In last night’s Killers of the Flower Moon review, I failed to mention the general sense of pleasure and assurance and high-level articulation that you always get from a Martin Scorsese film. There are concerns, yes, about the occasionally plodding pace and the 206-minute length and a lack of sufficient dramatic payoff, but start to finish you know you’re in the hands of a master filmmaker who always works with good people.

Thelma Schoonmaker‘s editing never feels rushed or anxious or slapdash — every cut feels exactly right, barely noticed and smooth as silk. Early on Robbie Robertson‘s musical score ignites with a reverb-y guitar riff that heralds the mixed-blessing discovery of oil on Osage land, and soon after settles into a steady metronomic rhythm that suggests the sound of native drums in the distance. And every frame of Rodrigo Prieto‘s widescreen (2.39:1) cinematography is exquisitely framed and lighted.

The final import of Killers may win you over or not, but it’s always soothing to watch, and the moral undercurrent never dissipates.

It pains me to report that Killers of the Flower Moon-wise, there’s a little bit of trouble in River City. Not a huge amount of trouble, mind. I was moderately and at times actively engrossed and l certainly wasn’t in any kind of pain but…

It holds and occasionally fascinates in a dutiful, believable, step-by-step fashion, and it certainly radiates profound moral lament and heartache for the many Osage victims, but overall it doesn’t quite get there.

It’s basically a bit more than two hours of scheming and murder and fiendish plotting between Robert De Niro’s “King Hale” and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, and a bit less than 90 minutes of Jesse Plemons and his FBI team arriving in Oklahoma and getting to the bottom of it all — but at the end of the day Killers doesn’t really generate enough juice.

Killers is certainly watchable in a steady, methodical way, but it never really builds up a head of steam. Authentic period atmosphere (early to mid 1920s) and beautifully shot. It certainly feels real and lived in, but also lacking a certain fire in the belly quality — a bit too measured and matter of fact and low-flamey.

It’s a good film but it feels too quiet and subdued and even…no, I won’t say mezzo-mezzo. It holds your interest and never bores. But it never really excites either.

All I can say is thank God for Plemons and the G-Men, whose arrival kicks up the dramatic tension and delivers a certain limited gusto.

Cheers for sad-eyed Lily Gladstone (it’s definitely her movie — Native American actress wins acting Oscar!!) and a superbly suffering DiCaprio as the yokelish, none-too-bright, puffy-faced Burkhart — but the film is slowish and drawn-out and kinda plodding at times…obviously dialogue-driven but altogether rather quiet and far from any definition of incendiary. It never really combusts.

Was the 206-minute length really necessary? And was the massive budget really justified? Minus the stars and the enormous budget and visual sprawl it could have been a modest four-episode HBO movie that would earn respect…at least that. But with few jumping and shouting for joy.

Ilya Povolotsky’s Grace, a haunting, Wim Wenders-like father-daughter road film set in Russia’s outlying regions, is a Director’s Fortnight selection. Reviews will pop later tonight or tomorrow.

Last night HE enjoyed a friendly sit-down with Povolotsky and producer Victoria Chernukha. Povolotsky, a Cannes first-timer, knows this adrift and rootless turf, and commendably sticks to his stylistic guns. We bonded over his admiration for Black Flies.

Three films today — Simba Masaku‘s Hound at 1:30 pm, Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower at 4:30 pm, and finally (11 pm) Todd Haynes‘ May December, about an actress (Natalie Portman) who visits the Maine home of a woman (Julianne Moore) she’ll be portraying in a film.

Cannes weather was warm and delightful when I arrived last Tuesday, but since then it’s been mostly unpleasant — cool temps and constant dampness except inside theatres.

The press screening happens Saturday afternoon at 4:30 pm (7:30 am in Los Angeles), and will break sometime around 8 pm, give or take.

Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest is an ice-pick art film about evil with a capital E — a riveting, unmistakably horrifying portrait of the home life of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of the infamous Auschwitz prison camp during World War II, and his wife Hedwig (Toni Erdmann‘s Sandra Hüller).

Rudolf, Hedwig and the kids reside in a large, handsome home just outside the gates of the camp, and mostly we’re just shown the day-to-day of meals, housekeeping, horseback riding, idle chatting with friends, casual infidelities and whatnot.

Glazer’s basic strategy is to allow subtle allusions, hints and insinuations of the Auschwitz horror to seep into this atmosphere of domesticity. Toward the end are two or three scenes of Rudolf meeting with military colleagues about a planned, ramped-up extermination of Hungarian Jews, but Glazer keeps it all curt and officious, saying to us “can you sense it…can you feel it?”

The vibe is ghastly and revolting, of course. The moral delivery feels like…I don’t know, gas filling your lungs or poison spreading through your veins. Little plop-plops of horror like Alka Seltzer tablets.

The film is basically one static tableau after another. The Hoss family taking a swim, the children playing on the grounds, Rudolf professing love for his favorite horse in the stable, Rudolf and Hedwig indulging themselves with lovers on the side, etc.

The Zone of Interest begins with a spooky overture (the composer is Mica Levi) against a black screen, and to be completely honest it was this overture that put the hook in more than anything else.

Because the movie that follows has no story — it is simply about exposing Rudolf and Hedwig’s aloofness and apartness — cruelty, denial, an absence of basic humanity. Here be monsters.

The second best sequence comes at the very end, a series of flash-forward, present-day images of what I presume is the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and then Glazer dovetailing back to 1942 as Rudolf is seemingly struck by a vision of what the future will bring, and (perhaps) who and what he is.

It all “works” but man, this film is dry as a bone. Like a frigid, long-buried fossil. Dry-ice steam filling the air.

The Cannes mob, of course, is praising it to the heavens because of the toxic moral current and Glazer’s arthouse strategy. Cannes critics can’t be iffy about such a film — they have to jump up and down lest they seem indifferent or unmoved by what Zone is presenting and how it all sinks in.

It’s a film that certainly sticks to your ribs (I can feel it kicking around inside as I write this), but I have to say that I found it too spare, too artified and rigidly schematic to a fault.

As I watched I was asking myself what is this movie saying that wasn’t in Steven Spielberg‘s Schindler’s List or Loring Mandel‘s Conspiracy (’01), a made-for-TV drama that delved into the psychology behind the 1942 Wannsee Conference, which is where “the final solution of the Jewish question” was ratified and officially put into motion.

The answer, as noted, is that The Zone of Interest has been shorn of explicitness while humming with implication. That’s the basic idea, and either this approach knocks you flat or it doesn’t.

I was simultaneously chilled to the bone while muttering to myself “I wish this film had something more because as penetrating as Glazer’s strategy is, it’s like early haute cuisine…big plate, exquisite food but very small portions.”

The film is based upon Martin Amis’s same-titled 2014 novel. It’s about a Nazi officer named Angelus Thomsen who falls into lust for the wife of the Auschwitz camp commandant, named Paul Doll. The only basic element that the book and the film have in common is the Auschwitz setting.

I’m certainly not dismissing Glazer’s film, but if he’d gone with the Amis story he might have been able to kill two birds with a single stone.

Dancing on a balcony on rue d’Antibes, roughly ten minutes after the 6:30 pm Zone of Interest screening let out. A sizable crowd stood and stared and took videos.

…is next on the dance card. Slated to begin showing at the Salle Debussy at 6 pm, and of course we’re still lined up outside at 6:12 pm. It would be nice if festival staffers would make at least some attempt to screen films at the scheduled time. We’re all on a clock, trying to squeeze in meetings, feedings and as many films as possible, etc.

Not a huge fan of Glazer’s Under The Skin. For me only Sexy Beast, 22 and 1/2 years old, hits it out of the park..

…if the weather would ease up on the damn moisture already. Enough is enough.

I’d frankly forgotten that the Brady Bunch star passed in late ’16 at age 82 or thereabouts. We all have to go sometime, but condolences all the same.

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies (Open Road), a pounding, brutally realistic New York City action drama about living-on-the-ragged-edge paramedics.

It beats the shit out of you, this film, but in a way that you can’t help but admire. It’s a tough sit but a very high-quality one. The traumatized soul of lower-depths Brooklyn and the sad, ferociously angry residents who’ve been badly damaged in ways I’d rather not describe has never felt more in-your-face.

In terms of assaultive realism and gritty authenticity Black Flies matches any classic ’70s or ’80s New York City film you could mention…The French Connection, Serpico, Prince of the City, Q & A, Good Time, Across 110th Street.

And what an acting triumph for Sean Penn, who plays the caring but worn-down and throughly haunted Gene Rutkovsky, a veteran paramedic who bonds with and brings along Tye Sheridan‘s Ollie Cross, a shaken-up Colorado native who lives in a shitty Chinatown studio and is trying to get into medical school.

Rutkovsky is a great hardboiled character, and Penn has certainly taken the bull by the horns and delivered his finest performance since his Oscar-winning turns in Mystic River (’03) and Milk (’08).

And Sheridan is also damn good in this, his best film ever. His character eats more trauma and anxiety and suffers more spiritual discomfort than any rookie paramedic deserves, and you can absolutely feel everything that’s churning around inside the poor guy.

At first I thought this 120-minute film would be Bringing Out The Dead, Part 2, but Black Flies, which moves like an express A train and feels more like 90 minutes, struck me as harder and punchier than that 1999 Martin Scorsese film, which I didn’t like all that much after catching it 23 and 1/2 years ago and which I’ve never rewatched.

Yes, it’s one nerve-wracking traumatic event after another, and so it feels like a forced deck at times. And yes, it dive-bombs into a kind of too-sudden happy ending during the last 10 or 15. But this is one alive-on-the-planet-earth urban thriller that grips and holds and doesn’t let you go.

It’s obviously more of a guy film and certainly not for couples (I noticed at least four or five women journos bailing within the first 30 or 40 — an older woman sitting next to me walked out only about 20 minutes in), but by any brutal big-city standard it’s a wowser.

The excellent, go-for-broke supporting performances from Michael Pitt, Katherine Waterston, Mike Tyson and Raquel Nave are nothing to snort at either.

Based on Shannon Burke’s 2008 novel (\based upon Burke’s real-life experience as a paramedic) and written by Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown, Black Flies is totally balls to the wall.