Like Toronto, NY and other film festivals, Sundance in the Plague Year was virtual.  It reduced its scope and crammed 73 films into six days. Nothing unspooled, it all streamed digitally, with 28 satellite drive-in sites scattered around the country. Here in the East it was freezing, and we got the snow Park City didn’t....

In some respects, Titane, or Titanium, is why I go to film festivals. Or one of the reasons. This second film by French film director Julia Ducournau (Raw) is an encounter I’d rather not have had, because it places me in a box I’d rather not be in: not particularly liking it, vs. second guessing my dislike...

Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception, which showed in the new, non-competitive Cannes Premieres section, is everything you wanted to know about Philip Roth and more. Way more. At least more than I wanted to know, even though I confess to buying The Outlaw Blake Bailey’s Roth biography, when his publisher, Norton, stepped away from it under pressure over...

Flag Day, directed by Sean Penn, concerns the Family Vogel, late 20th century Minnesotans, played by the Family Penn, Sean as John Vogel, his daughter Dylan as Jennifer Vogel and son Hopper as son Nick, both from his time with Robin Wright. The story is based on a book by Jennifer Vogel that starts in...

Red Rocket stays right inside Sean Baker’s wheelhouse — the sex industry workers, professional, amateur, haphazard, casual or casualties that inhabited Starlet, Tangerine and The Florida Project before. There’s just no victory or dignity in the path Red Rocket’s lead character, Mikey Saber, has taken to crawl back to Texas City, his dirtwater East Texas home town after 17 years in...

Over at the high end of the marketing continuum is Mothering Sunday. The story is set post World War I.  In service to the Nivens, (Olivia Colman and Colin Firth), is Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), who aside from front line duties like appearing with the silver breakfast tray and saying, “Your breakfast, Suh,” steals into the...

Waiting for The French Dispatch, which held over for a year from the Cannes that wasn’t in 2020, has been talked about in some circles as one of the key cinema torments of Covid 19, not equal to the dislocation if not outright suspension of animation and death of civilization, but definitely in the mix. Having...

The early ‘80s Brown University Semiotics crew of Todd Haynes, writer-director, and Christine Vachon, producer reached back and pulled together a doc that more than simply captures the renegade Velvet Underground and its band of wayward angers, Lou Reed, John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Sterling Morrison and Nico and their ins and outs. It did something...

Having missed for the last two years—2019 for my daughter’s graduation, 2020 for the collapse of civilization—the most obvious thing to talk about is not my return but the 74th Cannes’ return at all, pushed back this year to July from May. The festival’s return I suppose is due to the will of Thierry Fremaux,...

Anyone who has ever sat through a college English course has heard this drone: “There are only (fill in the blank) stories out there.  Every one you read is just a variation.”  In my time, I have heard that fill-in-the-blank amount range everywhere from seven to twenty-one so I have no fixed number to offer. ...