Sketch script at the 75th edition of Festival de Cannes INT. CANNES PALAIS de FESTIVAL - CONFERENCE DE PRESSE The scene opens as Three Thousnad Years of Longing director George Miller sits at the centre of his ensemble of cast, between Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, respectively flagged either side by Augusta Gore and Douglas Mitchell. Miller's presence commands silence as questions are fielded amongst the crowd of media journalists, longing for genius to dawn on their commentary...

I opened my weekend with a bold and experimental visual experience provided by none other than Wes Anderson. "The French Dispatch" may have been met with inconsistent critical reviews during itss festival run, but don't let that fool you. The film is a 1 hour and 48 minute indulgence of everything we've come to love about Wes Anderson's cinematic style. From shifting color grades that go from color to black and white at the flick of a switch, to the classic Wes Anderson a...

" Friendship's Death (UK 1987) was part of the Cannes Classic series directed by Peter Wollen and produced by the BFI.  It stars Tilda Swinton as an alien named "Friendship" who was on hand to introduce the film and sad she hadn't seen it on a big screen since 1986 and "can't wait". Everytime she has seen it since then , Swinton conveyed that it feels "so modern and so fresh" even though there are "anachronisms in it like finding a sushi ...

Avengers, Endgame: Thanostradamus As star casts go, Avengers: Endgame runs up a mind-boggling score. Like in theatrical performances, where all characters come on to the stage after the performance to take a bow, Endgame brings them all on screen, even resurrecting the dead, in a show of ultimate strength, before their nemesis is vanquished. Just as it takes two lives to conquer the dark force, the dark force itself needs to be conquered not once but twice. It is ingenious writing, to lay out...

(Tilda Swinton, Tom Burke, Honor Swinton Burke, Joanna Hogg, © Lindsay Bellinger 2019)   By LINDSAY R. BELLINGER   The press conference for Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir, a wonderfully nostalgic look at the life of Julie (Honor Swinton Burke), a young female film student in early 80s England, was quite revealing. It seems that Hogg and Tilda Swinton have been friends since childhood, so they were very excited to work with one another on this semi-autobiographical look ...

(James Mackay and Annie Symons, © Lindsay Bellinger 2019)   By LINDSAY R. BELLINGER   The Garden, Derek Jarman's visual narrative film from 1990, starring Tilda Swinton as the Madonna, returned to the Delphi Filmpalast where it had its glorious German premiere at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival. This time it was a restored copy of Jarman's film about the biblical garden where his version of the Passion of Christ blends lighter moments, even with some...

Isle of Dogs, Review: No bow-wows only wow-wows Dog lovers of the world, unite, stop motion—you have everything to keep but your dogs to lose! Imagine a scenario where all the dogs in a city are captured and dropped-off on a deserted island by cable cars, because of a dog flu epidemic. The story is set in Japan, in the dystopian near-future, and a lot of the dialogue and captions/sub-titles are in Nihongo…er…Japanese. But the appeal is universal, both to dog lovers and pet...

Siraj Syed reviews Doctor Strange: Surgery and sorcery go hand in hand Comics can be victims of overkill, especially when they traverse the distance from page to screen. Casting might be (mis)guided by name and fame, when suitability is of greater import. Marvel’s Doctor Strange, with part Disney talent and full distribution channels in tow, is ridden with both pitfalls. It’s a marvel then that the film manages to serve above par, enjoyable fare, for which credit largely goes to t...

MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, V Long festivals and so many films to watch, besides the regular weekly releases to see and review—not unexpectedly, festival diaries go into several parts, and even get interrupted by another festival that follows on the heels of the earlier one. MFF17 was followed by IFFI. But there still so much to day about MFF, so here’s one more instalment of the Diary. Thithi is a two-hour long Kannada film set in rural Karnataka. It has earned rave rev...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent When Michael Keaton “was frozen” in a scene for the newly released Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, according to Edward Norton, who appeared with him at an AFI conversation on 11/8, “you could see he was having trouble.” “I mean, I don’t know if this story is apocryphal,” Norton offered, “but there’s this story I heard (from a director), that when Greta ...

  by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent   It has been 75 years since Gone With the Wind (1939) groundbreaker Hattie McDaniel won her Best Supporting Actor, but she remains the gold standard of character actors. That said, with Walter Brennan (1894-1974) and late great J. T. Walsh gone since 1998, here's a roster of the top dozen current heavyweight character actors.  But wait, there's more... Disqualified for semi-leading player potential are: John Hawkes ...

Only Lovers Left Alive By Moira Sullivan. Cannes Luncheon Cannes Luncheon ©Moira Sullivan Toward the end of the festival, when the press was anxious to leave for home and needed an injection of new sites and hospitality, the mayor of Cannes, Bernard Brochand, took the opportunity to invite over 100 journalists to a luncheon in the old quarters of Cannes – Le Suquet. The official jury also attended the lunch and press had the opportunity of photographing this high p...

The jury declares that this year’s competition presents a broad range of films whose central aim consists in exploring ways to further the interpretation and understanding of important topics of our time. Therefore the jury has decided to award prizes to those efforts which achieve a balance between the political statement and the poetic form. Golden Bear for the Best Film  La teta asustada (The Milk Of Sorrow) by Claudia Llosa Silver Bear - The Jury Grand Prix  A...

The International Jury, presided over by Tilda Swinton,(Burn After Reading, Julia... ), will decide who is to take home the Golden Bear and the Silver Bears and the Alfred Bauer Prize in the Competition of the Berlinale 2009. The other members of the Jury are Spanish director Isabel Coixet, director Gaston Kaboré (Burkina Faso), Swedish best-selling author Henning Mankell, director Christoph Schlingensief (Germany), director Wayne Wang (USA) and food activist and author Alice ...

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