‘EO’ Film Review: Cannes’ Oldest Director Gives us a Silly, Entertaining Trifle About a Donkey

Manori Ravindran International EditorCannes sensation “EO,” which tells the story of a donkey’s life, has been acquired for North America by Sideshow and Janus Films. The film is the latest collaboration for the U.S.

did make the movie more engaging, but this is simply as engaging as “Zero Contact” can get.What does stand out in “Zero Contact” is the score by Anders Niska and Klas Wahl, but not because it tells the story very well. Instead, it creates an incessant filter between the audience and the film, so that every moment in the narrative has to fight its way to the audience through a hazy aural mishmash of non-specific tension.

Here’s a fun bit of symmetry: Of the four French titles competing for this year’s Palme d’Or, the first to screen was “Brother and Sister” and the last was “Mother and Son.” (Presumably daughters and grandparents will get their due next year.) Of the two, “Mother and Son” director Léonor Serraille bests her colleague Arnaud Desplechin in the family-saga sweepstakes, delivering a decade-spanning immigration drama that plays on the most intimate of registers.The film closed out the Cannes competition on Friday, providing it an auspicious berth. This year’s jury will go into deliberations with actress Annabelle Lengronne fresh in mind; should the actress win, she won’t have far to travel.She isn’t entirely the lead, as the triptych follows a Franco-Ivorian family in chapters dedicated to each member.

The stars of the new movie Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann, stepped out for a press conference and photo call at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

Anna Marie de la Fuente In a historical first, the Cannes Festival and its market, the Marché, hosted the inaugural Venezuela Film Hub (VFH), surprising many international participants by its presence, given the mostly abysmal news coming from the South American country, crippled by the government’s economic mismanagement and U.S. sanctions.Spearheaded and fully financed by The Visionist Advisers, a New York and Paris-based creative agency founded by strategic advisor Valeska Hernandez, VFH brought close to a 100 Venezuelan projects to the Marché in a booth that offered a networking platform for Venezuelan filmmakers as well as a chance to promote the country as a filming location and the sampling of Venezuelan products.

Lise Pedersen In a panel discussion provocatively entitled “Content Scramble for Africa,” guests at the Cannes Film Market’s Cannes Docs sidebar were invited to interrogate the sustainability of current forms of collaboration between the African continent and the Global North in documentary filmmaking.Moderated by IDFA programmer Sarah Dawson, the panel included Laurent Bitty, president of Africadoc-Côte d’Ivoire, Senegalese director and producer Angèle Diabang (“Un air de Kora,” “Le Monde en Face”), Christilla Huillard-Kann, co-founder of Paris-based indie film production company Elda Productions, and Mohamed Saïd Ouma, head of DocA (Documentary Africa), a film fund dedicated to documentary film.

For decades, Italian filmmakers dominated Cannes.If the 1960s saw Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti reign supreme, somehow the 1970s were even richer. Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi won shared top prizes in 1972, while for two consecutive years later that decade the Taviani brothers and then Ermanno Olmi hoisted Palmes across a border that sits just 40 miles away.This year’s lone competition title from an Italian director (the only other Italian language film, “The Eight Mountains,” comes courtesy of two Belgians), Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia” will probably not break that particular drought, but the Neapolitan director can take solace in another modest honor: Telling a story about mothers and sons, about gangsters and priests, and about a peculiar kind of longing for the past in a place where little has changed for hundreds of years, “Nostalgia” is a nigh perfect candidate to wave il Tricolore.Taking a thin amount of plot and stretching it as far and wide as it can go, the film itself is far from perfect, but it does benefit from “The Traitor” star Pierfrancesco Favino’s terrific lead performance as a man who learns the hard way that there’s no going home again.After forty years abroad, Felice (Favino, of course) returns to his native Naples a stranger in a familiar land.

So many stars stepped out for 75th Anniversary celebration screening of The Innocent during the 2022 Cannes Film Festival!

Viola Davis is being honored!

unleashed smoke bombs and unrolled a list of murdered women just before the world premiere of Ali Abbasi’s serial-killer drama “Holy Spider.” And if the demonstration’s cause was only too just, its context was all too uncommon, since these protesters were seemingly there to support, not oppose, Abbasi’s violent and disturbing film. To follow up his Un Certain Regard-winning “Border,” the Iran-born Denmark-based director has burrowed into a chilling bit of true-crime from his native country, reimagining the 2001 case of a religious fanatic who slaughtered 16 young women and using that premise to explore systemic misogyny writ large. He does so by turning the murder thriller upside down, telling a story where the killer’s identify is never in doubt and his intentions are always crystal clear, and where the greatest source of tension comes from wondering whether anyone in power will lift a finger to stop him. The killer in this case is middle-aged construction worker Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani).

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” is a fictionalised account of her time at Les Amandiers, a prestigious acting school in Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris. As well as drawing on her own memories of student-dom in the mid-1980s, she and her co-writers, Noémie Nvovsky and Agnes De Sacy, interviewed other people who studied alongside her, and so their tragedy-tinged comedy drama, which is in Competition at Cannes, should have all the unruly specificity of real life.

Alicia Vikander stuns on the red carpet in a metallic cooper dress at the premiere of Irma Vep during the 2022 Cannes Film Festival held at Palais des Festivals on Sunday (May 22) in Cannes, France.

so much fun to make,” Coen said when he introduced the film before its Cannes Film Festival premiere in the Salle Bunuel on Sunday night. “I know people always say that, but in this case, it’s true.

Algerian actor Ahmed Benaissa died today following a lengthy illness and just hours before his film Sons of Ramses is scheduled for a Critics’ Week screening at the Cannes Film Festival. He was 78.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefCambodian auteur Rithy Panh has rejoined the jury that will decide the prizes for Cannes Film Festival’s inaugural TikTok short film competition. Panh resigned as president of the jury two days ago due to concerns over possible influence of the outcome by the organizers.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorErotic love story “99 Moons,” which has its world premiere in Cannes’ ACID sidebar today, has kicked off international sales. Berlin-based M-Appeal is handling the rights to the film, which is directed by Jan Gassmann.Arthouse VOD platform Filmin has taken the rights in Spain, and arthouse distributor StraDa Films has taken the films for Greece. France and Latin America are in negotiation.