Cannes Review: ‘Nitram’

EXCLUSIVE: Australian producer-distributor Arcadia, whose recent credits include Netflix pic 2067 with Kodi Smit-McPhee and Ryan Kwanten, has made two hires and revealed its upcoming distribution and development slates.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentParis-based sales agency Luxbox has added sales to the U.K., Australia and Brazil to previous deals with the U.S. and France on Directors’ Fortnight title “Clara Sola,” making good on its upbeat critical reception at the Cannes Festival this month.London-based Peccadillo Pictures has acquired U.K.

Shiny’s Democracy (★★★☆☆) features the Irish-born, Australian psychedelic rocker reenacting an iconic photo from the ’70s, with a trace of irony — the original photo of the Australian Prime Minister being dismissed from parliament represents for Shiny Joe “a failure of democracy.” But the artist’s first solo album in seven years is anything but a failure, with a catchy, accessible sound that is still very much his own.As a founding member of Pond and sometime collaborator with their Western

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“You’re trying to punish me. Surely the Southern Hemisphere is bad enough.”So says Edie Henley (Harriet Walter) to her daughter Kate (Frances O’Connor) in the early scenes of the drama “The End.” This dark comedy created by Samantha Strauss comes to Showtime after a 2020 run in Australia; its first episode shows us how and why Edie, a widow, has been brought to Australia from her native England.

Though “Nitram” never depicts the unspoken horrific massacre that its protagonist commits, the entire film queasily pulses in the anxious anticipation of the unspeakable event. It’s not an easy film to watch, knowing what’s coming but remaining completely powerless, not unlike watching a car crash in motion and being unable to stop it.

Caleb Landry Jones was a big winner at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival!

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.

As the Cannes Film Festival draws near to a close, Justin Kurzel sat down to field a series of questions about his Palme d’Or contender Nitram, a deeply disturbing retelling of the events leading up to the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre in Tasmania, Australia.

Jessica Kiang Justin Kurzel’s exceptionally disturbing, horribly plausible “Nitram” opens with an excerpt from a 1979 Australian news report on firework accidents. A boy of about 12 is being interviewed from his Hobart hospital bed, and when the posh, compassionate voice of the presenter asks if the injuries he sustained will discourage him from playing with fireworks in future, he smiles a strange, sly smile, and says no.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Iranian-Australian filmmaker Noora Niasari (Waterfall, 17 Years and a Day) has been signed on to adapt and direct Mahsa Rahmani Noble’s novel Raya.

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.

Cinema’s love affair with trains goes back, of course, to the very origins of the art form, and more than a century later, the flame shows no sign of dimming. To recent examples such as “Snowpiercer” (2013), “Train to Busan” (2016), and the latest of many adaptations of “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) can now be added “Compartment no.6” (“Hytti Nro 6”) from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, premiering in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.