Cannes Film Festival 2018: reviews, news, and analysis

The “human vs. unfeeling homicidal environment” genre is crowded with entries, with man (and sometimes woman) battling nature on boats, in the wilderness, between mountains, on deserted islands, in Amazon jungles, among bears, on the unforgiving American plains, in murderous caves, and countless other locales not designed for human flourishing.

In fact, you could argue that man versus nature is the original genre of realism. One of the oldest examples in English, Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, is widely considered to be the beginning of realistic fiction in literature — and possibly the first English novel, to boot.

Cold War is a gorgeous, unyielding heartbreaker. A romance and a tragedy stretching across decades, it’s rich and allusive, a movie that promises to take its audience seriously and then delivers on that promise.

It also manages to do an end run around the problem with many lesser romances, which crop their timeline down to something manageable, only to tell what feels like just a slice of the story. Cold War grandly takes on the whole arc, from first meeting till the very end. And yet it still manages to feel like an intimate character drama, even as its scope goes much broader.

Midway through Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, mostly set in the 1970s, a white cop explains to the Colorado Springs Police Department’s only black cop that the way to push racist ideologies to the average American who doesn’t consider himself racist is to slip it in beneath other issues, like immigration and crime and affirmative action and tax reform.

Then someday, he continues, Americans will just elect someone who embodies those ideals.

In a move that unnerved a lot of people at the time, the original directors of Solo: A Star Wars Story — Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pair of low-key comic geniuses behind the Jump Street series and The Lego Movie — were punted from the project halfway through production, with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy citing “different creative visions.”

To which one might reply: What exactly did Lucasfilm expect? Wasn’t this the point of hiring Lord and Miller in the first place?

You never forget your first time — seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey, that is. And director Christopher Nolan certainly hasn’t: At a master class on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, Nolan told the assembled crowd that he first saw the film as a 7-year-old, when his father took him to see a rereleased 70mm version of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece at a huge theater in London’s Leicester Square.

“I had the extraordinary experience of being transported in a way that I hadn’t realized was possible. The screen just opened up and I went on this incredible journey,” he said.

The 71st Cannes Film Festival concluded on May 19 with an awards ceremony and the premiere of Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited and possibly cursed film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The festival’s nearly two-week run was filled with protests and pledges regarding the festival’s history of gender inequity and sexual harassment, as well as programming that seemed poised to critique every sort of ideological oppression.

But it was also a celebration of some of the best films and filmmakers working in global cinema today — and for those who were lucky enough to see the offerings, it was a veritable feast. Cannes helps set the pace for the next year of film conversation, including the inevitable awards season prognostication.

Most film festivals aren’t programmed around a theme. But sometimes one emerges anyhow, brought on by some combination of the festival programmers’ interests and what’s going on in the world.

Most of the offscreen buzz (and some of the onscreen buzz) at Cannes in 2018 was about gender equality and women in the industry. The festival was navigating its first year after the brutal industry fallout following allegations against Cannes regular Harvey Weinstein and many other figures who in years past could have been seen around the Croisette. Critics struggled to grapple with yet another Lars von Trier film depicting the brutal torture and murder of women. There was a protest of Cannes’s long history of male-dominated selections and the signing of a pledge for greater transparency around selections in the future.

For decades, it looked like a mere dream, but now it’s reality: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited adaptation (sort of) of Miguel Cervantes’s novel — which turns 403 this year — will premiere at Cannes on May 19, where it will close the festival.

While on-set catastrophes and funding problems have stalled the film for years, its future was recently threatened once again by a legal battle with an aggressive former producer seeking to keep the film from premiering. A French court declared on day two of the Cannes Film Festival that the film could in fact premiere on the final day.

Under the Silver Lake starts out, both in setting and in setup, as a self-conscious homage to noir of the neo and sunshine varieties. It exists somewhere in the space where movies like The Long Goodbye, Rear Window, In a Lonely Place, and half a dozen other films meet, a hazy, grungy world where things just sort of happen and mysteries only get half solved. It’s populated by familiar types lifted from the movies: the mysterious femmes fatales, the free-spirited artists, the topless, eccentric, bird-raising neighbors, the wisecracking friends, and the grizzled, aimless detective type who finds himself always one step behind a plot that turns out to be much wilder than he could have anticipated.

But as soon as the movie establishes these conventions, it slowly and methodically starts eating its own tail. Under the Silver Lake isn’t an homage so much as a remix of classic Hollywood tropes, which positions itself and its contemporary hipster characters less as the continuation of history than the end of it.

It would seem a tad worrying that Wim Wenders’s documentary about Pope Francis had the full participation of the Vatican. Usually “authorized” documentaries about public figures come off as more hagiography than actual examination of the person’s life and legacy.

But in this case, it’s to the film’s advantage. Francis has not been terribly shy about talking with media and appearing on camera, but most of what the average person gets to hear and see about him is filtered through the broader news media or political commentary, or perhaps religiously oriented analysis.

In a groundbreaking move for the film industry, three of the Cannes Film Festival’s most important figures signed a pledge on Monday to improve gender parity at international film festivals.

At a ceremony kicking off a day of programming focused on gender equality, the directors of three important sections at Cannes — Director’s Fortnight artistic director Edouard Waintrop, Critics’ Week artistic director Charles Tesson, and festival director Thierry Frémaux — signed the “Programming Pledge for Parity and Inclusion in Cinema Festivals.”

Last year, the Cannes Film Festival modified the bumper that runs before every film officially selected to play in the festival’s main program. That bumper shows a set of red stairs — meant to emulate the world’s most famous red carpet, outside the Palais des Festivals — ascending through a deep sea and over the horizon to the stars, while tinkly music plays in the background, ending with the festival’s logo.

In 2017, to celebrate its 70th year, the bumper superimposed the last names of directors whose work had been programmed over the past seven decades. The names changed every day, but it was painfully obvious by the second day how few women directors’ names we’d see, something that was remarked upon but not ultimately a focus at last year’s festival.

Kirill Serebrennikov’s punk movie-musical Leto is at Cannes, but its director isn’t. He’s under house arrest after his nonprofit was raided last summer by Russian law enforcement, allegedly because Serebrennikov is under suspicion of masterminding an embezzlement plot that caused harm to the state.

But artists and major Russian cultural figures have said they believe the raid and imprisonment are actually in retaliation for the film and theater director’s candid views on Vladimir Putin, LGBTQ rights, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Serebrennikov is mostly known as a subversive theater director, but his controversial film The Student, which explored indoctrination, also won an award at Cannes in 2016.

The Cannes Film Festival and Netflix are at it again. With less than a month to go before the luminaries start walking the red carpet at the world’s most prestigious film festival, the two entities have renewed a battle that started there last year. And it’s sparked arguments around the world about what really counts as cinema.

But if you find yourself confused about what Cannes and Netflix are arguing over, what it really means, and who’s right, then you’re not alone. It’s a complex, layered fight, one that’s fundamentally about differing cultures and definitions of cinema. And it’s complicated by Netflix chief Ted Sarandos’s statements, which sometimes seem calculated to obscure what’s actually going on.