A historic occasion! Prince Charles, Prince William and Princess Anne inspected the British troops on Queen Elizabeth II’s behalf, in which they received their first salute.
19.05.2022 - 01:29 / theplaylist.net
Returning to Cannes a year after his feverish drama “Petrov’s Flu” hit the Croisette, Kirill Serebrennikov can finally attend the festival in person after recently being free from years of house arrest. Debuting in competition, his latest offering, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” is a slow-burn historical drama that never manages to escape from being a bore despite its seemingly intriguing premise.
As opposed to channeling all of his energy into making a project entirely focused on the life and career of famed 19th-century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky — “The Music Lovers” already exists for that — Serebrennikov instead, as the title suggests, puts all the attention on Antonina Miliukova, a music student who becomes fully consumed with her affections for Tchaikovsky and eventually marries him. Continue reading ‘Tchaikovsky’s Wife’ Review: Kirill Serebrennikov’s Historical Melodrama Is a Repetitive Tale Of A Toxic Marriage [Cannes] at The Playlist.
.A historic occasion! Prince Charles, Prince William and Princess Anne inspected the British troops on Queen Elizabeth II’s behalf, in which they received their first salute.
Though shot and set prior to the Russian invasion, by dint of being a Ukrainian picture detailing the aftermath of a woman soldier’s assault in the Donbas, “Butterfly Vision” lays claim to uniquely wretched timeliness at this year’s Cannes. What is an impressive if formally flawed first film from Maksym Nakonechnyi earns some emotional weight vis-a-vis present events: the Ukrainian flags of blue and white, flown with unsparing pride across Nakonechnyi’s images, bear the immediate frisson of beleaguered resistance, and that women Stateside presently face unprecedented threats to their bodily autonomy only compounds the miserable resonance.
Directed by Louis Garrel, son of revered arthouse director Philippe, “The Innocent” is a quintessentially French comedy whose principle aim is to be a fun time. Though this may seem a relatively modest ambition, we all know it isn’t easy to do well, and Garrel certainly does not make things any simpler for himself as the film repeatedly leaves the realm of the bon mot to veer on the farcical.
Cannes Film Festival.Members of the production team for “Butterly Vision,” by Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechni, protested the ongoing war in Ukraine while on the red carpet Wednesday.In front of Salle Debussy, the second-largest theater in Cannes, the team — including producers Darya Bassel and Yelizaveta Smit, plus actress Rita Burkovska — held a banner that read, “Russians kill Ukrainians. Do you find it offensive or disturbing to talk about this genocide?”The sirens heard on the red carpet stairs were meant to symbolize air raids in Ukraine, while the protestors held signs that read “sensitive content” over their faces.Not only were they demonstrating the ongoing devastation in Ukraine, but they were also attempting to show the extent of Russian censorship.The film “Butterfly Vision” explores a similar idea, albeit in a fictional world.
A balloon shaped like a heart flies from the open window of a taxi. It is late at night and the woman (Leila Hatami) who this gift was bestowed upon simply couldn’t care less about the useless trinket, far more interested in comparing the quality of the accompanying chocolate boxes dispensed by a handful of men who wish to have her as a Valentine.
It’s the plight of the plightless: a kid from a comfortable, upper-middle-class background wants to be some manner of artist, except that he’s (and it does seem to be a he more often than not) bereft of the experience, grit, or outsider credibility that define the role models he hopes he could one-day call influences. He ventures out into the big bad world in search of something to put a bit of hair on his creative chest, only to face the spiny question of whether this effort to get real is just class tourism, a jaunt in the gutter that one phone call to Dad could prevent.
Inspired by her own late mother’s long battle with multiple sclerosis, writer/director Emily Atef’s (“Molly’s Way,” “3 Days in Quiberon”) latest work, “More Than Ever,” delivers a poignant and well-acted story. Featuring Gaspard Ulliel’s last performance, the film asks its audience to face the reality of and ponder the inevitability of death as well as the line between those who have experienced a type of suffering and those who haven’t.
With the true-crime renaissance in full swing over on the small screen, it feels appropriate that a similar spike should be felt in the moviehouse. “The Stranger,” the sophomore feature from Aussie TV guy Thomas M.
In 2017, Swedish-Egyptian director Tarek Saleh’s breakthrough film “The Nile Hilton Incident” was the subject of much controversy and was ultimately banned in Egypt due to its in-depth portrayal of police corruption in modern-day Egypt. Five years later, Saleh is back with “Boy From Heaven” (“Walad Min Al Janna“), a transfixing feature tackling the harsh realities that occur in the country, this time exploring the complicated and corrupt relationship between religion and politics.
Nick Holdsworth European Film Academy president Agnieszka Holland has criticized the Cannes Film Festival for welcoming a Russian movie to the main competition.The Polish-born director – who fled to France in 1981 when Communist authorities imposed martial law – said now was the time to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine.That demanded a total ban on Russian cultural products in Europe, she said in Cannes on Saturday.The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker slammed the festival’s inclusion of Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s “Tchaikovsky’s Wife.”“If it were up to me, I would not include Russian films in the official program of the festival – even if Kirill Serebrennikov is such a talented artist,” the 73 year old filmmaker said. Speaking in Cannes at an industry roundtable on supporting the Ukrainian film industry at a time of war, Holland added: “Unfortunately my bad feelings were confirmed by his words.
Arnaud Desplechin’s latest film superficially resembles some of his most beloved and best work, family dramas featuring very colorful, neurotic, sometimes impulsive characters by turn extremely sincere and sardonic, loquacious and secretive — films such as “My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument” (1996) and “A Winter’s Tale” (2008). But unlike them, “Brother and Sister” is also a puzzle, even if the director does not make it easy for us to solve it.
Guy Lodge Film CriticWhatever other flaws “Brother and Sister” may have, you absolutely cannot accuse it of being slow to build. Within its first 10 minutes, two estranged siblings bawl each other out at a dead child’s wake, one declaring the other “an indecent monster”; a screechingly staged single-vehicle car crash imperils an elderly couple and paralyzes a teenage driver; then, a barrelling truck at the scene brings further tragedy.
A silver spoon clunks loudly inside a bowl of beef broth. The meal — well, barely a meal — is served to Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) twice a day, her diet a strict combination of insipid soup and wafer-thin slices of lemon.
Three Thousand Years of Longing” at the Cannes Festival on Friday.Wearing only panties drenched with blood-red paint, the screaming woman had the Ukrainian flag sprayed across her chest with the words “Stop raping us.” The word “scum” was also written on her lower back. Video posted to Twitter shows security personnel covering up the woman and escorting her off the carpet.
Between her job as a French-English interpreter, the prospect of romantic fulfillment, and the impending deterioration of her father’s health, the woman holding together all the threads in Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning” navigates a wide spectrum of human emotion. In the director’s follow up to last year’s English-language meta homage “Bergman Island,” Sandra (Léa Seydoux) oscillates between desire and grief with believable fluidity.
James Gray returned to Cannes for the fifth time with what was a personal story inspired by his childhood during 1980s Queens, NY, and the premiere tonight was nothing but emotional.
Christopher Vourlias One day after dissident Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov’s “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, members of the Ukrainian film industry took to the Croisette to call for a total boycott of Russian movie. Meanwhile, just steps away in the Palais des Festivals, the director’s long-awaited return to cinema’s grandest stage was overshadowed by questions about the festival’s controversial selection and over the film’s financial ties to Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.Speaking at a politically charged press conference on Thursday, Serebrennikov described Russia’s war in Ukraine as a “total catastrophe” but rejected calls for a boycott of Russian film.
Tchaikovsky’s Wife filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian dissident was grilled, by the global press at Cannes over the pic being bankrolled by oligarch financing in particular Roman Abramovich, as well as the notion of the world’s boycott against Russia.
wildly entertaining rock ‘n’ roll fantasia “Leto.”The two films both show that Serebrennikov has strong ideas about how to use music, but otherwise they’re worlds apart. “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” begins with Miliukova (Alyona Mikhaylova) dressed in widow’s black and trying to choose the right words for her funeral wreath; but when she arrives in the room where her husband’s corpse is laid out, Tchaikovsky (Odin Biron, full of quiet Peter Sarsgaard smarm) rouses himself, stands up and asks, “Why is the wife here? Who invited her?”The scene is enough to tell you that this will be Miliukova’s story, and that it won’t be a straight period piece, even though it re-creates 1893 St.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticBack when art house movies played full-time in art houses, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” at least on paper, might have seemed a film of middlebrow commercial hooks — the sort of movie that would have slipped into the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York and played there comfortably for a month or so. The first hook, of course, is Tchaikovsky himself, the Russian composer who created works of such timeless and popular beauty that he is always in danger, in an odd way, of being underrated, like the Spielberg of longhairs.