Sunday, May 23, 2010

Cannes Review: More Awards, Tender Son, Burnt By the Sun 2

Robert here, scouring the internet to give you the latest on the goings on in Cannes.  The first awards and final reviews are trickling in.

Awards!
  • The top Cinefondation award goes to The Top Sellers says IndieWIRE 
  • In a movie that's less than shocking though I'm sure well deserved, Gregg Araki's Kaboom wins the first Queer Palm.  France 24.

In Competition


  • The Exodus - Burnt By the Sun 2 Nikita Mikhalkov's follow up to his 1994 Oscar winning film, premiered recently in Russia with a massive thump.  The same can be said of Cannes.  According to Variety, viewers "won't have to be experts on Soviet history to see this is jingoistic, proselytizing, badly acted twaddle"And according to The House Next Door "The entire movie is nonstop bombast, with huge battles, epic widescreen vistas, silent-film performances, and one of the most absolutely ridiculous scores I've ever heard in a movie."
  • Tender Son - The Frankenstein Project This Hungarian film deals with the return of a long lost son and is loosely based on Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. "Though the film lacks the narrative glue provided by character evolution, many of the individual sequences are strong," says Variety.  And ScreenDaily notes "Though displaying the visual sure-handed confidence already evident in Delta carries him along for a while, the script doesn’t quite manage to deliver the dramatic impact"