The festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, went to the Turkish drama Winter Sleep , but there were plenty of other excellent movies to be seen this year.
Clouds of Sils Maria
Olivier Assayas' movie about making movies is light and self-reflexive, but it also contains some fascinating analysis about making art versus making commercial fare, and about how someone's public persona can affect how people see the their work. Assayas pulled off a real casting coup in getting Kristen Stewart to play Valentine, the personal assistant to the successful actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche). Clouds of Sils Maria would be worth seeking out just to see the Twilight star, in character, talking gossip and bad press versus good press — all the pressures she's had to deal with during her career, applied to someone else.
Clouds of Sils Maria will be released in the United States by IFC Films on Dec. 1.
IFC Films
Mr. Turner
Beautiful art isn't always made by beautiful people, as Mike Leigh's biopic of British painter J. M. W. Turner attests. Timothy Spall, who takes on the film's eponymous role, makes the most of an unusual turn in the spotlight — he even nabbed the festival's Best Actor award for his performance as the gruff, squat painter, someone whose incredible talent didn't make him easy to get along with. But Spall allows Turner to be difficult yet vulnerable, a man beholden to no one and not prone to letting people in to understand what's going on inside his head. His late-in-life romance with Margate widow Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey) is sweet and halting, a glimpse of softness in a very prickly, very talented figure.
Mr. Turner will be released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics.
Sony Pictures Classics
Mommy
Brash and exuberant, 25-year-old French Canadian director Xavier Dolan's fifth (!) film is impressive as much for its sense of promise of greatness to come as for its poignant, funny depiction of a hard-to-control teenage boy Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) and his not-all-that-together single mom Die (Anne Dorval). Mommy feels messy, vital, and young, sometimes to its detriment, but no sequence at the festival felt as thrillingly alive as when, in the midst of a joyous montage set to Oasis' "Wonderwall," Steve reaches toward the camera and opens the 1:1 aspect ratio to widescreen, a glorious visual representation of the possibilities with which his life, at least for the moment, seems filled.
Mommy doesn't yet have U.S. distribution.
Metafilms
Wild Tales
This blacker than black Argentinian comedy from Damián Szifron is made up of six separate stories that share themes of revenge and loss of control, as well as jaw-dropping outrageousness. As the title promises, these vignettes are filled with unexpected twists, presenting seemingly banal setups (like a pair of travelers on a plane who learn they know someone in common or a city dweller whose car gets towed) and taking them to some dazzling and dark places. The first sequence, which takes place entirely before the opening credits, seems to set the film up with someone that will be impossible to top, but the last matches it — and everything in between is very solid as well.
Wild Tales will be released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics.
Sony Pictures Classics
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