Tommy Lee Jones made his Cannes directorial debut in 2005 with "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" and was awarded best screenplay for it (Guillermo Arriaga was scribe) and the best actor nod. It's taken him nine years to turn out his new opus "The Homesman," as director. After Faulkner, he's adapted a novel by Glendon Swarthout and revisits the Western genre. The resulting film, a moral and social fable from a different era, is excellent

“La Chambre Bleue” (“The Blue Room” in the original French), the extremely-talented actor Mathieu Amalric’s directorial debut, screened on Friday. Based on a slim 1955 novel by police procedural author Georges Simenon, it relates, or rather reveals, its story in a tortuously piecemeal fashion. In the course of an interrogation, we are introduced to Julien (Amalric), his mistress (Stéphanie Cléau) and his wife (Léa Drucker). What has transpired between them and the reasons for Julien’s interrogation gradually come into focus. Shot using the academy ratio of 1:33 (also used in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,”

(CONTAINS SPOILER ALERTS) Atom Egoyan’s to-catch-a-child-abductor caper “The Captive” was the third competition entry to arrive here. The motif of young ones in distress amid snow-clogged landscapes will no doubt bring to mind the director’s harrowing “The Sweet Hereafter,” which was a big prizewinner here in 1997. Sadly “Captive” does not come close to “Hereafter” in emotional force and restraint. Instead it brings to

It would be difficult to write a review of this year's Nuri Bilge Ceylan Cannes film in the space we normally intend for this type of article in Screen Comment. Our reviews are usually about 350 words and this word count just would not do it justice (plus, there's always another movie to go watch during Cannes). Instead, I'll give some impressions of it, by far my favorite one in this 67th edition of

Walter Salles is hosting this year's Cinemas du Monde series (see the full story here) We caught up with him just before the Cannes Festival to ask him a few questions: If one of the filmmakers in this year’s lineup were to ask you for a piece of your personal wisdom concerning their career as filmmaker, what would you tell them? Only do a film if the story that you've elected is absolutely essential to you. Define “cinema” in one brief sentence.Cinema is an extraordinary instrument to unveil the world we live in, to better understand "the other", and ultimately, who we are. Is the democratization of filmmaking (thanks to the availability of equipment, etc) necessarily a good thing? Yes, in the sense that digital technology offers the possibility for a larger number of young filmmakers

There’s a scene in Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante’s film « Heli » in which a young woman returns home to find a pool of blood across the floor of her home and a family that’s vanished. The camera is set low to knee-height and shows her from behind as she enters, and then slowly withdraws out of the room upon making the gruesome discovery, the camera leading the way as she walks backwards to eventually lean against a wall and slowly

“Cosmopolis,” the new film by David Cronenberg, is a bit anemic but as movie-events in Cannes go, it’s the bee’s knees. There’s a high-wattage star like Robert Pattinson in it, it is directed by David Cronenberg and it was adapted from a novel that is as relevant to our times as it is a stinging indictment of them. Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a multi-billionaire and yen trader who decides to to get a haircut. Except, his preferred barber-shop is

It’s official, Cannes’ jack-in-the-box title by France’s Leos Carax "Holy Motors" has found a distributor. Indomina, which produces the “Cabin Fever” series, has bought the rights; no theatrical date as of this writing. This was one of the most anticipated film at Cannes this year and one of the top three films preferred by the press. Here's the official press release: Cannes, France (May 27, 2012) --- It was announced today that The Indomina

Rallying behind an insurgency borne out of the Arab Spring and emboldened by the fall of Muammar Kaddafi, helping to install a democratic government, those were the missions of French author and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy’s (B.H.L.) as he traveled between France and Libya last year cameras in tow. As revealed in “The Oath of Tobruk” (a co-directed project shot entirely with Canon's EOS 5D camera) B.H.L.’s involvement

The winners have been announced and this 65th edition of the Cannes Festival is officially over. Slim pickins for the U.S., with the American Benh Zeitlin winning the only prize in the Official Selection, the Camera D'Or (for feature films being presented at Cannes for the first time). Let's hope for a stronger showing next year in Cannes. One of the surprises of the evening included the "A separation" actress Leila Hatami coming up on