The best thing you can say about the 71st Festival de Cannes is that the truly bad movies were few and far between. That’s somewhat remarkable considering the programmers lost out on a few titles they hoped would be in competition due to a Netflix dispute and others that preferred to wait for a fall festival premiere.
READ MORE: Cannes: ‘Shoplifters’ Wins The Palme d’Or; Spike Lee’s ‘BlackKklansman’ Takes Grand Prize
“Long Day’s Journey into Night”
We’re still scratching our heads as to why Bi-Gan’s remarkable and perplexing “Long Day’s Journey into Night” didn’t make it into this year’s official competition at the Cannes Film Festival. This mesmerizing, mysterious Chinese film featured a wanderer (Huang Jue), going through the darkly dreamy, isolated, and neon-lit streets of a fictional small-town in search of a mystery woman, (Tang Wei). The piece-de-resistance of the film is, of course, the 50-minute single-take that we had the pleasure of viewing in divine 3D. We’re still trying to make sense of the plot, but it didn’t seem to matter because the hypnotic dreamy surrealism Bi-Gan concocted is spellbinding. [our “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” review]
“Shoplifters”
“Shoplifters,” finds a 55-year-old Hirokazu Kore-eda revisiting the plight of marginalized people on the fringes of Japanese society. The film is a humane, judgment-free take on a family of shoplifters, revealing the contoured complexities that live within the peculiar dynamic they have built over a few decades. Kore-eda captures their simple joys, their sorrow, their moments of laughter with warmhearted spontaneity, all done with such delicacy and generosity that these true-to-life moments create an overwhelming, heartswelling humanism. Trying to pick apart his native country’s struggles between tradition and modernity, legality and crime, Kore-eda takes the time to affectionately dissect the way family functions, before carefully deconstructing it with a surprising final twist that adds layers of socio-political intrigue and becomes a scathing indictment of a Japan that’s lost touch with familial connection. [Our “Shoplifters” review].
“Birds of Passage”
Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s “Birds of Passage” revitalizes the gangster-drug genre, stripping it of its clichés right down to the bone. This Directors’ Fortnight shocker was shot in the Guajira Desert of Colombia and split into five “Cantos.” Set across an entire decade, “Birds of Passage” is the story of an indigenous family that finds a way “in” with the marijuana drug trade. These events would, in essence, kick-start the Columbian drug trade a few years later. Don’t mistake this great movie for “Narcos.” In fact, it plays like the flipside of last year’s Tom Cruise drug-dealing drama, “American Made.” The film resonates because it comes from the indigenous’ perspective, which means native tradition is very much alive and well here, which, initially, leads to a moral compass for dealing the drugs in a fair and humanist way, until it’s near impossible to continue on that way. There hasn’t ever been a gangster movie quite like this before.
– Jordan Ruimy [our “Birds Of Passage” review]
“The House That Jack Built”
Lars von Trier‘s “The House That Jack Built” came to Cannes with a lot of heavy baggage, but, the end result was actually von Trier indicting himself and his sins more than anything else, even as he repulses us. This is exactly the film you’d expect when delving into a serial killer drama directed by von Trier and, yet, perverse fetishes aside, there are moments that give us a kind of satisfaction, as if the filmmaker is telling us that, yes, he does deserve to be damned into the deepest pits of hell. Jack is Von Trier, admitting to his flaws as a human being and asking us if we could do the same. The director of classic such as “Breaking The Waves,” “Dancer in the Dark,” “Dogville” and “Melancholia” had all but lost his mojo recently, with “Antichrist” and “Nymphomaniac” being more about shock than artfulness, trash rather than awe. “Jack” is actually a meditation about failure and the lack of self-confidence, good and bad art, this is very much a therapy session for von Trier. The mainstream will avoid it like the plague, but cinephiles should have the open-mind to look closer and find an artist pushing boundaries. – JR [Jess Kiang’s Cannes review which is the opposite of “best”]