A little Indy film premiered today on the Croisette, but since you’ll all be seeing that later this week anyway, I figured we’d give it a miss and move straight on into the artsy stuff. Sound good? Okay…
First up is Matteo Garrone’s crime saga Gomorrah, playing in competition. Here’s ScreenDaily’s Lee Marshall’s take on the film- “Probably the most authentic and unsentimental mafia movie ever to come out of Italy , Gomorrah is a courageous, bruising and harrrowing ride. But the film suffers from its own bravery… Like the white powder used and traded by many of its protagonists, Gomorrah provides a kick-in-the-head rush but no lasting buzz.”
Next, here’s Jay Weissberg in Variety on Brilliante Mendoza’s Serbis, also in competition- “Presumably Mendoza is looking to use one family’s economic struggle and indifference to the sordidness around them as a metaphor for Filipino society as a whole, though his slice-of-life realism often feels more exploitative than enlightening, unlike his superior “Foster Child.””
Moving to films outside of competition, Tom Mes weighs in on Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata in Midnight Eye- “Anyone familiar with Kurosawa's body of work will know that it is often the very real ills of society and its people that give his films their power and their chill… Tokyo Sonata is the ultimate expression of this quality of Kurosawa's cinema. As mentioned, it contains no supernatural elements, no ghosts, killers or monstrous flora and fauna. Yet it is without doubt the most terrifying film Kiyoshi Kurosawa has ever made. It is terrifying because it is about us.”
Here’s Ty Burr on the seniors-fucking drama Cloud 9- “If you saw this story cast with 20-year-olds or 40-year-olds, it would taste like stale soap, but played out with characters in the evening of their lives -- when none of them expected an erotic thunderbolt to knock the table over -- the drama seems fresh and freshly lived.”
Finally, the one and only Glenn Kenny on Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser- “The plot twists to mount tragedy on tragedy (did I mention the captive woman has an adorable seven-year-old daughter), along the way upending genre conventions that even the most seasoned moviemaker messes with at his or her own peril. Without giving too much away, the last twenty minutes had my seatmates and I muttering “Jesus!” over and over.”