A lot of movies from Argentina are about Argentina. Szifron’s is one of the craziest, most exciting, best acted, and even better made. He’s distilled an aspect of the national character down to ‘vengeful assholes.’ It’s one vicious note he manages to turn into five different moods that gather in writerly force and allegorical chutzpah.

This is going to sound perverse if not outrageous to the Cannes dweebs but here goes. A little while ago I happened to watch the clip below — obviously a smartly-written, efficiently shot, no-big-deal scene in a broadly commercial Hollywood Oscar winner. Familiar to one and all. But I swear to God this one little scene delivers more in the way of complex social undercurrents, authoritative acting and emotional intrigue than the entire import of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Two Days, One Night, which I saw this morning. There’s no comparison. The Sting is a shallow studio confection, agreed, but it’s ten to fifteen times more absorbing than watching Marion Cotillard going from co-worker to co-worker asking for their secret vote, etc.

Sony Classics hosted an elegant press luncheon today (12:30 to 2 pm) for Bennett Miller‘s well-received Foxcatcher at the Carlton Beach restaurant. It got started a little late and a lot of us had to leave around 1:30 pm for the Salle Debussy Lost River screening so there wasn’t much time to really chat with the principals. I spoke with Bennett a little bit; ditto producer Jon Kilik. I didn’t even say hi to costars Steve Carell and Channing Tatum. Thanks to SPC’s Tom Bernard and Michael Barker and their p.r. reps. I wish I could have hung around longer.

During today’s Foxcatcher press luncheon at Carlton beach (l. to r.): Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Daily Mail‘s Baz Bamigboye (standing), director Bennett Miller, Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy.

Rear deck of Carlton beach restaurant — Tuesday, 5.20, 1:10 pm.

Northeast corner of Carlton Hotel — Tuesday, 5.20, 12:15 pm.

Foxcatcher star Channing Tatum at today’s Foxcatcher luncheon.

It turns out that Ryan Gosling‘s Lost River, which ended about 50 minutes ago, is much, much better than I expected — a wide-angle-lensed, visually inventive decrepit dream-fantasia that’s obviously been influenced by Behn Zeitlin‘s Beasts of the Southern Wild as well as David Lynch, Terrence Malick (murmuring voice-overs mixed with impressionistic visuals), John Carpenter‘s Escape From New York and you-tell-me-what-else. The film may not be 100% successful but at least Gosling errs on the side of wild-ass imagination. Some journos hated it (“show-offy,” “pretentious”) and there was a definite mixture of boos and cheers when the closing credits began to roll, but I know a formidable envelope-pusher when I see it. Director-writer-producer Gosling and dp Benoit Debie have really come up with a ruined realm of their own — part Tobacco Road, part urban wasteland, part psychedelia — and a lot of it is very cool to gaze upon and…I don’t know, get lost in. Oh, the meditative muck and sprawl of it all!

Lost River star Iain De Caestecker.

Ryan Gosling during last summer’s filming of Lost River.

Set in some kind of verdant, overgrown, foreclosed-upon urban shithole pockmarked with abandoned homes and rundown buildings (and shot near Detroit), Lost is really out there and a lot of it (okay, most of it) is driven by what could politely be called dream logic. That’s a nice way of saying some of it doesn’t make a lot of basic sense. There are mentions of a collapsed economy and a woman having taken out a home loan that she shouldn’t have so it’s obviously a post-2008 realm. There are predatory creeps roaming around like the feral bad guys in Robocop, and there are little pockets of normality and decency and respect for life and property. There are things that happen every so often without apparent motivation but with films like this you have to roll with the imaginative flow.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Two Days, One Night, which screened early this morning at the Cannes Film Festival, is exactly what I expected — a low-key, no-frills, ploddingly earnest drama about factory workers being asked to make a choice between humanity and expediency after a co-worker (Marion Cotillard) has been told she’s being laid off. It’s a decently made but far-from-inspired film, roughly on the level of the Dardennes’ The Kid With The Bike. Yup, that’s right — the Corleone brothers of the Croisette have hit another line-drive single or ground-rule double. Now watch everybody cream over it.

Trust me — if this film had been made by a no-name journeyman from England or Germany or Russia, it would barely be noticed much less honored with a Cannes competition slot. But it’s that Dardennes legend, you see. That stamp means everything.

Now I don’t even have to see Ryan Gosling’s Lost River. The trailer makes it quite clear that this reputed “fantasy thriller” suffers from the good old “trying too hard” impulse that many first-time-filmmakers succumb to. It may be somewhat influenced by Rubber‘s Quentin Dupieux, but it’s probably going to suck eggs. I’m obliged to see it, of course (Tuesday afternoon, 2 pm, Salle Debussy) but I have a pretty good idea what this is going to be. We all do. Iain de Caestacker plays the sensitive-faced son of Christina Hendricks. The “look at my muscles!” guy is Matt Smith. Also featuring Eva Mendes, Saoirse Ronan, Ben Mendelsohn and Barbara Steele.

Earlier this evening I stood uncomfortably rock-still for a good 30 minutes outside the Salle Bunuel for a 7:30 pm screening of Pablo Fendrik‘s El Ardor, which, by the way, is slow and uninteresting. We had to wait a good 15 or 20 minutes longer than we should have because a screening of Steve James‘ Life Itself, the excellent Roger Ebert doc, ran late. And then instead of the crowd exiting when the doc was over, James and Chaz Ebert (i.e., Roger’s widow) apparently decided to have a nice leisurely q & a inside while a couple of hundred people outside melted and suffered. The air began to lose sufficient oxygen, the body heat was oppressive, and the crowd was getting angry and unruly. “That’s Cannes,” a British journalist told me. “That’s how they do things here. Get used to it.”

Last night TheWrap‘s Steve Pond posted a piece titled “Cannes At The Halfway Point: Where’s The Excitement?” Well, I’ll tell you, Steve. Cannes excitement has definitely been sparked by two films thus far — Damian Szifon‘s Wild Tales and David Cronenberg‘s Map to the Stars. Sharon Waxman, Pond’s boss, filed almost the exact same story during last year’s Cannes festival…”nothing’s really happened yet, where’s the pizazz?,” etc.

Yesterday the N.Y. Post‘s Susan Edelman revealed a list of tacky knick-knacks being sold at the new 9/11 Museum Gift Shop. Included are (a) FDNY, NYPD and Port Authority Police T-shirts and caps, (b) earrings molded from leaves and blossoms of downtown trees, (c) cop and firefighter charms by Pandora and other jewelers; and (d) “United We Stand” blankets. Not to mention 9/11 bracelets, bowls, buttons, mugs, mousepads, magnets, key chains, flags, pins, stuffed animals, toy firetrucks, cellphone cases, tote bags, books and DVDs. “Even FDNY vests for dogs come in all sizes,” Edelman reports. Why don’t they sell photos of dead jumpers while they’re at it? What gets me is that visiting adults have to pay $24 to even get into the store. What’s the difference, I’m wondering, between this and similar items (tasteful scale models of prisoner barracks, little Nazi ashtrays, little toy Doberman Pinschers) being sold in a gift shop at the Dachau and Auschwitz museums?