Search Results for: personal shopper

In order of preference, the finest films I saw at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival are as follows: Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (the questionable ending is a slight thorn, but it obviously didn’t bother me that much), Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Salesman, David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water, Andrea Arnold‘s pagan-ish Wild Honey, … Read more

Emad, a 30something Tehran school teacher (Shahab Hosseini), is playing Willy Loman in a stage production of Arthur Miller‘s Death of a Salesman, and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) is playing Linda, Willy’s wife. An intriguing endeavor but the play, we soon learn, isn’t central to their story. Forced by structural problems to vacate their … Read more

I stayed at the Hotel Moliere during my first visit to the Cannes Film Festival in ’92. Thanks to Henri Behar for the $100-a-night sublet. If I was a Cannes jury member I would strongly urge giving a major prize to Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper if only to convey a “fuck you” to the Philistines … Read more

After some hemming & hawing I decided to blow off the 7pm Salle Debussy press screening of Nicholas Winding-Refn’s Neon Demon in order to catch a 6pm Director’s Fortnight showing of Laura Poitras’ Risk, a long-gestating portrait of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. I’ll catch the follow-up screening of Demon at 10 pm. HE Cannes headquarters … Read more

I was momentarily disappointed with something Personal Shopper director Olivier Assayas said yesterday during yesterday afternoon’s press conference. Shopper seriously entertains the possibility that Stewart’s character, Maureen, is being visited by the ghost of her dead brother, Lewis. All kinds of apparitions (visually based upon old photographs of ghosts taken in the early 20th and … Read more

I have to leave for the Salle Bunuel for the 10:30 pm One-Eyed Jacks screening but first I have to at least post my tweets about Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, which broke around 40 minutes ago. The mostly Paris-based ghost story starring Kristen Stewart as (I know this sounds strange) a combination personal shopper and … Read more

The opening weekend of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival looks a teeny bit soft, and yet the first two nights (Wednesday, 5.11 and Thursday, 5.12) seem to promise some degree of intrigue. How can you go all that wrong with Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society, Jodie Foster‘s non-competitive Money Monster (which, by the way, a friend … Read more

I didn’t stay up until 3 am to file my reactions to the announcement of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival slate because (a) I was presuming that no wowser surprises would be included (this has turned out to be correct) and (b) there’s an apparent downside factor attached to…well, a good percentage of the films … Read more

Cheers and salutations to The Playlist‘s Jessica Kiang and Oliver Lyttleton for having posted the most comprehensive list of 2016 films that I’ve seen anywhere. I’ve been updating my own 2016 rundown (the most recent re-edit appeared on 12.30) so I’ve isolated 31 of Kiang and Lyttleton’s titles that I’ve previously ignored. Several are intriguing; … Read more

The feedback is so bad that Kristen Stewart and IndieWire interviewer Anne Thompson have to avoid speaking directly into their microphones. Stewart consequently sounds so faint and echo-y that I can’t really hear her…okay, I can hear the occasional phrase or expression. She doesn’t always speak in short, hurried, half-muttered phrases, but she often does. … Read more