The cemetery of the title is one of ancient kings rumoured to lie under the hospital building. Like many of Apichatpong’s previous films, it conjures a present haunted by the past and did so with some of the festival’s most enchanting imagery hypnotic, neon-tinged nocturnal landscapes in particular. Weerasethakul’s remarkable and mysterious film centres on a middle-aged, lonely hospital volunteer Jenjira tending to soldiers who have succumbed to a sleeping sickness in a remote Thai city. Like Arabian Nights, Cemetery of Splendour is another film with political stories lurking beneath the surface. UK festival release 13 October 2015 (London Film Festival) / UK cinemas Spring 2016Īpichatpong Weerasethakul, France/United Kingdom / Germany/Malaysia/Thailand It’s a film about escapism that manages to mine the desperation and precarious lives of ordinary people too. If his denunciations of government austerity can seem too smugly farcical at times and some imaginative stories drift on too long, there is always a deliriously surprising turn in waiting, along with moments of outré visual experimentation (split screens, double exposure, upside-down landscapes) and Gomes’s trademark wistful pop soundtrack. Gomes is one of only a few auteurs to tackle the financial crisis head on and this portrait of his native Portugal mixes fiction, documentary (informed by journalists’ extensive research) and absurdism where most would favour intimate social realism… The most ambitious, industrious undertaking at this year’s Cannes was Gomes’s quasi-adaptation of the classic Middle Eastern folktales, a 381-minute maze-like triptych. (As mil e uma noites) Miguel Gomes, Switzerland/France/Germany/Portugal UK festival release 11 October 2015 (London Film Festival) / UK cinemas and VoD release Spring 2016 Given that the aesthetic of the Mad Max franchise has influenced visual culture every bit as much as that of Metropolis or Blade Runner (1982), it is remarkable that Fury Road manages to be at once familiar and yet consistently surprising, not to say astonishing. It is a movie of split-second decisions, cut-the-crap materialistic down to the very last particular, where every bullet in a clip (and the one in the chamber) and every centimetre of leeway counts. Max, Furiosa and the others speak of their world – or rather don’t speak of it – as people who are accustomed to living in it might, and save their breath for matters of practical exigency, which is to say survival. The camera is almost perpetually in motion, and when it isn’t, everything else is the dialogue, mostly shouted, is half-heard over the roar of a V8 engine… This isn’t haphazard storytelling: Miller knows that stopping off for exposition breaks will cost him valuable speed. UK cinema release date / DVD, Blu-ray and download 5 October 2015įrom humble, homemade origins, each Max movie has trebled in size, and Fury Road is the metastasised endpoint. ☞ Read Isabel Stevens’s first-look Cannes review Isabel Stevens, reviewing from Cannes in our July 2015 issue Surveying a battleground of power and control, the director knows all too well the potency of gesture and delivers some of his most devastating scenes in close-up: a possessive hand placed on a shoulder, a finger inching towards a phone’s hang-up button, and, most of all, the eyes of Carol and Therese, full of longing, staring out of car windows. The influences of the brooding worlds of Edward Hopper and Saul Leiter, and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, are still on show here but this is the film where Haynes steps out of their shadow. Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt has waited 63 years for an adaptation, but this is a tender, devastating romance between Rooney Mara’s wide-eyed shop assistant Therese and Cate Blanchett’s Carol, an elegant socialite and mother with everything to lose. ☞ Read Geoff Andrew’s first-look Cannes review Nick James, reviewing from Cannes in our July 2015 issue Its story, however, though well known to Chinese audiences, was not sufficiently clear for others to make a Palme winner. What’s so special about this oblique take on the historical wuxia epic are the long quiet sequences between the action, where the ability of trained murderer Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) to melt into the shadows creates a delicious dynamic between the sheer beauty of diaphanous, wafting curtains, billowing gauzes and waving tree branches and our anticipation that our gorgeous assassin will appear among them to stir things up. My favourite film at this year’s Cannes – and arguably the critics’ – was Hou’s The Assassin, which was worthy of its Best Director prize. (Nie Yinniang) Hou Hsiao-Hsien, France/Hong Kong/Taiwan UK festival release 11 October 2014 (London Film Festival) / UK cinema release 22 January 2016
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