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NO FRONTRUNNER AT CANNES, CRITICS SAY

May 21, 2010 by · 3 Comments 

The Cannes Film Festival is going into its final hours without a clear frontrunner for its top Palme d’Or prize, which will be presented on Sunday. British director Mike Leigh’s Another Year has received the most positive reviews, but few of them can be described as fervent. Indeed, a host of international journalists are complaining about what they have judged to be, with few exceptions, an overall bland, often depressing, and slow-moving collection of features at this year’s festival. Two actors, they indicate, are the leading candidates for the male acting award — Javier Bardem for Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s Biutiful, and Lesley Manville for Leigh’s Another Year. Doug Liman’s Fair Game, the only U.S. film included in the competition, received solid reviews, but most critics agree that it broke no new ground, cinematically or politically. (On comment boxes connected to U.S. reports about the movie, conservatives are already denouncing it as liberal fabrication, pointing out in particular that reviews suggest that it avoids reference to the 2006 confession of former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that he was the source who “inadvertently” revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in 2003. The film stars Naomi Watts as Plame Wilson and Sean Penn as her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.)

             

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  • filmex

    Only Lew Irwin would know, much less feel the need to share, what is being said by wingnuts in comments sections regarding the Plame film. But, then again, as the man who has spent years trying to turn NeoCon Kyle Smith into a “name reviewer” (without effect), one guesses this is to be expected.

    Can hardly wait for Smith’s “hilarious” review of “Roy & Joe”, the rather melancholy tale of Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy, starring journeymen journalists Kyle Smith and Lew Irwin.

  • admin

    Has politics in America become so toxic that a review about a completely apolitical satire must be judged on the basis of the reviewer’s political sentiments? I have mentioned Smith’s conservatism when that was relevant to the movie he was writing about. But “MacGruber?” Smith is often a funny and entertaining critic — regardless of his politics. As for trying to turn him into a “name critic,” the quotation marks are yours, not mine. We merely cite the national newspaper critics and those in the top markets in our weekly review summaries.