I’ve decided to once again blow off Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep, which screens today at the Salle du Soixantieme at 2:30 pm. I’ll get to it one of these days or weeks, but the dispiriting reviews (reactions from Hitfix‘s Guy Lodge and Indiewire‘s Jessica Kiang) that came out of yesterday’s debut showing are enough to persuade me to wait and see it down the road. I will always respect and admire Ceylan, but currently other obligations are opportunities are elbowing his latest aside.

My plan for today is to see the much-buzzed-about Wild Tales at 11:45 am, followed by the 2 pm Salle Debussy screening of Ned Benson‘s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, the 6:30 pm showing of the 150-minute-long Saint Laurent (perhaps only an hour or 90 minutes’ worth…we’ll see) and then, finally, Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York at 9 pm, which will be followed at 11 pm by some kind of press schmoozer with Gerard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset.

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“Ever wonder about Terrence Malick‘s 30-years-in-the-making Voyage of Time? Well, it seems the film will now emerge at the [2014] Cannes market. Wild Bunch and Berlin-based Sophisticated Films are set to present first images from the feature to festival buyers. They’re saying [the film] will hit theaters in a feature-length version in 2016, with a 40-minute version in the IMAX format.” — 5.13.14 post by Indiewire‘s Beth Hanna.

Early last evening Harvey Weinstein & Co. hosted a Majestic Hotel preview of the Weinstein Co.’s 2014 and ’15 slate. St. Vincent costar Naomi Watts and Woman in Gold star Ryan Reynolds said a few words before the product reel was shown. The films included Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes (which looks really good), Suite Francaise, The Giver, Macbeth, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them (which screens twice on Saturday), Begin Again and the afore-mentioned St. Vincent (a relationship comedy with Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts and Chris O’Dowd, formerly titled St. Vincent de Van Nuys). Also previewed were The Imitation Game, a cuddly CG bear comedy called Paddington and a forthcoming Antoine Fuqua-directs-Jake Gyllenhaal boxing movie called Southpaw.

I was struck by the absence of any florid Shakespearean verse in the footage for the Michael Fassbender-and-Marion Cotillard Macbeth (due in ’15) so I asked Harvey if the film contains any of that. “It’s cut down,” Harvey said. “[The film is] very conducive to mainstream audiences.” So this new Macbeth doesn’t resemble the 1971 Polanski version? “No, no…it’s somewhere in the middle but it’s very understandable,” Harvey replied. So instead of Fassbender saying “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” he’ll just say “tomorrow”? Here’s the mp3 of our brief discussion.

Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army is a soulful humanistic doc about Russian hockey, struggle, destiny, love of country, recent Russian history and the things that matter deep down, which is to say the things that last. In a marginal or tangential sense you could also call Red Army the flip side of Gavin O’Connor‘s Miracle, the 2004 sleeper about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s victory over the Russians at Lake Placid in 1980. In that film Russia’s Olympic hockey team was depicted as a gang of formidable ogres — here they’re revealed as men struggling with loves and longings like anyone else. The central figure is Vyacheslav Fetisov, the Russian hockey superstar who reigned from the mid ’60s to late ’90s, initially as a Russian player and then with the New Jersey Devils and the Detroit Red Wings. His story is the story of Russia from the bad old Soviet days of the ’70s to the present. The film is crisply shot and tightly cut — it moves right along with efficiency and pizazz, and is augmented by Polsky’s dry sense of humor and a general undercurrent of feeling. Cheers to Polsky, Fetisov, producers Werner Herzog and Jerry Weintraub and the two dps — Herzog collaborator Peter Zeitlinger and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko.

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Kidnapping thrillers don’t — can’t — get much dumber or cheaply teasing in a foggy smoke-and-mirrors sense than Atom Egoyan‘s Captives (aka The Captive), which screened this morning at the Cannes Film Festival. Intentionally confusing by way of coy misdirection, this is one of those “can you guess what’s really happening here?” melodramas that use time-shift games to throw you off the scent. I only know that Captives, a wildly ineffective stinker with some of the worst over-acting in a film of this type that I’ve ever seen, was making me groan less than five minutes in. Then I began to flinch, throw up my hands, pitch forward in my seat, cover my face with my hands, etc. Then I settled into a state of numb resignation. “Go on, pour it on, poison me,” I told the movie. “Inject your awfulness into my veins.”

It’s only the third day of the Cannes Film Festival, but I’m willing to say at this point that Captives is the winner of the Only God Forgives Cote d’Azur Wipeout Award of 2014. Stab me in the chest with a pencil…please!

Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos (the not-hot-enough wife of Brad Pitt in World War Z) are Canadian working-class parents of ginger-haired Cass (Peyton Kennedy as a child, Alexia Fast as an eight-years-older version), who abruptly disappears from the back seat of Reynolds’ truck as he’s picking up food in a diner. For help the couple turns to Rosario Dawson and Scott Speedman, independent investigators (or possibly legit cops — I wasn’t sure) who specialize in child predators and kidnappers. Most of the action happens eight years after the kidnapping but the movie shifts back and forth in order to keep things fuzzy and inconclusive.

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Today Criterion announced an upcoming Bluray of Bob Fosse‘s All That Jazz (’79) on 8.26. It impressed me the first time (the Manhattan press screening was at Cinema 1) but irritated me the second time. Parts are hammy or ham-fisted and not very hip, but it was quite the film of its day. Roy Scheider gave a career-peak performance as Broadway musical director Joe Gideon, whose story was modelled on Fosse’s own in the early ’70s. “Almost every scene is excruciating (and a few are appalling), yet the film stirs an obscene fascination with its rapid, speed-freak cutting and passionate psychological striptease,” wrote critic Dave Kehr. “This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity.” Time‘s then-critic Frank Rich wrote that “as a showman, [Fosse] has no equal. Music, performers, movement, lighting, costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone.”

I’m slated to see four films today (i.e., Friday, 5.16), which will allow for very little time for postings. Atom Egoyan‘s 113-minute The Captive begins the day at 8:30 am inside the Grand Lumiere. I’ll have two and a half hours to file before the 1 pm press screening of Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army (80-something minutes) at the Salle Bazin. (This means skipping the Mr. Turner lunch from 12:45 to 2:30 pm.) At 3 pm comes the mother of long-runnning-time Cannes competition films — Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep at 196 minutes. Then I stay to the end or blow off the last hour to attend a Weinstein Co. preview event at the Majestic starting at 5:30 pm. Then comes the 8pm screening of Hilla Medalia‘s The Go-Go Boys, a doc about Cannon Films’ Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. After which there’s a Red Army premiere after-party starting around 10:30 pm.

All this stuff jammed in today, and they couldn’t program one of these films or events to happen yesterday or particularly the day before, which was all but dead?

Keren Yedaya‘s That Lovely Girl (a.k.a., Loin De Mon Pere or Far From My Father) is a dull, dreary, self-indulgent film about a longterm father-daughter incestuous relationship. The film proves how the mere presentation of shocking or uncomfortable situational subject matter is not enough. You need to deliver a story of some kind, and a resolution that offers some sense of completion and/or just desserts. The monster is Moshe (Tzahi Grad), a 60 year-old father, and the victim is Tami (Maayan Turgeman), his 22 year-old daughter. It’s an acrimonious, highly sexual relationship that’s probably been going on for a decade. Cruel, horrific. All the more so given Tami’s compliance and emotional neediness and self-abuse (over-eating, cutting herself). In basic payoff terms Girl delivers far too little. No tension, no intrigue, no gathering of forces. The film is flat and odious. Sasha Stone hated it so that makes two of us. You can also add the five or six people who walked out of my corner of the Salle Debussy within the first 25 or 30 minutes.

Maayan Turgeman, Tzahi Grad in Keren Yedaya’s That Lovely Girl.

Sasha says That Lovely Girl is as icky and debilitating as Markus Schleinzer‘s Michael, an Austrian film about a child molester that played at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Wrong. Michael “isn’t pleasant to watch,” I wrote, “but it’s brilliant — emotionally suppressed in a correct way that blends with the protagonist, and aesthetically disciplined and close to spellbinding.”