CANNES 2023 - remote notes

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes...


ROBERT DENIRO AND LEONARDO DICAPRIO

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (Martin Scorsese)
Bradshaw: "Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone star in this macabre western about serial murders among the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, which reflects the erasure of Native Americans from the US. . . Martin Scorsese’s western true-crime thriller is about the US’s Osage murders of the early 1920s, based on the nonfiction bestseller by David Grann. With co-writer Eric Roth, Scorsese crafts an epic of creeping, existential horror about the birth of the American century, a macabre tale of quasi-genocidal serial killings which mimic the larger erasure of Native Americans from the US." It's "an instant American classic." Five stars from Bradshaw. GUARDIAN. Peter Debruge (Variety) judges it to be "overlong" but "never slow." David Rooney (Hollywood Reporter) calls it "epic" and "searing." Also with Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser.

FOUR DAUGHTERS (Kaouther Ben Hania)
(GUARDIAN:) "Fact and fiction mix in mother’s heartbreak over Islamic State... Actors and real people re-enact the past to understand why two daughters left Tunisia to fight for IS in Syria, leaving the rest of the family behind". A unique hybrid "metafiction" (as Jessica Kiang calls it in her Variety review) with a troubling topic, for sure, but only three stars from Bradshaw. Kiang gives a through description and may like FOUR DAUGHTERS rather better. She says it "may operate better on a scene-to-scene basis than as a holistic narrative," but that "within those individual scenes there are plosive little puffs of insight" that are "sometimes provocative, sometimes moving, and sometimes, unexpectedly, very funny." Not sure whether the underlying theme of having children who disappear to become terrorists is served though.