The Lost Generations of Japanese Cinema by Stéphane du Mesnildot for Issue #715

What's new in Japan? This year, neither the Venice Film Festival (zero films) nor Cannes could provide an answer, nor even suggest a vague trend, except perhaps one of apathy. In Cannes, Kore-eda's Our Little Sister and Naomi Kawase's An were in competition, two weak works by filmmakers selected in 2014 and 2013 respectively. The only real event would have been Kiyoshi Kurosawa's entry into the official…

Cannes Film Festival Awards: History Lessons by Marcos Uzal for Issue #832

The highly uneven quality of this year's Cannes competition, along with the absence of a clear standout film that would have garnered universal acclaim, made predicting the awards difficult. That Cristian Mungiu's Fjord and Andrei Zvyagintsev's Minotaur would win the two most prestigious prizes, the Palme d'Or and the Grand Prix respectively, was, however, the most predictable scenario. These films belong to a genre highly suited to the…

Vote McCay by Fernando Ganzo for Issue #827

This is a film about which the following lines will not be of much use. Not that there isn't something to say about Ella McCay or James L. Brooks, who returns to cinema here fifteen years after How Do You Know (to grasp the magnitude of this absence, one need only consider that Jack Nicholson played one of the main roles). But one has the feeling that words would weigh down the…

By Hélène Boons for Issue #829

Yet another adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel, toning down its cruelty once celebrated by Bataille, a poorly baked soufflé aspiring to be a BDSM macaron, Wuthering Heights ends with the death of Catherine (Margot Robbie) in childbirth. In the novel, this scene is meant to mark the passing of the torch from one generation to the next, leaving children to deal with the fallout from their parents' mistakes. Here, no children are born, as…