Cannes 2012, May 16-27

[Chris Knipp]

Early buzz about Cannes 2012 and the American entries.

There's a big article in today's (Sat. May 19, 2012) NY Times about Hong Sang-soo's new film IN ANOTHER COUNTRY with an interview with Isabelle Huppert, who went to Japan with the Korean director to shoot, starting without a script, only a place. Here is the photo from the Times., Yu Jun-Sang, who plays a lifeguard, and Isabelle Huppert, enjoying herself in the rain. Cannes likes Hong (as does the New York Film Festival) and IN ANOTHER COUNTRY is in competition.

She is delighted that Mr. Hong is in competition. “He wants to compete with his different kind of music, and I love the way he filmed me, just like any other woman in the landscape.”--Joan Dupont, NYT, May 18, 2012

I will put up some Paris film-related and Cannes-related photos of my own shortly. There are Cannes stories in a lot of the weekend editions of magazines and papers. The stars of Audiard's RUST AND BONE are featured as they have been all week, especially Marion Cotillard. This looks like the most prominent French film in the festival.

What about American films? Besides Wes Anderson's MOONRISE KINGDOM, there is Walter Salles' adaptation of Kerouac's ON THE ROAD (American novel, mostly American actors but Brazilian director, of course) and I don't know if I've mentioned Andrew Dominik's KILLING THEM SOFTLY, starring Brad Pitt, with Ray Liotta and Richard Jenkins.

Jackie Cogan is a professional enforcer who investigates a heist that went down during a mob-protected poker game.

Sounds a little like something Joe Carnahan might do. There is also Jeff (SHOTGUN STORIES, TAKE SHELTER) Nichols' MUD. Lee Daniels' PAPERBOY is in competition, though its merits have been strongly questioned; however his PRECIOUS got a 15-minute ovation after being shown in the 2009 Cannes Un Certain Regard category. Out of competition is HEMINGWAY & GELLHORN (a docucrama), which there's a positive buzz about, directed by Philip Kaufman, who directed HENRY AND JUNE and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, and wrote the INDIANA JONES movies and THE RIGHT STUFF. MOONRISE KINGDOM is the opening night film, and it also turns out to be superb, one of Anderson's very best films. KILLING THEM SOFTLY got good marks from Mike D'Angelo and MUD almost as good. PAPERBOY got general boos. ON THE ROAD has been super-hyped in France and may be well-promoted in the US, but it turned out not to be a huge success critically.

[Chris Knipp]

OTHER MIKE D'ANGELO CANNES THUMBNAIL ASSESSMENTS. These are in the order they came as tweets. I'll include even ones I've already cited. The following are all from https://twitter.com/#!/gemko and are the words of Mike D'Angelo.

By way of intro, he tweeted this good news:

On the 10-year anniversary of my first Cannes, they've finally upgraded me to the rose press badge. MADE IT, MA! TOP OF THE WORLD!
(Basically this means I don't have to show up an hour-plus early for everything, which will free up my schedule enormously.)

I can well imagine how much that rose badge means. And the thing is, D'Angelo is really a free-lancer, an independent voice, even though his daily Cannes dispatches appear on AV Club. He is astute, dedicated, and agenda-free. Hence I think it's worth following him closely during this all-important festival.

Moonrise Kingdom: 75. Balance between pre-adolescent ardor and adult disappointment a bit wobbly, but mostly delightful in RUSHMORE vein. [A week later D'Angelo revisited MONNRISE and raised his rating to 78.]

Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir (Bouzereau): W/O. Utterly banal "interview" (= longtime friend urging RP to tell fave anecdotes) + film clips.

After the Battle (Nasrallah): 38. Plays like a daytime soap that happens to be set during the Arab Spring. Epochal meets insipid.

Rust and Bone (Audiard): 64. The story of a horribly disabled person, and also of a woman with no legs. Stealthy reverse schematism! I like.

Sister (Meier): 68. Surprisingly Dardennes-y, but it's not like that's a bad thing. Seydoux ideally cast. English title not ideal. [Market]

Paradise: Love (Seidl): 47. Two hours of mutual exploitation. Individual scenes crackle, but Seidl has one idea, hammers it relentlessly.

The We and the I (Gondry): 52. In which he remakes GET ON THE BUS as a high-school movie. Enjoyed rowdy energy, not so much the earnestness.

Reality (Garrone): 66. Another film w/only one idea, but at least it's a bold one. Feels like something Buñuel would make if he were alive.

Safety Not Guaranteed (Trevorrow): 56. Winning premise spins wheels, indulges weak subplots straining to reach feature length. [Market]

Mekong Hotel (Joe): 41. Strictly a doodle, and formally drab to boot. Supernatural elements feel shoehorned in. Guitar score is pleasant.

Beyond the Hills (Mungiu): 59. Another accomplished film content to just keep doing one thing from start to finish. Super intense though.

Lawless (Hillcoat): 61. Flavorful turf-war pseudo-Western with two iconic badasses (and Pearce out-intimidating Hardy, incredibly).

Laurence Anyways (Dolan): 53. Yeah, this is way too long. And stars Melvil Poupaud, who I can rarely stomach. Scattered inspired moments.

38 Witnesses (Belvaux): 55. Powerful when purely cinematic, which is about half the time. On-the-nose dialogue sometimes painful. [Market]

CHRIS KNIPP COMMENTS: I was so excited over RUST AND BONE it may seem ironic that the first film I saw in Paris, SISTER (Meier) might be better, as well as Garrone (which I have not seen). Indeed SISTER may be better than RUST AND BONE, in which Audiard may take too many shortcuts and go too soft. Meier doesn't. However RUST AND BONE is still better in D'Angelo's view than most of the others he's seen. I think his rating system is very precise.

I definitely go along with D'Angelo's high rating of MOONRISE KINGDOM.

I can't find the place where D'Angelo explains his numerical ratings, but remember that it is a very harsh system (with a correspondingly good range) in which even a 50 may not be at so bad, and 75 is really excellent, not C+ as in school grades.

I'm curious to see if I think Nasrullah's AFTER THE BATTLE is as unsuccessful as D'Angelo says..

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo's AV Club Cannes Day Two and Day Three reports.

Day One gives a full review of RUST AND BONE. I'll give you his concluding section:

Both actors are tremendous—especially Schoenaerts, in an amazingly tricky role—and the special effects are seamless enough to make Forrest Gump’s Lieutenant Dan look like a cheap parlor trick, but it’s mostly the inversion of genre expectations that compels. Rust and Bone does turn out to be the schematic, conventional story of a horribly disabled person who gradually learns how to live again. That the disabled person isn’t who we naturally assume makes it just novel enough to seem somewhat fresh.

He also reviews Austrian Ulrich Seidl's PARADISE: LOVE:

Ultimately, Paradise: Love seems interested only in making you wince, not in making you think. Let’s hope the other two chapters—involving a Catholic missionary and a diet camp—are less monotonous.

And he reviews Michel Gondry's Bronx-set amateur improvised school daray THE WE AND THE I, which he says would have made a nice short film.

DAY THREE: D'Angelo reviews Matteo Garrone's REALITY, about a Neopolitan fish dealer who becomes obsessed by a reality TV show, which he calls a "loopy fable," which could not be more different from GOMORRAH.

[REALITY[ doesn’t belabor the allegory, but he’s not exactly subtle about it, either. Reality opens by descending from the heavens and concludes by re-ascending from a fantastic kitsch-paradise, while the climax is precipitated by Luciano’s participation in a Good Friday pilgrimage. In truth, the movie works better conceptually than it does moment-to-moment, as its luckless hero’s journey into delusion does follow a predictable trajectory (albeit one enlivened by Arena’s winning performance). But it’s still invigorating to see a movie unafraid to make a bold statement, though few seem to have noticed. If Luis Buñuel were alive today, this is roughly what I’d expect him to be up to.

D'Angelo isn't entirely clear here but I guess the "allegory" is about religious fanaticism undercutting normal human kindness?

Next D'Angelo deals with , Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s BEOND THE HILLS, his follow-up to his Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, which he says is blunter than REALITY but also much more intensely involving. He suggests it was thematically linked with REALITY because both are about religion, this one concerning two women, one a nun, who were apparently lovers in an orphanage earlier, and again the theme is religion. He found it gripping and explosive, but too dogmatic.

Mungiu has few peers when it comes to formally rigorous nail-biters, but I’d like to see him tackle material he’s more conflicted about.

As for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEKONG HOTEL, D'A reminds readers how he rejoiced at UNCLE BOONMEE'S big Cannes win, but declares that this film "barely even qualifies as a doodle."

This is an example of what i like about D'Angelo, because he never doggedly backs favorites, but goes in to each film without preconceptions or much prior information and judges it on its own individual merits.

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo saw Vinterberg's THE HUNT/JAGTER.

The Hunt (Vinterberg): 54. To avoid exasperating @msicism let's just say you've more or less seen this one once you know the premise.

He adds a postscript tweet:

Good to see him back in a CELEBRATIONal mode, but this is very straightforward treatment of a (somewhat dated) hot-button issue.

Is D'Angelo a little more jaded than usual not that he has a rose press badge? I don't think it will look that way when we read all his day-by-day AV Club writeups. Some of his Twitter correspondents have accused D'Angelo of being one-note in his thumbnail critiques this year by accusing a series of the films of themselves being one-note, or good, but just hitting one point over and over.

Awaiting his Cannes '12 Day Four AV Club piece now. Meanwhile he posted on Twitter this interesting new photo of a Cannes crowd. His caption is below:


Scrum in front of the Debussy, overlooked (or overignored) by two snooty guards on the stairs.

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo now has a higher ratied '12 Cannes film than MOONRISE KINGDOM: Haneke's new one, LOVE.

Love (Haneke): 77. Starts out surprisingly lovely, then turns Haneke-grueling. But always deeply felt & beautifully acted, if singleminded.

He is also seeing Kiarastami and Hang Sang-soo (with Huppert who is in the Haneke) tonight so this is a big day. "It's all coming together," he tweeted.

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo saw Hong Sang-soo's new one. I suspect his previous one, THE DAY HE ARRIVES, which I reviewed in the SFIFF, may be better. It really clicked, and it's on home ground.

D'A. has two tweets on this:

In Another Country (Hong): 51. Not sure if I'm tickled or disappointed that he made the same film he always makes, except w/ Huppert in it.

and

Three stories this time, with Izzy in three different roles. Loved the 1st, diminishing returns thereafter. Miscommunication humor abounds.

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo is waiting till late this evening (Sunday, May 20, 2012) to see the new Kiarostami because of crowds.

Like Someone in Love (Japanese: ライク・サムワン・イン・ラブ) is an upcoming Japanese-language drama film written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami, starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno and Ryō Kase. It tells the story of a young Japanese woman who finances her studies through prostitution. The film is a French-Japanese production. --Wikipedia.

D'A. mentions another competition film I didn't list, by Ken Loach, which he is looking forward to 24 hours from his tweet. So belatedly, below is a complete list of all the official films of the festival in various categories, and the Loach is the first one (why didn't any roundups or predictions mention it?):

In Competition:
The Angels' Share, directed by Ken Loach
After The Battle (Baad el mawkeaa), directed by Yousry Nasrallah
Beyond the Hills, directed by Cristian Mungiu
Cosmopolis, directed by David Cronenberg
Holy Motors, directed by Leos Carax
The Hunt (Jagten), directed by Thomas Vinterberg
Killing Them Softly, directed by Andrew Dominik
In Another Country (Da-Reun Na-Ra-E-Suh), directed by Hong Sang-soo
In the Fog (Im Nebel), directed by Sergei Loznitsa
Lawless, directed by John Hillcoat
Like Someone in Love, directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Love (Amour), directed by Michael Haneke
Moonrise Kingdom, directed by Wes Anderson [Opening night film]
Mud, directed by Jeff Nichols
On the Road, directed by Walter Salles
The Paperboy, directed by Lee Daniels
Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe), directed by Ulrich Seidl
Post tenebras lux, directed by Carlos Reygadas
Reality, directed by Matteo Garrone
De Rouille et D'os, directed by Jacques Audiard
Taste of Money (Do-Nui Mat) directed by Im Sang-soo
Vous N'Avez Encore Rien Vu, directed by Alain Resnais

Un Certain Regard:
7 Dias en la Habana, directed by Benicio del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Juan Carlos Tabio, Gaspar Noe and Laurent Cantet
11.25 The Day He Chose His Own Fate, directed by Koji Wakamatsu
Aimer à Perdre la Raison, directed by Joachim Lafosse
Antiviral, directed by Brandon Cronenberg
Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Benh Zeitlin
Confession of a Child of the Century, directed by Sylvie Verheyde
Despues de Lucia, directed by Michel Franco
God's Horses (Les Chevaux de Dieu), directed by Nabil Ayouch
The Pirogue (La Pirogue), directed by Moussa Toure
La Playa, directed by Juan Andres Arango
Laurence Anyways, directed by Xavier Dolan
Le grand soir, directed by Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern
Miss Lovely, directed by Ashim Ahluwalia
Mystery, directed by Lou Ye
Student, directed by Darezhan Omirbayev
Trois mondes, directed by Catherine Corsini
White Elephant (Elefante Blanco), directed by Pablo Trapero

Out of Competition:
Therese Desqueyroux, directed by Claude Miller [Closing night film]
Hemingway & Gellhorn, directed by Philip Kaufman
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath
Me and You (Io e Te), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Midnight Screenings:
Dario Argent's Dracula, directed by Dario Argento
Ai To Makoto, directed by Takashi Miike

65th Anniversary:
Une Journée Particuliere, directed by Gilles Jacob

Special Screenings:
A musica segundo Tom Jobim, directed by Nelson Pereira Dos Santos
The Central Park Five, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon
Polluting Paradise (Der Mull im Garten Eden), directed by Fatih Akin
Journal de France, directed by Claudine Nougaret, Raymond Depardon
Les Invisibles, directed by Sebastien Lifshitz
Mekong Hotel, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, directed by Laurent Bouzereau
Villegas, directed by Gonzalo Tobal

Directors' Fortnight
3, directed by Pablo Stoll Ward
Granny's Funeral (L'enterrement de mémé), directed by by Bruno Podalydès
Alyah, directed by Elie Wajeman
Camille redouble, directed by Noémie Lvovsky [Closing night]
The King of Pigs (Dae gi eui wang), directed by Yeun Sang-Ho
Dangerous Liaisons, directed by Hur Jin-Ho
El Taaib, directed by Merzak Allouache
Ernest et Célestine, directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner
Fogo, directed by Yulene Olaizola
Gangs of Wasseypur, directed by Anurag Kashyap
Infancia clandestina, directed by Benjamin Ávila
La noche de enfrente, directed by Raoul Ruiz [Special Screening]
La Sirga, directed by William Vega
No, directed by Pablo Larraín
Opération Libertad, directes by Nicolas Wadimoff
Hold Back (Regaine), directed by Rachid Djaïdani
Room 237, directed by Rodney Ascher
Sightseers, directed by Ben Wheatley [Special Screening]
Sueño y silencio, directed by Jaime Rosales
The We and the I, directed by Michel Gondry [Opening night]
A Respectable Family (Yek Khanévadéh-e Mohtaram), directed by Massoud Bakhshi (Iran)

Critics' Week
Competition
Aqui y alla, directed by Antonio Mendez Esparza
Au galop, directed by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing
Les voisins de dieu, directed by Meni Yaesh
Hors les murs (Beyond the Walls) directed by David Lambert
Peddlers, directed by Vasan Bala
Los salvajes, directed by Alejandro Fadel
I, directed by Ilian Metev

Special Screenings
Broken, directed by Rufus Norris [Opening night]
Augustine, directed by Alice Winocour
J'enrage de son absence (Maddened By His Absence), directed by Sandrine Bonnaire

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo has his AV Club Day Four piece up hare. However since it deals with Hillcoat, Vinterberg and Dolan, three he's not too wild about, I won't summarize here. Hillcoat pleased him mainly as an escape into more mainstream entertaining fare as relief from the intense flow of festival art films. He thought Vinteerberg's treatment of a man falsely accused of child sexual abuse was well done and more in CELEBRATION mode, but a bit out of date and also too one-note, lacking ambiguity. Dolan he thought way too long, and Melvil Poupaud happens to be his least favorite well-known male French movie actor. Tomorrow he will review Haneke, and he's coming to Kiarostami, whose new film (in Japanese, remember) he has not apparently seen yet.

By the way I never said that D'Angelo was my favorite film reviewer, only that he's my favorite English language Cannes festival reporter and thumbnail critic of Cannes films. Once in a while he also comes up with something passionate and great, like his letter to Lars von Trier about ANTICHRIST. That doesn't happen every day (and I understand).

June 21, 2012 (in Paris, anyway).

[Chris Knipp]

Yet another competition film that I failed to note and big intro pieces seem not to have mentioned:

MUD (Jeff Nichols)

He's the director/writer of SHOTGUN STORIES and TAKE SHELTER. MUD stars the improbable new Cannes 'it' boy, Matthew McConaughey, who plays a journalist in Paperboy and a mystery man in MUD. And McConaughey has two more movies coming out soon, as a perverted killer in KILLER JOE and apparently he'll take his shirt off again for MAGIC MIKE, a film by Soderbergh. I was undershelmed by his 'serious' turn in Linklater's BERNIE (and underwhelmed by BERNIE for that matter) but others liked him and thought this a turn to new 'character' roles, and it true, that's great.

MUD debuts at Cannes May 26, 2012.

[Chris Knipp]

Another D'Angelo Twitterr thumbnail and the second highest rated film for him so far.

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (Resnais): 73. His fond farewell, ruminating on the end, his career and the nature of cinema and theater

and he adds

So audacious in conception initially that it wasn't quite sustainable, but very much the film I wished PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION had been.

[Chris Knipp]

In France the two most hyped Cannes films have been ON THE ROAD and Audiard's RUST AND BONE. Unlike last year when TREE OF LIFE got early Paris theatrical release, and was also one of the best films and come to think if it, got the Golden Palm. The Grand Prize was shared by THE KID WITH THE BIKE and ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA. What I mean is that I don't think RUST AND BONE deserves the accolades that Audiard's previous two films have gotten, and I'm neutral about ON THE ROAD. It sounds like it may be joyous and exciting. I don't know if it will a great film.

[Chris Knipp]

Monday, May 21, 2012. LIKE SOMONE IN LOVE

D'Angelo has apparently not Tweet-rated Kiarostami's LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE but has said that he is baffled by it --"I honestly never had the slightest idea why I was watching it or what it was trying to convey. And still don't"-- and finds even more baffling the fact that others were not baffled, and someone who hated Haneke's AMOUR loved LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, "which makes no sense." He may be struggling with his view on LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, which Variety(by Guy Lodge, not a familiar name to me) suggests is somewhat a companion piece to CERTIFIED COPY. Here is the Variety lead summing-up paragraph:

The very title of Abbas Kiarostami's Tokyo-set character waltz "Like Someone in Love" -- named for the jazz standard Ella Fitzgerald croons on the soundtrack -- promises something as woozily romantic as "Certified Copy," his 2010 cat's cradle of lovers' memories. As it turns out, it's the first, not the last, word of the title that's key to this droll, elegant but faintly trying study in emotional artifice. An unofficial twin to "Copy," sharing its playful preoccupation with identities mistaken and assumed, it's a more austere and less intellectual work, certainly less attractive to distribs, though auteur cachet should see it through.

D'Angelo says "apparently other people are engrossed by the film's surface level. Whereas its complete banality is what throws me." Some might say watch it again, he's missing something, and he said, " I have so little desire to watch it again, given how enervating it played to me." This was somewhat my own reaction to CERTIFIED COPY, which so many cinephiles seem to love so much. I thought its interest was overrated. It's polished but there's not much there there. Watch Antonioni instead.

[Chris Knipp]

HANEKE'S AMOUR

Todd McCarthy (formerl Variety's chief critic) is covering Cannes for Hollywood Reporter. His online report is here. McCarthy describes the festival as getting better as it goes along, and like D'Angelo gives Haneke's AMOUR very high marks. He looked on MOONRISE KINGDOM as being finely made but very lightweight; I guess he would not give it a D'Angelo-style 75. AMOUR was for him when the festival "finally kicked into gear," and he describes it as "an unflinching yet supremely elegant examination of the final stages of life, unerringly acted by French greats Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva." McCarthy describes RUST AND BONE AS "surprisingly conventional but resourcefully made and very well acted." He sees much the same limitations in Vinterberg's HUNT that D'Angelo did.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian of London's Cannes correspondent, wrote a rave review of AMOUR. He calls it "intelligent filmmaking of the highest order"

Michael Haneke's new film in the Cannes competition is everything that could have been expected from him and more: a moving, terrifying and uncompromising drama of extraordinary intimacy and intelligence.
--Peter Bradshaw.

Peter Debruge's Variety review points out AMOUR was acquired by Sony Picture Classics before for US distribution before Cannes.


JEAN-LOUIS TRANTIGNANT AND EMMANUELLE RIVA IN AMOUR

[Chris Knipp]

May 22, 2012. D'Angelo has a lot more tweet thumbnail reviews.

The Angels' Share (Loach): 56. Puckish light commercial comedy with some big laughs and a Hollywood-ready contrived plot. Mild fun.

Room 237 (Ascher): 58. Really wish he'd structured it w/each interview as a self-contained unit. But most of the evidence is amusingly wack.

Killing Them Softly (Dominik): 63. Subtext, Andrew. *Sub*text. Sub.

For Love's Sake (Miike): 55. Batshit-goofy musical gradually gets bogged down in convoluted high-school gang plot. Should run 90, not 137.

Holy Motors (Carax): 88. Holy shit.

Time will tell what this Carax tweet means. D'Angelo's approval of KILLING THEM SOFTLY (going against some other reviewers) is hopeful, since it is one that will be generally available to American movie-goers in September. It's a Weinstein release. Variety's Justin Chang describes it as "low-octane" but "cooly distinctive" and admits Brad Pitt's presence will add caché.

All those tweets are fro https://twitter.com/#!/gemko/

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo AV Club Cannes '12, Day Five: Get out your Haneke-chiefs, we have a Palme D'Or favorite "Grade: B+ (but to put that in perspective, this is my favorite film not just here at Cannes but of the entire year so far; I’m just ridiculously stingy with A’s)."

D'Angelo AV Club Cannes 2012, Day Six: Alain Resnais does his Prairie Home Companion, and amateur sleuths comb obsessively through The Shining. He means that Resnais' YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET! may be Resnais' 'natural swan song' like Altman's.

The sticking point for many appears to be Eurydice itself, though I found Anouilh’s pragmatic take on the nature of romantic love eloquent and bracing. Admittedly, Resnais has trouble sustaining his ambitious conceit for the entire running time, and the film’s second half comes closer to being a straightforward theatrical adaptation, concentrating mostly on Arditi and Azéma as Orpheus and Eurydice. But the sight of mostly middle-aged (and older) actors performing roles intended for the blush of youth; the intense emotion with which Resnais’ stable relives their work with an artist who’s just passed away; the tension between the theatrical and the cinematic (a longtime Resnais obsession) as refracted through the juxtaposition of Resnais’ classical mise-en-scène with the rehearsal footage’s more modern, freewheeling visual style (the latter having been shot entirely separately by Bruno Podalydès)…it all unmistakably suggests a fond farewell, providing the source material with a deeply moving extra-textual undercurrent. That Resnais gives one of the young actors the final shot speaks volumes. Grade: B+

To explain the second part of D'Angelo's Day Six title:

I was also eager to watch a feature-length documentary about various folks’ bizarre theories regarding what Stanley Kubrick was really up to when he made The Shining, and Room 237,playing in the Fortnight after premiering at Sundance earlier this year,delivered the sincere insanity I’d hoped for and then some.

He also reviews the Ken Loach competition film THE ANGEL'S SHARE, which he calls "weightless" but describes as enjoyable and gives a B- to.


PAUL BRANNIGAN IN THE ANGEL'S SHARE