Michael Haneke's "Happy End" Gives An Unhappy First Glance

With just about two weeks to go before its seaside premiere at the 70^th annual Cannes Film Festival, the first image for Michael Haneke’s Happy End – his latest cold dose of cruel reality – has landed as hard as the realization that one day we will all die, and most likely alone. Of course, Haneke returns to Cannes this year a reigning champ, double-fisting Palmes d’Or after his last films to grace the Competition – The White Ribbon and Amour – emerged victorious. The question on many minds going into this year’s festival is whether he’ll win the top prize for a third time and break the all-time record he holds alongside fellow international auteurs Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Bille August, Emir Kusturica, Shohei Imamura, the Dardennes brothers, and last year’s surprise winner Ken Loach.

Happy End reunites Haneke with two performers who have arguably given career-best performances under his clinician’s gaze: Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher herself, and Amour’s Jean-Louis Trintignant; familiar faces Toby Jones and Mathieu Kassovitz round out the cast alongside fellow first-timers Franz Rogowski and Fantine Harduin. While little is known of the plot’s particulars, we do know that Happy End focuses on a French bourgeois family living comfortably in the port town of Calais as the European refugee crisis washes ashore in their midst, considerably less comfortably. The image above shows our main cast dining al fresco around a white-on-white-on-white table in the fashionably casual spring wear you’d expect from the seaside privileged, a breeze surely blowing somewhere in the air. Meanwhile, you can tell by their gazes of curious dispassion that you’re unmistakably inside a Michael Haneke film. Of all of his frown-triggering films to debut at Cannes in the main Competition – Funny Games (’97), Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Caché, The White Ribbon, and Amour – which sends your soul spiraling the deepest and darkest, and why?

Tribeca 2017: The Endless

And here's Jason Adams finally report from Tribeca Film Festival though Nathaniel has a few more to go...

If you loves puns as much as I love puns you'll understand when I find myself in a bit of a mental pickle when a film I don't particularly enjoy comes along and it's called The Endless. On the one hand it's just far too easy, riffing on how "endless" you found the experience of sitting through the film to be. On the other... it's the base level humor of puns that we're talking about here. This ain't precisely elliptical rocket science stuff. You can go low when they go low.

But even worse for this pun-lover is it's not particularly true either, that The Endless feels endless, and so we're stuck somewhere in between. Kind of like the characters in The Endless find themselves! Whoa. If that blew your mind then have I got a movie for you...

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Thoughts I Had: First images from "Murder on the Orient Express"

To Entertainment Weekly the honor of introducing us, or re-introducing us rather, to the characters of Murder on the Orient Express. The Agatha Christie book was first published in 1934, got a very popular Oscar loved film adaptation forty years later and another forty-plus after that it'll be back in movie theaters again with a brand new cast. 

After the jump a mega post about this cover and the adjacent character photos that came with it... 

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Henson and McCarthy team up for "The Happytime Murders"

By Robert Balkovich

Melissa McCarthy has been positioning herself as one of the great comedic actors of the 21st century for quite some time now. Like most stars she has her share of hits (The Heat, Spy) and misses (Tammy, The Boss), but even if the movie flops, McCarthy always brings it. On that note, be extremely excited about her newest project:, a puppet/human hybrid dark R rated comedy directed by heir to the Muppets Brian Henson called The Happytime Murders...

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Would you rather...?

@madonna I ❤️you. No other caption needed

A post shared by Sarah Paulson (@mssarahcatharinepaulson) on May 2, 2017 at 11:48am PDT

I can't ask a 'would you rather' with Sarah Paulson spotting Madonna at the Met Gala as an option because it would win in a landslide. Obviously anyone in their right mind would choose that.

So you get a second option.

Would you rather:

...eat a watermelon with Lindsay Lohan?
...have a wrap party with Daniel Wu?
...hang out in Uma Thurman's trailer?
...paint on/with (?) Ronnie Kroell?
...recover from jet lag with Alan Cumming?
... "walk" dogs with Doona Bae?
... or museum it with Gabby Sidibe?

PICTURES AFTER THE JUMP TO HELP YOU DECIDE.

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