Ever since “Marie Antoinette” filmmaker Sofia Coppola has seemed to suffer from indolence, and that was the case again with “The Beguiled,” her new film debuting today in Cannes. I could not get into this movie in spite of its bravura visual palette, its many funny moments and primo cast composed of Colin Farrell, Kristen Dunst and Nicole Kidman. It’s three years into the civil war. Farrell plays Corporal McBirney

Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann traveled to North Korea three times in […]

When actress Robin Wright arrived on the set of Kering’s Women in Motion on Thursday, the shadow of Claire Underwood, the wife of the U.S. president in "House of Cards," floated in, too. One has become hardly dissociable from the other, and so it was this role of the powerful woman she invented with David Fincher that drove her for the first time behind a camera. Elegantly dressed in a black suit, she came to the 70th

In “Nelyubov” (“Loveless” in the original Russian) a twelve year-old boy recedes slowly into oblivion as his parents go through a separation, more or less forgetting about his existence. His mother meets a successful company executive and his father’s new girlfriend is already well into her pregnancy, the two preparing to start a new family. After their child disappears, the future divorcés call the police, triggering an inquiry

Young Ben is in want of a father he’s never known, and Rose (young Millicent Simmonds), a deaf child who lives a hundred years earlier than him, is fascinated by a mysterious New York actress (played by Julianne Moore). After Ben discovers something in his mother’s (Michelle Williams) things he takes off for New York City to try and find his father. Rose comes into a hint, found in a newspaper clipping, and takes a boat ride to Manhattan in search of the actress.

Is social media a waste of time, as David Remnick said? Maybe so. But Twitter, Instagram and the rest make keeping up with other people's lives easy and free. Where the Cannes festivalgoer is concerned, a spur-of-the-moment video on Instagram by a filmmaker can potentially add insight into what they're experiencing. At the same time, it's important not to lose touch of the fact that social media is often as vapid as it is useless

"Based on a true story" ("D'après une histoire vraie" in the French original) is the latest film by Roman Polanski, and a late addition to this year's Cannes program. The film was adapted from the namesake novel by author Delphine de Vigan. In it, a writer (played by French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski's real-life wife) living in Paris publishes an autobiographical novel, and it does not go over well with her relatives who now

Will Smith, Jessica Chastain, Maren Ade, Fan Binbing, Park Chan-Wook, Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriel Yared (a French-Lebanese composer known for writing the score for "The English Patient") have just been announced as this year’s jurors at the 2017 Cannes Festival, celebrating seventy years this year. These brave men and women will help jury president Pedro Almodóvar in choosing a winner among this year's

Gentlemen, start your engines!

The filmmakers, their movies, all of these, and more, were announced during a well-attended press conference at a grand movie theater on the Champs Elysées this morning.

Two notable comebacks this year are Fatih Akin, with “Aus Dem Nichts” (“In the Fade”) and John Cameron Mitchell, who was last in

2016 is starting to shape up as the year of the love letter to Hollywood’s Golden Age. We started the year with the Coen Brothers's "Hail Caesar!," a kidnapping comedy set in a fictional fifties studio with million-dollar mermaids, crooning cowboys and blacklisted commie screenwriters. Still to come is Damien Chazelle’s musical "La La Land" with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Stuck in the middle is Woody Allen’s