CANNES Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes May 21, 2019

MOST ANTICIPATED EVENT today is the showing of Quentin Tarantino's new movie, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, about some down-on-their luck actors at the time of the Sharon Tate murders, with Bruce Lee and Charles Manson as incidental characters and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Tarantino has posted an open letter to all Cannes writers and attendees about spoilers - asking all not to give away stuff. See the letter H E R E.

Bradshaw calls Gaspar Noë's Lux Æterna "self-parodic silliness" and gives it 2 out of 5 stars.


BENNY EMMANUEL, GABRIEL CARBAJAL IN CHICUAROTES

Chicuarotes (Gael García Bernal). Special Screenings.

This is the second directorial outing from Gael García Bernal, a long time since the first (2007), and a disappointment, says Screen Daily's Jonathan Romney. That debut was Deficit , a "coolly ironic depiction of Mexico’s spoiled middle-class youth," This one, explains Romney, returns "more or less" to Amores Perros territory (the film that brought him international recognition as an actor), depicting "two young working-class chancers desperate to improve their lot" who wind up "screwing up in every way." It's like a "WhatsApp-era Los Olvidados, with "energy to spare" but a "tonal discontinuity" that "scuppers the film," oscillating between "goofy comedy, hard-nosed violence and wildly overplayed melodrama."