Last night’s 10 pm screening of Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul shook me out of my end-of-the-day fatigue. This is an immediate Palme d’Or contender, I told myself. No day at the beach but one of the most searing and penetrating Holocaust films I’ve ever seen, and that’s obviously saying something. Shot entirely in close-ups (and occasional medium close-ups), this is a Hungarian-made, soul-drilling, boxy-framed art film about a guy with a haunted, obliterated expression who works in an Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp as a Sonderkommando (i.e., prisoners who assisted the Germans in exterminating their fellow inmates in order to buy themselves time). His name is Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig — a slamdunk Best Actor nominee), and the film is basically about this guy foolishly risking his life in order to properly bury a young boy who’s been exterminated — a boy he plainly doesn’t know but whom he claims in his son. I have to catch an 8:30 am Lobster screening but everyone — Variety‘s Justin Chang, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy (with whom I conversed last night by email), Indiewire’s Eric Kohn, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday, Toronto Star‘s Pete Howell — is flipping out about this film, and you can include me.

The harrowing lead performance by Son Saul‘s Geza Rohrig could conceivably win Best Actor by festival’s end.

Late Thursday afternoon elite press and international distributors viewed the Weinstein Co. preview reel that unspools at the Cannes Film Festival every year. During pre-screening remarks honcho Harvey Weinstein indicated that Todd Haynes‘ Carol, the allegedly Brokeback Mountain-like, early-50s-era lesbian heartbreaker starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, may be the company’s hottest Oscar pony. Maybe. He also made a bold declaration about Southpaw star Jake Gyllenhaal being in line for a vigorous Best Actor campaign while lamenting that Jake should have been nominated last January for Nightcrawler. (Which is true — Jake totally deserved a nomination and had generated lots of heat but was edged out all the same.)

(l. to r.) Cannes Film Festival juror Jake Gyllenhaal, star of forthcoming Weinstein Co. release Southpaw; fellow juror Sienna Miller, costar of Weinstein Co’s Adam Jones; and Alicia Vikander, star of Weinstein Co’s Tulip Fever.

Weinstein stated that Southpaw had been selected for screening at Cannes, but it had to be withdrawn from competition after Gyllenhaal was announced as a jury member. Harvey also mentioned that a Southpaw screening will happen soon in Cannes but for buyers and not journalists

After the clip reel Gyllenhaal, Sienna Miller and Alicia Vikander came on stage and delivered some of the old soft sell. Miller is a costar of John Wells‘ Adam Jones (Weinstein Co., 10.2.15). Vikander is, of course, “Ava” in Ex Machina and the star of Justin Chadwick and Tom Stoppard‘s forthcoming Tulip Fever, which the Weinstein Co. has not decided when to release just yet.

Carol looks like a quality package, all right. This may sound weird coming from me but I admired the dated grainy look of it, due to Ed Lachman‘s having shot it in Super 16mm. Old-fashioned film grain is different than digital grainstorms, which are more specific and emphatic.

Earlier today I attended the Palais press conferences for Matteo Garrone‘s Tale of Tales (11 am) and George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road (1 pm). Then I went home and crashed for an hour before beginning to write and post again. The next event is a Steve McQueen racing doc at 5:30 pm, followed by the annual Weinstein Co. preview gathering at the Majestic, which starts around 5:30 and will run until 7 or so. Then it’s a toss-up between Radu Montean‘s One Floor Below or Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul, both showing at 10 pm.

Mad Max: Fury Road star Tom Hardy at close of today’s 1 pm press conference,or sometime around 1:35 pm.

Tale of Tales costar Selma Hayek at close of press conference.

On 9.28.12 Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported that Fox Searchlight was “courting” Natalie Portman to play Jackie Kennedy in a film about the former First Lady’s ordeal in the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination. The project, Jackie, began life as a 2010 script by Noah Oppenheim, which I read and discussed on 4.15.10. Two and a half years later Fox Searchlight is temporarily out but Portman has finally committed to star in the pic under director Pablo Lorrain (No, The Club) with funding from The Wild Bunch, Variety is reporting.

So Portman is now locked into playing the most celebrated First Lady of the 20th Century along with with Supreme Court Justice Ruder Bader Ginsberg. Depending on the breaks, both performances will probably emerge as Oscar-worthy or certainly Oscar-baity.

Jackie was originally going to be directed by Darren Aronofsky with his then-wife Rachel Weisz as Jackie, but that went south when they broke up. Aronofsky will now produce the Portman version with his Protozoa Pictures partner Scott Franklin along with Chile’s Juan de Dios Larrain. Jackie will roll at the end of this year and probably be released by late ’16. Fox Searchlight will probably get back in the game as a distributor and Portman will be campaigned as a Best Actress contender — all pretty much set in stone.

I’ve more or less said it already: George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road (Warner Bros., 5.15) is one of the finest action films ever made — phenomenal, triple-A, pulse-pounding, perfectly performed by a live-wire cast topped by Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, occasionally hilarious and superbly cut, timed, captured and choreographed…a grand slam if there ever was one for this type of thing. And what would that be? Call it an apocalyptic chase thriller with heart and humanity (underneath the rubber and fire and flying bodies it’s about wounded characters rediscovering their compassion and trust). And it’s extra special, I feel, because of the respect and allegiance it shows for women as leaders, fighters, nurturers, survivors. Without taking anything away from Hardy, who brings the legendary Max Rockatansky to life just as winningly as young Mel Gibson did 30-plus years ago, Fury Road is very much a woman’s action film, and all the richer for that.

I saw this epochal film for the second time this morning and was studying Miller’s schemes (visual, structural, thematic) all the more closely this time. It’s just brilliant, dawg — almost too much to fully appreciate in a single setting.

A few weeks ago the deranged Vin Diesel declared that Furious 7 is Best Picture material; Fury Road actually is that. Fury Road so puts Furious 7 to shame that if director James Wan is any kind of man he’ll collapse in sobs after seeing it and do the usual-usual (put on a fishing hat and dark shades, drive out to Palm Springs and register in a nondescript hotel under a fake name for the next three or four weeks). Miller has probably forgotten more than Wan knows about how to make a great action film.

And yet a fair-sized portion of those who worshipped Furious 7 are reportedly hesitant or undecided about seeing Fury Road. You can lead a horse to water…

This is one of the most visually striking action flicks I’ve ever seen. Each and every shot is exquisitely balanced and radiantly artful in a way that Vittorio Storaro will probably appreciate more than most, as Fury Road uses a deliciously robust (some would say intense) color scheme. Many of the all-desert, all-the-time images (particularly the nocturnally-tinted blues) reminded me of Storaro’s work on The Sheltering Sky (’90). The great John Seale definitely earns consideration for a Best Cinematography Oscar. Each and every shot has been painted by a master.

The last time a documentary presented an argument suggesting that Courtney Love was in some way responsible for or a contributor to the 1994 shotgun-suicide death of her then-husband Kurt Cobain was Nick Bromfield‘s less than conclusive Kurt and Courtney, which I saw at Sundance in 1998.  From a producer friend:  “I asked Broomfield at a friend’s party if there was anything he left out of Kurt and Courtney.   He immediately lowered his voice and said, “Yes, something I found out later. Courtney had him cremated and put in a jar which she then put in a small backpack. She wore the backpack everywhere she went for years.”  Wait…Love wore a backpack to parties and premieres?  Producer: “I said ‘she wore him? Why?’  And he said,  ‘Because she finally had him.”

A sizable number of foo-foo Cannes critics have creamed over Matteo Garrone‘s Tale of Tales following Wednesday evening’s 7 pm screening. These responses have struck me as overly obliging, to put it gently. Due respect to Garrone (Gomorrah) and 17th Century Italian author Giambattista Basile, whose “Pentamoronem,” a collection of 50 dream fables published posthumously in 1634 and 1636, inspired many classic fairy-tales we’re all familiar with, but for all its compositional delights and atmospheric richness, Tale of Tales is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing save that Garrone is a highly skilled, grand-vision director.

Yes, I enjoyed the fact that the three tales are adult-angled, which is to say dark, gloopey and completely unrelated to “happily ever after,” and I felt satisfied by their perversity as far as it went, but they don’t lead anywhere or echo anything — they’re just diseased and obsessive and aggressively illogical little sagas about royals who want what they want and then have to pay for their obsessions or blindnesses or over-reachings.

Out of the original 50 they seem to have been chosen by Garrone more for their confounding perversity than anything else. And I’m saying this as a fan of Fellini Satyricon (’69), which at least seemed to be saying something about the libertine culture of the late ’60s whereas Tale of Tales seems to be about nothing more than the fact that Garrone and his team had zilch to say. Except maybe that life is full of pitfalls and trap doors and at the end of the day the odds are that you’ll wind up fucked if you resort to magic to solve your problems.

Gus Van Sant‘s The Sea of Trees, which has been acquired by Roadside Attractions, will debut at the Cannes Film Festival the day after tomorrow — Friday, 5.15. A not-euphoric-minded American guy (Matthew McConaughey) travels to Japan’s Aokigahara forest with the intention of sinking a razor-sharp blade deep into his lower abdomen. Or maybe to hang himself…what do I know? He eventually meets up with a Japanese guy (Ken Watanabe) who’s arrived at the base of Mt. Fujiyama for the same reason. I’ve written this same synopsis seven or eight times now. I’m presuming along with everyone else that Roadside will be giving Trees an award-season release.

Following this morning’s 10 am screening of Emmanuelle Bercot‘s La Tete Haute (which is nothing special — not bad but a bit of a snore), I went home to file and maybe grab an hour’s nap before hitting the 2 pm Cannes jury press conference (i.e., co-chairs Joel and Ethan Coen, Rossy de Palma, Xavier Dolan, Sienna Miller, Sophie Marceau, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rokia Traore and HE’s own Guillermo Del Toro). When I returned to the pad around 12:15 pm I figured I’d get the nap first (I awoke this morning at 3:45 am) and then file. I sank to the bottom of the pond and woke up three and a half hours later. It’s now 6:05 pm and I’m racing to finish this post before catching the 7 pm showing of Matteo Garrone‘s Tale of Tales. [Update: It’s now 6:18 pm.] The best quote of the conference came from Gyllenhaal when he said that each juror had been divided into either the Joel or Ethan team. “We are not allowed to talk about who is in what group,” he said. “[It] was based purely on personality.” Second best quote from GDT: “I feel that we are not the judges. We are here to defend the works we appreciated against other jurors.” I’m presuming that Guillermo is going to be a big fan of Yorgos Lanthimos‘s The Lobster because it’s a kind of surreal Bunuelian social-criticism deal and because it includes transformations from humans into animals…yes! Animals in clothes.

Ethan, Joel Coen during today’s pre-press conference photo call.

(l. to r.) HE’s own Guillermo del Toro, Sophie Marceau, Rokia Traore.

Yesterday morning (or early last evening in Cannes) a Ramin Setoodeh-authored Variety interview with Cate Blanchett came online, and the immediate takeaway was that Blanchett, the star of Todd Haynes‘ lesbian-themed Carol, said she’s had relationships with women “many times.” She didn’t specify if these dalliances happened before or during her marriage to Andrew Upton, but it’s an intriguing confession any way you slice it.

Quote: “When asked if this is her first turn as a lesbian, Blanchett curls her lips into a smile. ‘On film — or in real life?’ she asks coyly. Pressed for details about whether she’s had past relationships with women, she responds, ‘Yes…many times’ but doesn’t elaborate. Like Carol, who never ‘comes out’ as a lesbian, Blanchett doesn’t necessarily rely on labels for sexual orientation. ‘[I’ve] never thought about it,’ she says of how she envisioned the character. ‘I don’t think Carol thought about it.'”

Add to this beliefs about Blanchett’s Carol costar Rooney Mara having known similar intrigues, and you’re talking about a possibly interesting on-screen chemistry.

Not to mention (a) the script of Carol having been written (and re-written and re-written) by “out” playwright Phyllis Nagy, (b) the casting of “out” Carol costars Carrie Brownstein and Sarah Paulson, (c) the film having been produced by the same-oriented Christine Vachon and directed by Todd Haynes, and you have…I don’t know what you have or how good Carol will be or anything. But at least you have a good portion of the creative team coming from a similar place.

No quotes or sourcing, but during last night’s Cannes Film Festival journalist dinner at La Pizza it was sincerely, semi-convincingly asserted that Pete Docter‘s Inside Out (Disney, 6.19) is “almost” Best Picture-level good and an all-but-assured hit. I immediately turn the dial down when I hear something like this because I’m incapable of really loving animation…tough. But I believe the person who passed along the enthusiasm — she really meant it. Two people also discussed Brad Bird‘s Tomorrowland, and one of them gave me one of those looks that said “forget it.” The other wasn’t trying to “defend it,” exactly, but his attitude is/was a little more forgiving or compassionate. So there you have it — Tomorrowland thud, Inside Out ascending.