Thea White, an actor best known for voicing the sweet-natured Scotswoman Muriel Bagge on Cartoon Network’s "Courage the Cowardly Dog," died on July 30. She was 81.
15.07.2021 - 15:37 / theplaylist.net
In “A Hero” (“Ghahreman”), Asghar Farhadi blurs the line of innocence and guilt in a fraught drama about the true weight of a good deed. During a two-day reprieve from prison, Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) and his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) discover a handbag full of golden coins.
Thea White, an actor best known for voicing the sweet-natured Scotswoman Muriel Bagge on Cartoon Network’s "Courage the Cowardly Dog," died on July 30. She was 81.
Director Vincent Maël Cardona uses western Europe in the early-1980s as the canvas upon which he paints his layered and achingly genuine portrait of young love, familial bondage, artistic aspiration, and universal chaos. Unburdened by a firm connection to any one genre or narrative archetype, “Magnetic Beats” tells a simple story with a full arsenal of source music, thoughtful set design, and crisp acting at all levels to pull off this love letter to a particular moment in time.
It’s a good thing you can’t catch a virus from an image because if you could, just a few frames of Kirill Serebrennikov‘s fabulously yeasty, bilious, dank Competition title, “Petrov’s Flu” would bring all of Cannes‘ anti-Covid measures to naught.
Tatiana Huezo’s eye for lyrical truth has materialized in documentaries like “Tempestad” or “The Tinniest Place,” works that penetrate some of the most tenebrous corners in recent Latin American history with shimmering compassion. Her stance as an acute observer of the people that survive and persevere through tumultuous sociopolitical and economically disadvantaged contexts produces thought-provoking filmic meditations.
The Robert Bresson quote that opens the anthology film “Year of the Everlasting Storm” — “you don’t create by adding, but by taking away” — makes a tidy adage of the time-honored idea that deprivation breeds innovation.
When teenaged environmental activist Greta Thunberg made her now-famous speech at the UN Headquarters in 2019, she was met with equal parts admiration and derision, likely an unfavorable imbalance toward the latter. For every A-list celebrity who reposted a clip on their Instagram story, adorned with enthusiastic heart emojis, surely another handful of Internet trolls lurked in the comments and left discouraging messages.
The rise in popularity of true crime stories has seen the line between genuine investigation and lurid exploitation become increasingly blurred. With every new Netflix docu-series, podcast episode, and beach-read paperback, content creators are having to go further afield to dig up some crime forgotten to history to recast in a light that often appears oriented for entertainment first, with any richer insights an inadvertent byproduct.
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi is no stranger to success at the Cannes Film Festival. While the three films of his that have premiered at Cannes haven’t won the coveted Palme d’Or, two have won other prizes at the festival.
It would be disingenuous not to begin this review by mentioning that, yes, Panah Panahi is indeed related to the titan of Iranian cinema, Jafar Panahi.
What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops.
Asghar Farhadi is back in Cannes Competition this year with his latest movie A Hero, the story of a young man who is in prison because of a debt he is unable to pay. Today, the director told press that he was looking to “improve something in the world” with his filmmaking
We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having.
“Where are you really from?” It’s an invasive question that’s awfully familiar to people of color, one that intrudes its way into our everyday lives. Though it can have innocent intentions, it’s often hostile and only works to invalidate our livelihood.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn movies like “A Separation,” “The Past,” and “The Salesman,” the Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi has demonstrated a unique ability to take “ordinary” human situations, usually on the domestic front, and play them out in a way that is so minutely authentic yet suspenseful that they give you the sensation that life itself, if observed closely enough, is a kind of thriller.
Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentAsghar Farhadi, an Oscar winner for “A Separation” and “The Salesman,” is in Cannes with “A Hero,” the Iranian auteur’s fourth film to world premiere in the festival’s competition after “The Past,” “The Salesman” and Spanish-language “Everybody Knows.”“A Hero,” which sees Farhadi returning to filmmaking in Iran, is about a man named Rahim who is in prison because of an unpaid debt.
Premiering in competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Nanni Moretti’s wild melodrama “Three Floors” is based on a 2017 Israeli novel called “Shalosh Qomot” from writer Eshkol Nevo and begins with an undeniably tragic event. One dark night on a quiet street of Rome, a drunk driver runs over a lady crossing the road, narrowly avoids hitting a pregnant woman, then finally crashes into a building, landing straight into a family’s living room.
What do fans of Sylvan Esso dance house remixes and Bob Dylan have in common? Almost nothing, you’d imagine, and you’d probably be right. But in Clio Barnard’s sweet, unlikely romance “Ali & Ava,” which premiered as part of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight program, the two titular characters—both from opposite musical camps—learn to find common ground in each other’s preferences and more, to share in each other’s lives.
July 12th, 2021, Cannes – Reader, I ratatat out this missive in haste on my trusty Smith-Corona from the South of France, in the paltry hopes it may adequately convey my delight in viewing the latest cinematographic marvel from Mr. Wes Anderson, originally of Houston, Texas but more latterly resident of a nearby color-coded, symmetrical nebula almost entirely of his own design.
There’s a lovely wind that blows across the island of Fårö, Ingmar Bergman‘s actual home for several years, and his spiritual home for several decades. Even in the summer, when Mia Hansen-Løve‘s “Bergman Island” is set, the breeze is constant, cool and a little salt-dampened, tousling Vicky Krieps’ hair, scudding through the tufts of scraggly dune-grass and sweeping majestically across the vast empty spaces where the point of this movie is supposed to be.