Letterboxd — Your life in film

FOR A FESTIVAL MARKED BY POLITICS -- FROM THE guards sweeping security wands over audience members to the screens filled with war and suffering -- The Pianist perhaps seemed a safe choice for the Palme d'Or. Yet in a festival laden with good movies but absent any major revelation, neither did it seem especially wrong. Indeed, most of the overtly political films disappointed on some level. The worst by far was Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, a morass of reductive…

Damned with faint praise were The Son, another morality tale from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta); Unknown Pleasures, an epic of ennui from Jia Zhangke, the prodigiously talented Chinese director of the 2000 festival's discovery, Platform; and David Cronenberg's Spider, about a mentally ill man struggling against his own demons. In a normal week, any one of these three titles would be greeted with enthusiasm, but instead, in the hothouse atmosphere of Cannes, they were found wanting, mostly because they…

Damned with faint praise were The Son, another morality tale from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta); Unknown Pleasures, an epic of ennui from Jia Zhangke, the prodigiously talented Chinese director of the 2000 festival's discovery, Platform; and David Cronenberg's Spider, about a mentally ill man struggling against his own demons. In a normal week, any one of these three titles would be greeted with enthusiasm, but instead, in the hothouse atmosphere of Cannes, they were found wanting, mostly because they…

Damned with faint praise were The Son, another morality tale from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta); Unknown Pleasures, an epic of ennui from Jia Zhangke, the prodigiously talented Chinese director of the 2000 festival's discovery, Platform; and David Cronenberg's Spider, about a mentally ill man struggling against his own demons. In a normal week, any one of these three titles would be greeted with enthusiasm, but instead, in the hothouse atmosphere of Cannes, they were found wanting, mostly because they…

Damned with faint praise were The Son, another morality tale from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta); Unknown Pleasures, an epic of ennui from Jia Zhangke, the prodigiously talented Chinese director of the 2000 festival's discovery, Platform; and David Cronenberg's Spider, about a mentally ill man struggling against his own demons. In a normal week, any one of these three titles would be greeted with enthusiasm, but instead, in the hothouse atmosphere of Cannes, they were found wanting, mostly because they…

Damned with faint praise were The Son, another morality tale from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta); Unknown Pleasures, an epic of ennui from Jia Zhangke, the prodigiously talented Chinese director of the 2000 festival's discovery, Platform; and David Cronenberg's Spider, about a mentally ill man struggling against his own demons. In a normal week, any one of these three titles would be greeted with enthusiasm, but instead, in the hothouse atmosphere of Cannes, they were found wanting, mostly because they…

Damned with faint praise were The Son, another morality tale from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta); Unknown Pleasures, an epic of ennui from Jia Zhangke, the prodigiously talented Chinese director of the 2000 festival's discovery, Platform; and David Cronenberg's Spider, about a mentally ill man struggling against his own demons. In a normal week, any one of these three titles would be greeted with enthusiasm, but instead, in the hothouse atmosphere of Cannes, they were found wanting, mostly because they…

GIVEN THE WOES ON PARADE AT FILM FESTIVALS, where tears flow as freely as stage blood, it's not surprising that critics tend to embrace comedies like baby blankets. Aki Kaurismäki's charming if slight The Man Without a Past became an immediate favorite (it ended up winning second prize), and while critics were split when it came to Paul Thomas Anderson's lazy riff on an Adam Sandler comedy, Punch-Drunk Love, the film was quickly crowned a conceptual coup. (Anderson shared the…

GIVEN THE WOES ON PARADE AT FILM FESTIVALS, where tears flow as freely as stage blood, it's not surprising that critics tend to embrace comedies like baby blankets. Aki Kaurismäki's charming if slight The Man Without a Past became an immediate favorite (it ended up winning second prize), and while critics were split when it came to Paul Thomas Anderson's lazy riff on an Adam Sandler comedy, Punch-Drunk Love, the film was quickly crowned a conceptual coup. (Anderson shared the…

GIVEN THE WOES ON PARADE AT FILM FESTIVALS, where tears flow as freely as stage blood, it's not surprising that critics tend to embrace comedies like baby blankets. Aki Kaurismäki's charming if slight The Man Without a Past became an immediate favorite (it ended up winning second prize), and while critics were split when it came to Paul Thomas Anderson's lazy riff on an Adam Sandler comedy, Punch-Drunk Love, the film was quickly crowned a conceptual coup. (Anderson shared the…