The first truly exciting film of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival screened this afternoon — Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables. Set in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, a poor but tightly knit Muslim community, it offers a jolting contemporary echo of the cruelty, harassment and oppression that ignited Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, this time rooted in police brutality and racial animus.

Start to finish Les Miserables is rough, riveting, incendiary — written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard. It generally feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a Little Do The Right Thing plus a dash of the anxious urban energy of William Freidkin‘s The French Connection.

But it’s about more than just urban action beats. It’s a racially charged tragedy, injected with sharp social detail and several strong (if somewhat sketchy) characters on both sides of the tale. It’s a bit splotchy and slapdash at times, but is quite the ride.

Part policier and part social-canvas suspenser, Les Miserables is basically about conflicted cops (including one bad apple) under pressure vs. a crew of scrappy, rambunctious, vaguely criminal kids in the ‘hood. It takes the side of Montfermeil natives (Ly was raised there) but also portrays the cops in reasonably fair and humanistic terms.

Closing motto: “There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”

The story is about a mischievous Muslim kid named Issa (Issa Perica) who gets himself into hot water by stealing a lion cub from a small local circus. The circus guys angrily threaten some Montfermeil community leaders (not the suit-wearing kind), and soon after the film’s three plainclothes protagonists — the racist and brutish Chris (Alexis Manenti), a casually brusque but decent-hearted Montfermeil native named Gwada (Djibril Zonga) and Stephane (Damien Bonnard), a new transfer with a curtly liberal, mildly compassionate approach to police work — are on the hunt.

They eventually chase down and capture Issa, but then comes the triggering incident: an agitated Gwada fires a flashbang (a non-lethal stun grenade) into the kid’s face. Luckily Issa recovers, but Chris and Gwada go into panic mode when they quickly realize that the incident has been captured by a drone-mounted video camera. Despite Stephane’s objections, the priority becomes finding and destroying the visual evidence.

Things get increasingly hairy and desperate, ultimately leading to a climax…okay, I’ve said enough.

I won’t reveal the finish but it reminded me of the last two or three minutes of Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation. I for one found it satisfying.

The news about Focus Features having bought international rights to Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, which will screen in the Directors’ Fortnight section on Sunday, obviously ups interest levels. Which means that getting into either of the two Lighthouse screenings (8:45 am and 8:30 pm) will require extra determination and stamina.

Elite press badges cut no ice at Directors Fortnight screenings. Everyone is on an equal footing, so you just have to line up outside the J.W. Marriott and hope you’ve arrived early enough. Gaspar Noe‘s Climax was the hottest Directors Fortnight attraction last year, and it took me two tries before I got in.

The Lighthouse solution, I’ve decided, will require a 6 am Sunday wake-up and arriving at the Marriott by 7 or 7:15 am. I recently urged an industry friend, who’s intrigued by The Lighthouse having been shot on 35mm black-and-white celluloid, to join me at that hour. I explained that the 8:45 am offers the only realistic shot because access to the 8:30 pm screening will be a huge time-eater. Awaking at dawn is simply a matter of will.

Dry, droll and deadpan are what you always get with Jim Jarmusch (and that’s fine with me), but The Dead Don’t Die, a small-town zombie comedy, is too slow, passive, resigned, lethargic and self-referential. It kind of works during the first half, but gradually spaces itself out.

Die‘s central problem is that it’s about watching a zombie apocalypse rather than somehow dealing with it.

Strange as this sounds, none of the characters actually try to survive. Well, they do but half-heartedly. It’s a hipster goof-off riff, but if you want to get serious and divine a social-political message, the film is basically saying “we’re going so wrong now and are more or less fucked at this point so why even fight it?”

Jarmusch occasionally flirts with the thematic thrust of George Romero‘s Dawn of the Dead (passive, brain-dead consumers are real-life zombies) and takes shots at the spreading Trump cancer, but he doesn’t really engage. Well, he does but in the manner of an aging, despairing, heavy-lidded type.

The Dead Don’t Die is baroquely amusing here and there, but the mood of laid-back nihilism and a general “submission to the plague” mentality is too persistent. Around the two-thirds mark the lack of any semblance of narrative energy starts to work against itself.

Horror fans are going to stay away in droves, Joe Popcorn is going to say “where’s the movie?” and Jarmusch devotees are going to feel under-nourished.

Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny play cops in an upper New York State town called Centerville, and all they really do is watch and comment, watch and comment, watch and comment.

Tilda Swinton plays the only truly cool character — an eccentric small-town samurai mortician.

Tom Waits plays a kind of Greek chorus character named Hermit Bob — a woods-dwelling hobo who provides despairing commentary now and then, especially toward the end. Steve Buscemi, RZA, Danny Glover and Caleb Landry Jones are typical Jarmusch-styled eccentrics (a snarly Trump fanatic with a dog named Rumsfeld, a wisdom-dispensing UPS delivery man, a kindly townie, and a gas-station owner with an encyclopedic knowledge of film and comic books, respectively).

I’m sorry to be panning. I’m a huge fan of Only Lovers Left Alive (which I only saw once but has gotten better and better the more I’ve thought about it) and Paterson. I had the feeling during tonight’s screening that Jarmusch wrote the script too quickly and hadn’t really thought things through. But the main problem is that his story and direction are just as lethargic as his characters.

Daniel Craig pulled a Tom Cruise last week in Jamaica, injuring his ankle during a running scene and consequently throwing the shoot of Bond 25 (aka Shatterhand) out of whack.

What was your first thought after hearing of this? Right — you wondered how old Craig is (51) and if that might have been a slight factor. The answer is “it might well have been.” Craig is squarely middle-aged and not even within flirting distance of being “old”. But you do wither slightly at that age. Running, fighting and leaping-wise, the optimum window is between your late teens and mid to late 40s. After that an actor is probably better off playing “M” or “Q.”

Genes, luck and discipline are always key factors in shooting action scenes, but one or more of these probably failed Craig, who’s been injured three or four times before while Bonding. Biology, man. You can run but you can’t hide.

After the fall Craig “was in quite a lot of pain and was complaining about his ankle,” according to a source who spoke to The Independent‘s George Simpson. “As you’d expect he was also pretty angry that it had happened. He threw his suit jacket on the ground in sheer frustration.”

Craig: “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! I’ve done this kind of action scene dozens of times before. What the hell happened?”

Sean Connery was 52 or so when he shot in last Bond film, Never Say Never Again (’83). Pierce Brosnan was the same age when he hung up his Bond spurs in ’05. Roger Moore was 57 or 58 when he did his final Bond, A View to a Kill (’85). They were all pushing it. They all tasted a bit of luck.

HE says the ideal Bond actor should be in his early 30s (the rugged-looking Connery was 32 when he made Dr. No) to late ’40s, depending on the breaks. After that it starts (I say “starts”) to become a game of roulette mixed with careful choreographic planning.

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The La Pizza guys honored HE’s reservation, but they somehow got the idea that 40 guests were expected. “That was a mistake, possibly on my part,” I explained, half expecting to get my knuckles rapped. “I’d like to predict but people do what they want…I mean, the guests could be as few as 20 or 25.”

The waiters were counting on a much bigger bill and tip, you see, so they were a teeny bit miffed. I must have said “I’m sorry” three or four times, but the La Pizza guys were giving me side-eyes left and right.

I explained that Toronto Star critic Peter Howell was on deadline, a plane carrying Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson was late, N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Kyle Buchanan was downstairs and not into the upstairs crowd and Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman had opted to join his colleagues (including editor Claudia Elller) three or four tables down from ours. And Variety‘s Steven Gaydos was inexplicably MIA. And no sign of Deadline‘s Pete Hammond.

Plus there’s a kind of Hatfields-vs.-McCoys separatism between wokester critics and the not-so-woke, I told the waiters. It’s not the one-for-all, all-for-one crowd it used to be. A lot of prickly pears out there.

But things eventually worked out. Our banquet-sized table filled up, everyone ate and drank and the mood turned joyful and even boisterous. Raucous applause broke out when Thompson arrived; more cheers when Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich dropped by.

The bill ended up at 359 euros. Film at Lincoln Center exec director Lesli Klainberg generously picked up half the tab…that’s the American spirit!

Top group photo (l. to r.): Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, Claudia Eller, Asian bureau chief Patrick Frater, Brent Lang. Fourth pic from the top (l. to r.): World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, Film at Lincoln Center’s Lesli Klainberg, Miami Film Festival’s Carl Spence, Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Apple guy Matt Dentler, John Von Thaden from Magnolia Pictures and director (Show Me What You Got) & dp Svetlana Cvetko.

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