GIGANTIC NEW THEATER OPENS ITS DOORS AT CANNES

A new, almost completed, IMAX theater, The Cineum, is getting a trial run at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Located about four miles west of the festival nerve center, the block-long, four-story-high structure, which bears comparison with Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles, includes a main theater that offers 514 plush seats facing a 75-foot IMAX screen. It features the new 4K “IMAX with Laser” projection system, which doubles the resolution of most current IMAX rigs and permits greater height ratios. At this year’s festival, the venue is being used mostly for repeat screenings of films, shown a day or two earlier, that lend themselves to big-screen presentation — including Paul Verhoeven’s epic costume drama Benedetta, set in 1625. The screen appeared bright and free of distortion whether displaying grand vistas and battle scenes, intimate close-ups, or horizontal shots of two nuns, the principal protagonists, engaged in lesbian sex. It would have been the ideal venue for the out-of-competition screening of F9, the latest Fast and Furious spectacle, which the festival had reportedly considered presenting as its black-tie opening “tentpole” flick. According to some reports, that plan was shot down by festival functionaries who insisted that their menu be restricted to high-brow cinema “art.” Instead, the movie got its French premiere on Monday, opening night, at the open-air theater on the beach, where attendees and locals can relax in t-shirts and shorts on deckchairs lined up in the sand each night.