Tribeca 2018: Obey

by Jason Adams

A pack of teenagers walk towards the camera in the opening shot of Obey - goofing off, sex talk, up to no good. Before you know it one of them has smashed a car window - improbably the window-smasher, all seemingly eight feet tall of him, doesn't even register at first. Leon (Marcus Rutherford) is all long limbs but vanishing into the periphery at the same time. A wallflower on skinny stalks, he's too big not to notice, and yet.

Leon uses those long limbs to awkwardly straddle a socio-economic divide from the dingy flats of no-rent London towards a more stable ground - he is trying, and failing, at upward mobility. There's a great small scene in the center of the film where he goes job-hunting on an unthought-through lark - he just randomly walks into the middle of an office and asks a man sitting at his computer for work. It doesn't go well.

Obey is smart enough to not play this as a joke...

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Tribeca 2018: To Dust

by Jason Adams

Shmuel is a sinner. He keeps repeating that. This is a sin, this is a sin. His children are convinced he's possessed, and he kind of is. He haunts graveyards; he rows them into the middle of a lake and makes them cry. He stuffs a plastic bag over the head of a large pig and suffocates it in front of a community college science professor. Things are nuts!

Shmuel's wife has just died from cancer, see, and he's having troubles reconciling what that means. Not in the spiritual sense - Shmuel is a Hasidic man, and such things probably ought to concern him more than they do - but in a more practical sense...

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Beauty Break: Cannes 2018 Jury

by Nathaniel R

"Avengers Cannes Jury Assemble!" Australia's champion actress Cate Blanchett, as you know, is presiding (and only the 9th actress to have the honor) but who will be joining her on the Croisette? The beautiful people are after the jump...

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Cannes 2018. The First Films Announced!

by Nathaniel R

Best Actress possibility? Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (About Elly, Paterson) and French star Emmanuelle Bercot headline the cast of "Girls of the Sun" about a Kurdish female battalion and the journalist embedded in their ranks

The initial Cannes lineups have arrived with films from their semi-typical list of famous international auteurs. Cannes has had problems leaning into super-male lineups (even when hugely acclaimed female directors are available) so it's worth noting that three of the first seventeen films announced in competition are from female filmmakers: Lebanon's Nadine Labaki, Italy's Alice Rohrwacher, and France's Eva Husson.

Which films are you most excited about? We've got the titles as well as a few details we could find about them after the jump...

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Cannes News: Everbody Knows, The Poster Unveils, and Netflix Whines

It's still wintry here in NYC (groan) but Spring technically arrived a little while ago which means that the Cannes film festival is right around the corner. Here are three pieces of news involving the festival which will run from May 8th to May 19th.

The Poster
This year's poster, pictured above, is a quad rather than a horizontal for some reason. Usually they come in both formats or are just horizontal. It's based on the work of stills photographer Georges Pierre and the Jean Luc Godard film Pierrot Le Fou (1965). That's two posters based on Godard films in fairly quick succession. Last year's poster featured 1960s Italian sex symbol Claudia Cardinale but the year before that the poster was in tribute to Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963)! 'Maybe Cannes ought to look beyond the 1960s and Godard sometime soon?,' he suggested with ribbing affection. 

Opening Night film and the Netflix controversy after the jump...

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