Cannes winds down. What's winning the Palme?

by Nathaniel R

Margot Robbie at Cannes for "Once Upon a Time in..."There are 21 titles competing for the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. We've already talked about seven titles. Pedro Almodovar's Pain & Glory (Spain) is a potential prize winner (and a legit Oscar hopeful) and Mati Diop's Atlantique (France/Senegal), and Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (France) could be the key films in ensuring prizes to female directors (something Cannes has historically been bad at) since they were both extremely well-received.

In addition to those three potential Palme d'Or or Best Director winners (Cannes most important prizes), Ladj Ly's contemporary French drama Les Misérables and Kleber Mendonça Filho's Brazilian oddity Bacurau are also threats for jury love.  Diao Yinan's The Wild Goose Lake and Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die got decent notices but we don't expect prizes there.  

With Cannes ending this weekend we've run out of time so here are quick notes on responses to the other 14 Competition titles and our predictions after the jump...

COMPETITION TITLES

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Linky Pudding

Buzzfeed It's official Will & Grace (& Karen & Jack) is returning to NBC for a ninth season. The series ended on May 18th, 2006 over 10 years ago but their recent one-off election special got everyone excited again. 
AV Club supposedly that long hinted at Eastern Promises sequel will start shooting in only two months and supposedly Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassell will return. We'll believe this when I see it but would be happy to do so
Criterion Ira Sachs on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's classic Fox and His Friends

Arnaud Trouvé offers up César nomination predictions. If you can read French you'll enjoy it more
THR It's Octavia Spencer for "Woman of the Year" and Ryan Reynolds for "Man of the Year" at Harvard's annual Hasty Puddings celebration. Someone cast them in a rom-com together!
Coming Soon Sony Pictures Animation slate to come from The Smurfs onward
About Last Night a long lost interview/profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov from 1998. Just because! 
Boy Culture Betty White interviewed for her 95th birthday this week
Paste Manuel on One Day at a Time's successful resuscitation of the theater/tv hybrid of the multi-cam sitcom
Decider in Joe Reid's new Oscar column he talks to me about three Oscar races: Actress, Director, and Supporting Actor. Here's an excerpt:

My fantasy is that Ralph Fiennes, easily the single most Oscar-worthy actor who can’t seem to ever catch Oscar’s eye, is nomination morning’s biggest shock for A Bigger Splash. The key word in that sentence being “fantasy”.

Interview: Paulina García on Her Favorite Actresses and the Political Relevance of 'Little Men'

by Jose Solis

Audiences fell in love with Paulina García as the romantic heroine in Gloria, the Chilean sensation that won her the Best Actress award at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival and other honors along the way (including a nomination here). In that film she gave a delightful performance as a woman ready to find purpose in a life that others thought had lost all meaning. Where in Gloria she exuded a sincere need of approval and warmth, Leonor, her character in Ira Sachs’ Little Men is just the opposite. She’s a woman in full control of her emotions and moods, she seems a little bit too calculating to Brian (Greg Kinnear) who has just inherited a house from his late father Max, from whom Leonor rented a commercial space, and finds himself in the position of having to raise her rent. She’s also intimidating to her son Tony (Michael Barbieri) who lowers his head when asking her for permission to go hang out with his new friend Jake (Theo Taplitz) who happens to be Brian’s son.

But in García’s richly layered performance we see a woman on the edge, she’s about to lose everything she’s worked her entire life for and she refuses to go down without a battle. García is the kind of actor who is eloquent even when she’s not speaking, one of her glances can be more devastating than a Shakespearean soliloquy, a simple “no” from Leonor can contain an entire life history. I had the opportunity to speak to her from her home in Chile, to discuss her work with Sachs, actresses she loves, and why Leonor is such an important character for 2016...

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Review: Ira Sach's "Little Men"

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Feeling fatigued by summer movie season's emphasis on loud and flashy but ultimately empty spectacles? You're in luck. Little Men, now playing in limited release, is the perfect antidote: quiet but insightful, memorable and substantive. It's not a spectacle by any means but you should still see it inside the movie theater because it's the kind of careful storytelling that benefits from being fully inside of it. Getting lost in a story is much easier to accomplish in the pages of a great novel or the dark of a movie theater than if you wait around to Netflix and chill. The movie comes to us from one of our best LGBT directors, Ira Sachs. The New York based writer/director made his feature debut 20 years ago with The Delta (1996) but recently he's been on quite a roll.

Little Men is not an adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott sequel to Little Women, but it does feel like a rich unexpected sequel to a more contemporary future classic. Ira Sach's last film was the moving gay seniors drama Love is Strange starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina whose marriage at the beginning of the film sets off a surprising chain of events which leaves them homeless and at the mercy of friends and relatives. That beautiful movie ended, rather intuitively, with a wordless and narratively inconsequential scene in which we followed their young nephew on his skateboard down the streets of the city at magic hour. The image was rapturous and watery... or rather just rapturous; I was watching it through cascading tears was all. [More...]

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Ira Sachs and Cary Fukunaga Team Up To Bring '80s East Village AIDS Drama to TV

by Daniel Crooke

When mulling over Ira Sachs’ last handful of films – the intimately sketched, ephemeral epics of the heart, body, and soul, Keep The Lights On and Love is Strange, as well as his upcoming Little Men – a jokey poke from David Wain’s They Came Together immediately pops to mind: New York, a common setting between Sachs’ three aforementioned stories, “it’s almost like another character in the movie!”

After chronicling the city through a queer lens from the 1990s until now, Sachs will join forces with Cary Fukunaga to wind the clock back another decade to bring Christodora to the small screen – a interlocking character drama set in a 1980s East Village apartment building, built around devastation and communal connection in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Props to Sachs, for his New York stories always incorporate the city into the narrative in a way that isn’t only about iconographic lip service; his characters and their dilemmas could only exist within these urban surroundings, which creates deep internal and external senses of environmental exploration, whether through hard drugs, real estate, or gentrification.

Based on the novel of the same name, which was just released earlier this week, Christodora will be directed by Sachs and produced by Fukunaga via his production company, Parliament of Owls. [Side note: this company name in and of itself sounds like a creative collaboration between a lofty, Lincoln-mode Spielberg and Zack Snyder’s Ga-Hoole.] We don’t yet have a release date but fingers crossed that the limited series hits our televisions, tablets, very tiny screens, etcetera by 2017.

Have you picked up a copy of Christodora yet? What should we expect from Sachs’ first foray into television series?