myTest

And the second I arrived, I froze. I’d forgotten how deeply awful those places can be. A guy was singing “New York, New York”, Sinatra-style, and I was thinking about trying to kill myself. Okay, I wouldn’t actually, sincerely try to commmit suicide over the existence of a karaoke bar, but the thought certainly flashed…

Barnaby Thompson‘s Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean, assessed by Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and posted this morning (5.22): “From the outset, David Lean was using movies to express who he was. We associate [his films] with the word ‘epic’ (the opposite of ‘intimate’). But Maverick spins on the counterintuitive reality of what a personal…

Aired last night or in the early morning in Cannes, I’ve only managed to watch this. The crowd joining McCartney (whose voice is more than half-gone), Costello, Colbert and the gang on-stage…perfect.

A friend caught Lukas Dhont‘s Coward a few days ago, speaks very highly of it. The press line will begin forming outside the Salle Debussy around 9:30 pm or so. There’s an 8 pm Salle Bunuel screening of Roger Corman‘s Machine-Gun Kelly (’58) at 8 pm. I might drop and watch it for 75 minutes…

When the right actor has lucked into exactly the right role, a role that not only fits like a glove but serves as a kind of spiritual-emotional springboard that instantly ups the actor’s game, you can sense it within a couple of minutes. There was never the slightest question that Rami Malek‘s crackling, pocket-drop performance…

A last–minute HE choice, Emmanuel Marre’s Notre Salut (A Man of His Time) begins screening at 3 pm. I was told it’s a must-see, that buyers are circling, etc. 6 pm update: My source gave me a bum steer. The flatness of this French-produced WWII film is almost surreal. For me, Notre Salut — a…

I became a devotional admirer of Russian director Andrej Zvyagintsev after seeing the blistering, anti-Putin Leviathan (’14) in Cannes. I didn’t like 2017’s Loveless quite as much, but it’s obviously a scalding, no-bullshit, grade-A reflection of a certain poisoned layer of affluent Russian society. Four years later Andrej was pulverized by a Covid infection and…

Last evening (Tuesday, 5.19) I saw Pedro Almodovar‘s Bitter Christmas in the Salle Bazin, and in the immediate wake of the moaning man incident, I was saying to myself “this new Pedro movie is obviously thin gruel, but at least it’s not the cinematic equivalent of a 60ish frizzy-haired guy dying in his theatre seat.”…

Transcript of HE’s question to Fjord director-writer Cristian Mungiu [starts at 18:25]: Supplemental thought: The persecution that happens in Fjord is why Trump got elected in ’24.