"The Search," which screened for the press yesterday morning is a two-and-a-half hour-long war drama set in war-torn Chechnya in 1999. In this new film by "The Artist" director Michel Hazanavicius we follow four different people as they contend with the vagaries of war, the main one being about a woman who's separated from her brother after a bombing attack and goes on the search of the title. The director’s wife Bérénice Bejo plays

My knowledge of Greek cinema is imperfect, I admit--but am I alone? Greek cinema has historically suffered from a lack of promotional support abroad, which leaves moviegoers with scant information about the Greek canon. I remember watching Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Dogtooth” in Cannes a few years ago and feeling unnerved but also strangely delighted. Lanthimos took risks by putting characters that that were not likable in a situation so unusual

Two years ago with “Cosmopolis,” and now with “Maps to the stars” Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has been boosting his Hollywood cred with the appropriation of Robert Pattinson as his muse. Is this going to last much longer? While I waited to get into the Debussy theater for the film's 7:30pm screening a journalist told me, ironically, “they’ll shoot another third movie together and that one will be

The city. A couple in their late teens living in broken homes and attempting to get by in a Spain that's choking under the weight of austerity measures. From the very beginning of "Beautiful youth" ("Hermosa Juventud" in the original Spanish title) clues in the way of dialogues and confrontations are provided pointing to the bitterly difficult situation that this young couple, and so many others of their generation, are

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

Good, marketable cinema usually comes from the same continents over and over again. Countries in those continents have support structures that ensure that out of the lot some film school graduates are going to become great filmmakers. The reverse of this seems to be true, too. People desirous of becoming filmmakers but who have the misfortune of being born in countries such as Laos, Nigeria or North Korea and who have