• CANNES, France - On Sunday morning a new film slayed the rest of the competition. “Loving,” starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga and directed by Jeff Nichols, moved past festival favorites “American Honey” and “Toni Erdmann” to get to the number one place. Richard and Mildred Loving (Edgerton and Negga) are an interracial couple living in Virginia in the late sixties.

  • CANNES, France - “American Honey,” which I consider to be the best film out of this still-young Cannes Festival, played here last night. The Andrea Arnold-directed road movie stars newcomer Sasha Lane and Shia Labeouf and Riley Keough (Elvis’s granddaughter) and follows a crew of twentysomethings from all over the country (from Texas to Nebraska) who circle the mid-west selling

  • I liked "Money Monster," thought I'd that off the top. If that seems like an unusual or lame or unusually lame way to start a film review, that's fine. I wanted to state it firmly. Because there are things in the Jodie Foster-George Clooney political thriller that just made the rounds of the ongoing Cannes Festival that should go wrong. To start with, "Money Monster" quickly violates two of my dearest “signs that you’re watching

  • CANNES, France - A year ago luxury-brand conglomerate Kering became one of the Cannes Festival's official sponsors. Ever since then the talks “Women in Motion” which they fund have been the rendez-vous point for discussing, arguing and articulating the women in film platform. Kering, through its appreciable position has been able to bring some of the industry’s most eminent representatives, from the fields

  • CANNES, France -- Are you familiar with the Raoul Effect? Probably not, because it's a phenomenon that's known only to those people who've been to the Cannes Festival and watched films tendered in the official selection.

    Someone, it's unclear who, screams "raoul" at the beginning of the daily 7pm screening in the Debussy theater. No one knows why. It's unclear who the author of the scream is, or

  • CANNES, France - Like Woody Allen Ken Loach is a Cannes-minted director, a filmmaker whose films premiere in Cannes almost exclusively. Unlike Allen, however, Loach creates consequential human dramas. In a Loach film, society’s ills play a character, Loach often training his camera on society’s invisible links, the poor, the disabled, the unemployed, people who, under the pressure of necessity, may

  • Book author Léo (Damien Bonnard), is conducting research on wolves in the Lozère region of Southern France. It’s hill country, where grassy plateaus are dotted by the occasional rock formation and sheep farms, just like the one Leo encounters on his path, complete the landscape. Leo meets a shepherd by the name of Marie (India Hair). Nine months later, their baby is born. What could possibly go wrong with such a quaint pastoral tableau?

  • The Cannes Festival opened today with the best possible film it could open with: the buoyant and lighthearted “Cafe Society,” directed by Woody Allen. I walked out of this morning’s screening with my spirits raised. But, then became quickly hungry for lunch. In Allen’s perfectly-told, jaunty tale a young man, played by Jesse Eisenberg, moves to L.A. from New York to find work. He meets the boss’s secretary and falls in love with her

  • As the first lady of cinema gets dressed and ready for her close-up, a brief look at the lineup seems appropriate just before I board my train to Cannes. The selection of the 69th Cannes Festival, which opens tomorrow, is the strongest one in years. Paul Verhoeven's "Elle," starring Isabelle Huppert, holds the promise, for better or worse, of vanquishing the extremes of sadism and survivalism. France's Bruno Dumont

  • A little more than twenty years after the death of Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's now-deceased former prime minister, a new documentary coming out today attempts to give him a voice, to let him speak, and describe, the events that shaped both his personal life and that of his country. As “Rabin in his own words” shows Rabin, that most formidable of statesmen, started out working on a farm, like the country's first settlers in the