10 posts categorized "Documentary"

May 19, 2018

CANNES 2018 AWARDS COMPLETE

COMPETITION

SHOPLIFTERS

Palme d’Or: “Shoplifters,” Hirokazu Kore-eda

Grand Prix: BlacKkKlansman,” Spike Lee

Director: Pawel Pawlikowski, “Cold War”

Actor: Marcello Fonte, ”Dogman”

Actress: Samal Yeslyamova, “Ayka”

Jury Prize: Nadine Labaki, “Capernaum”

Screenplay — TIE: Alice Rohrwacher, “Happy as Lazzaro” AND Jafar Panahi, Nader Saeivar, “3 Faces”

Special Palme d’Or: Jean-Luc Godard

OTHER PRIZES

Girls

Camera d’Or: “Girl,” Lukas Dhont

Short Films Palme d’Or: “All These Creatures,” Charles Williams

Short Films Special Mention: “On the Border,” Shujun Wei

Golden Eye Documentary Prize: TBA

Ecumenical Jury Prize: “Capernaum,” Nadine Labaki

Ecumenical Jury Special Mention: “BlacKkKlansman,” Spike Lee

Queer Palm: “Girl,” Lukas Dhont

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Border

Un Certain Regard Award: Ali Abbasi, “Border”

Best Director: Sergei Loznitsa, “Donbass”

Best Performance: Victor Polster, “Girl”

Best Screenplay: Meryem Benm’Barek, “Sofia”

Special Jury Prize: João Salaviza & Renée Nader Messora, “The Dead and the Others”

DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

Climax

Art Cinema Award: “Climax” (Gaspar Noé)

Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Prize: “The Trouble With You” (Pierre Salvadori)

Europa Cinemas Label: “Lucia’s Grace (Gianni Zanasi)

Illy Short Film Award: “Skip Day” (Patrick Bresnan, Ivete Lucas)

CRITICS’ WEEK

Diamantino

Grand Prize: “Diamantino” (Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt)

Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Prize: “Woman at War” (Benedikt Erlingsson)

GAN Foundation Award for Distribution: “Sir”

Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award: Felix Maritaud, “Sauvage.”

Short Film: “Hector Malot – The Last Day Of The Year” (Jacqueline Lentzou)

FIPRESCI

Burning-Lee-Chang-dong

Competition: “Burning,” (Lee Chang-dong)

Un Certain Regard: “Girl,” (Lukas Dhont)

Directors’ Fortnight/Critics’ Week: “One Day” (Zsófa Szilagyi)

CINÉFONDATION

Electric-lion

First Prize: “The Summer of the Electric Lion,” Diego Céspedes

Second Prize — TIE: “Calendar,” Igor Poplauhin AND “The Storms in Our Blood,” Shen Di

Third Prize: “Inanimate,” Lucia Bulgheroni

April 12, 2018

CANNES 2018: FULL LIST OF FILMS

Screen Shot 2018-04-11 at 11.26.22 AM

Official Selection

In Competition
Everybody Knows (dir: Asghar Farhadi) – opening film
At War (dir: Stéphane Brizé)
Dogman (dir: Matteo Garrone)
Le Livre d’Image (dir: Jean-Luc Godard)
Asako I & II (dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
Sorry Angel (dir: Christophe Honoré)
Girls of the Sun (dir: Eva Husson)
Ash Is Purest White (dir: Jia Zhang-Ke)
Shoplifters (dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Capernaum (dir: Nadine Labaki)
Burning (dir: Lee Chang-Dong)
BlacKKKlansman (dir: Spike Lee)
Under the Silver Lake (dir: David Robert Mitchell)
Three Faces (dir: Jafar Panahi)
Cold War (dir: Pawel Pawlikowski)
Lazzaro Felice (dir: Alice Rohrwacher)
Yomeddine (dir: AB Shawky)
Leto (L’Été) (dir: Kirill Serebrennikov)

Un Certain Regard
Angel Face (dir: Vanessa Filho)
Border (dir: Ali Abbasi)
El Angel (dir: Luis Ortega)
Euphoria (dir: Valeria Golino)
Friend (dir: Wanuri Kahiu)
The Gentle Indifference of the World (dir: Adilkhan Yerzhanov)
Girl (dir: Lukas Dhont)
The Harvesters (dir: Etienne Kallos)
In My Room (dir: Ulrich Köhler)
Little Tickles (dir: Andréa Bescond & Eric Métayer)
My Favorite Fabric (dir: Gaya Jiji)
On Your Knees, Guys (Sextape) (dir: Antoine Desrosières)
Sofia (dir: Meyem Benm’Barek)

Out of competition
Solo: A Star Wars Story (dir: Ron Howard)
Le Grand Bain (dir: Gilles Lellouche)
Little Tickles (dir: Andréa Bescond & Eric Métayer)
Long Day’s Journey Into Night (dir: Bi Gan)

Midnight screenings
Arctic (dir: Joe Penna)
The Spy Gone North (dir: Yoon Jong-Bing)

Special screenings
10 Years in Thailand (dir: Aditya Assarat, Wisit Sasanatieng, Chulayarnon Sriphol & Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
The State Against Mandela and the Others (dir: Nicolas Champeaux & Gilles Porte)
O Grande Circo Mistico (dir: Carlo Diegues)
Dead Souls (dir: Wang Bing)
To the Four Winds (dir: Michel Toesca)
La Traversée (dir: Romain Goupil)
Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (dir: Wim Wenders)

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 6 through 19.

January 19, 2018

WORMWOOD

WormwoodErrol Morris’s six-part Netflix documentary series “Wormwood” wears out its welcome by the end of the fourth episode. It’s not that the subject matter isn’t as gripping as it is disturbing — you’ll come away being as fearful of C.I.A. spooks as you are of ISIS — but rather that there is so much repetition and filler that you can’t help being bored long before the long-telegraphed narrative hook comes along in the sixth episode. How many times do you need to see a guy falling out of a window to get the point?

Perhaps Morris was too in tune with his subject to exert his traditionally reliable editorial expertise. “Wormwood” could easily have worked as a two-hour movie, but it simply doesn’t hang together for four-hour’s worth of screentime. As such, “Wormwood” represents Morris’s weakest effort to date.

Wormwood

Nevertheless, the story is compelling. In 1953 Frank Olson, a U.S. Army scientist working on a chemical weapons program (dubbed Artichoke) geared for use in the Korean War, fell, jumped, was pushed or “dropped” from the 13th floor of the Statler Hotel (a.k.a. the Hotel Pennsylvania) in midtown Manhattan. Splat.

Since then, Frank Olson’s son Eric (who was nine-years-old at the time of his father’s suspicious death) has been preoccupied with getting to the bottom of the story behind his father’s bizarre demise, which the C.I.A. attributed to an LSD experiment gone wrong.

Eric Olson proves to be an ideal participant in Morris’s signature fever-pitched procedure for incendiary question-and-answer sessions. Both men speak in confrontational upper register clips that urgently demand no-nonsense answers.

Eric Olson

Morris notably eschews using his go-to Interrotron machine that allows interviewees to speak direct-to-camera (see "The Fog of War"), in favor of a more casual setting of talking across a table in an unadorned room. The only embellishment is a clock that hangs behind Eric Olson’s head, stopped at the exact moment that his father perished on the asphalt of 7th avenue. Another drawback to the series is its dark, drab visual style that has a droning effect. It nearly puts the viewer to sleep.

Morris uses the ever impenetrable Peter Sarsgaard to play the part of Frank Olson in reenactments of events leading up to the wee hours of November 28, 1953 when Olson’s life came to an end. Tim Blake Nelson, Bob Balaban, Molly Parker, and Christian Camargo function well in other supporting roles however unnecessary many of their scenes become by the time the final episode rolls around.

Hamlet

“Wormwood” is a lurid Cold War scenario that shows the U.S. Government at its worst, weaving skullduggery like so much wool at the hands of such real-life goons as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Indeed, this is nightmare-producing stuff. It comes as a relief when Morris intercuts footage from Laurence Olivier’s famous 1948 film version of “Hamlet” to give literary resonance to Eric Olson’s ongoing rabbit-hole existence as a man consumed with the meaning of his father’s death. It's enough to drive a man, or an audience, to drink.

Peter Sarsgaard

Not rated. 241 mins. (B-) (Three stars — out of five / no halves)


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