Daniel Kasman, editor of MUBI’s Notebook, has landed in Cannes, and the first film he’s caught is, according to Robert Koehler, “the first work in the competition that doesn’t belong there.” We’ll get to that, but first, Danny finds in Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah’s After the Battle a “stable heft of construction and deep understanding of genre conventions and a digital, realist mise-en-scène [that] allows it to move unexpectedly and considerable complexity between engagement with mainstream melodramatic storytelling and integrating, sometimes fluidly, often abruptly, poetic observations and dubiously dramatic, but forceful, socio-political discussions…. In a way, Nasrallah is positing a very dynamic, challenging but accessible form of mainstream political cinematic storytelling—a goal intrinsically experimental. The film is thus an admirably active, thinking film, energetic and versatile, and altogether working on a level of intelligent, agile and unafraid engagement that is a terrific way to start the 2012 festival.”

But for Robert Koehler, writing for Doug Cummings’s newly revived Film Journey (hurrah!), “After the Battle hammers its messages home. Since those messages are about Egypt’s semi-revolution after Tahrir Square, they could be welcome and interesting. But he chooses to couch them in a poorly conceived tale with flatly drawn characters meant to represent their classes…. Much of After the Battle plays like a Ken Loach movie—as if we need two Ken Loach movies in the competition—and which may partly explain why it’s here.”

Blake Williams for Ioncinema: “Characters weak and empowered alike have argument after argument over seemingly every social issue in Egypt as it relates to the Mubarek regime’s influence, a fundamental flaw in the script that reduces what should be living, breathing humans into non-descript participants in what resembles the world’s most disorganized debate tournament. When someone does engage in an aspect of life that could be considered banal, it’s quickly escalated to an nth degree of tension and screaming, as if Nasrallah were worried his audience was getting bored with it. Just narratively disjointed enough to be certifiably unconventional, there is little to justify this bloated work’s existence other than the obvious historical source that spawned it.”

“It takes a special kind of dud to make the immediacy of the Arab Spring seem trite and spineless, especially since the ripples from that massive uprising still reverberate throughout the Middle East,” writes Glenn Heath Jr. at Press Play. “But that’s exactly what After the Battle achieves.”

Yousry Nasrallah's 'After the Battle'

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Deborah Young admires the film’s “intelligence and passionate boldness.” The set-up: “The impetuous Rim (Meena Chalaby) goes with her friend Dina (Jordanian actress Phaedra) to distribute fodder to hungry horses in the ancient village of Nazlet, in the shadow of the Pyramids. Now that the tourists who once hired them have disappeared, the horsemen are so poor they can no longer afford to feed their mounts. Here she meets the strapping, guileless rider Mahmoud (Bassem Samra) and they exchange a forbidden kiss in the night. Their promised affair fizzles, without completely dying out, when Rim discovers he has a family and tries to educate the lot to participate in the revolution. Tahrir Square has forever changed their lives, though not for the better, because Mahmoud was pulled off his horse while attacking the demonstrators and beaten. A video of his humiliation is on You Tube, for which his sons are mocked and beaten in school. His spirited young wife Fatma (Nahed El Sebai) just wants things to return to normal.”

“After the Battle finally reaches an enthralling representation of community activism with its climactic scene, set at an actual protest—but by then it’s too late to enliven the overall experience.” Eric Kohn at indieWIRE: “To be fair, Nasrallah faces a tough proposition from the outset, when one considers the challenge of developing any kind of cogent story around the impact of the Egyptian uprising (or the Arab Spring at large), as it remains in the midst of great change but has yet to prove that true change has in fact taken place. That sense of ambiguity is exactly why ½ Revolution and Tahrir contained such stunning immediacy and “After the Battle” fails to make the drama stick: Nasrallah never brings the same intensity to the fiery topic that its heroine regards with such extreme convictions.”

More from Drew McWeeny (HitFix) and Jay Weissberg (behind Variety‘s paywall).

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.

“Laurent Bouzereau’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex and often controversial life of director Roman Polanski, culled from some 20 hours of conversation filmed at Polanski’s Gstaad estate during his house arrest at Zurich’s film festival in 2009.” Screen‘s Mark Adams: “The film—which had a ‘secret’ world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival last year—has a Special Screening in Cannes, and while unlikely to spark headlines, it is a gripping film biography of an intriguing, challenging and talented filmmaker.”

“In a film blessed with a subject who is complex and charismatic, forthcoming and surprisingly sympathetic, the major problem is Polanski’s painfully ingratiating on-camera interviewer, Andrew Braunsberg,” finds David Rooney, writing for the Hollywood Reporter. “A close friend since 1964, Braunsberg served as Polanski’s producer on Macbeth, The Tenant and What?… In more skilful hands, this might have been an eloquent testament to an artist widely considered to have paid his debt during 35 years of physical exile and personal vilification. To some extent, it achieves that, due to Polanski’s candor, his still emotionally raw recollections of painful episodes from his life and his assessment without self-pity of the misdemeanors that landed him in hot water. But those merits are too often undercut by Braunsberg’s maddeningly leading interview style. Neither the people in favor of Polanski being granted unconditional liberty nor the moral watchdogs still clamoring for him to be brought to justice are likely to have their opinion swayed as a result of this ineffectual package.”

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw finds that Polanski is “fluent, passionate and moving about his childhood wartime experiences in Occupied Poland…. I didn’t realize how closely the 2002 film The Pianist was based on precise childhood memories of the Krakow ghetto. It is the film he says he is proudest of now. That may perplex admirers of his (surely superior) works Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. But those films were created by a dark, troubled, brilliant filmmaker—a persona replaced, here, by a more statesmanlike figure who prefers to revisit an historical era of childhood which, however tragic and horrifying and traumatized, appears more important, and is the one in which his own innocence was absolute.”

The AFP reminds us that “Polanski, himself expected in the Cannes festival Monday to present a restored version of his 1979 film Tess, is planning a film about one of the most high-profile miscarriages of justice in French history, the Dreyfus affair.”

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.

It’s not unusual to see a flurry of announcements for new projects as a major festival like Cannes opens, but heavens. The biggest and most pleasant surprise has to be that Alain Resnais, who turns 90 on June 3 and, of course, will see his newest film, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet! (trailer), premiere in Competition on Monday, is already setting up his next project. Aimer, boire et chanter will be a comedy based on Alan Ayckbourn’s play Life of Riley, reports Elsa Keslassy: “Jean-Louis Livi, who is producing via his Paris-based F Comme Film, tells Variety that Chanter is a comedy in the vein of Smoking/No Smoking, also based on an Ayckbourn play. Cast has yet to be locked. ‘With Alain every film is very different,’ said Livi. ‘[You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!] deals with life, love, death and the hereafter, while Chanter will be an uplifting comedy with some acid moments.’” Resnais will once again collaborate on the screenplay with Laurent Herbiet and shooting is scheduled for early 2013.

Sticking with France for the moment, Screen‘s Melanie Goodfellow reports that Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance) will direct a biopic on French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, focusing on the years between 1965 and 1976. Thomas Bidegain, who co-wrote The Prophet and Rust and Bone with Jacques Audiard, will collaborate with Bonello on the screenplay.

John Woo will direct and produce a remake of Seijun Suzuki‘s Youth of the Beast (1963), and Nancy Tartaglione has the press release at Deadline London. Woo: “This remake is my salute to the great films and filmmakers produced by Nikkatsu’s 100 years in cinema history.”

Terrence Malick’s “forthcoming, long-untitled film with Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams (one of three he’ll be putting out over the next couple of years) will henceforth be known as To the Wonder,” reports Sean O’Neal at the AV Club: “It’s been rumored as even more experimental than The Tree of Life, even though it has a fairly straightforward plotline about Affleck as a philanderer who has a ‘hot-and-heavy’ affair—hence its R rating for ‘some sexuality/nudity’—that leads to a green card marriage with a European woman, only to have his life further complicated after he begins to have feelings for a longtime acquaintance (played by McAdams) in his Oklahoma hometown.”

Aaron Sorkin will be writing the adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography Steve Jobs, reports Chris Eggertsen at HitFix.

Greg Mottola may be adapting Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot for producer Scott Rudin. Angie Han has details and background at /Film.

Julia Leigh has already written her own followup to 'Sleeping Beauty'

With a little financial help from Screen Australia, Nash and Joel Edgerton will be turning Nash’s 2005 short Lucky into a feature and Julia Leigh will adapt her 2008 novel, Disquiet. Simon Dang has details at the Playlist, where Kevin Jagernauth reports that Scott Z. Burns, who wrote Contagion and The Bitter Pill for Steven Soderbergh, will be writing the sequel to the surprise hit of last summer, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

“Hot on the heels of the announcement that spooky Isabelle Fuhrman will headline David Gordon Green’s long-discussed-but-now-actually-happening Suspiria remake, comes word that several more actors have joined the cast,” notes Drew Taylor, also at the Playlist. “ScreenDaily reports that international treasure Isabelle Huppert has joined the cast of Suspiria alongside Janet McTeer, Michael Nyqvist and Antje Traue.”

At Movies.com, Alison Nastasi reports that, in his capacity as a professor at NYU, James Franco will be “overseeing a poetry-inspired project for NYU grad students that will result in two anthology features, according to indieWIRE. Award-winning American poet C.K. Williams’s 1983 book Tar—set around the poet’s experience with the Three Mile Island nuclear-reactor accident—and Stephen Dobyns’s National Poetry Series award-winner Black Dog, Red Dog will be the focus of the works…. Talents like Jessica Chastain and Mila Kunis are already flocking to the Williams project, while Olivia Wilde, Chloe Sevigny, and Whoopi Goldberg are focused on the Dobyns work.”

“Sony Pictures Classics has acquired North American rights to Susanne Bier’s romantic comedy Love Is All You Need, starring Pierce Brosnan,” reports indieWIRE‘s Nigel M. Smith. “The film marks her follow-up to her Academy Award-winner In a Better World.” Also cast: Trine Dyrholm and Paprika Steen.

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.

Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Ed Norton, and Bruce Willis wonder what's up with the kids these days in Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom.'

By David Hudson

“What is childhood if not an island cut off from the grown-up world around it, and what is first love if not a secret cove known only to the two parties caught in its spell?” asks Variety‘s Peter Debruge in an early review of the film that’s opening the 65th Cannes Film Festival. “While no less twee than Wes Anderson’s earlier pictures, Moonrise Kingdom supplies a poignant metaphor for adolescence itself, in which a universally appealing tale of teenage romance cuts through the smug eccentricity and heightened artificiality with which Anderson has allowed himself to be pigeonholed…. While Anderson is essentially a miniaturist, making dollhouse movies about meticulously appareled characters in perfectly appointed environments, each successive film finds him working on a more ambitious scale. Co-written by Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom may not be set anywhere so exotic as a Mediterranean boat (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) or a trans-Indian train (The Darjeeling Limited), but it feels even more finely detailed than any of his previous live-action outings. Still, the love story reads loud and clear, charming those not put off by all the production’s potentially distracting ornamentation.”

“Even more than in his previous work, the dialogue and music possess an extreme degree of declarative definitiveness that works as an aural correlative to the visuals,” writes Todd McCarthy in the Hollywood Reporter. “Everything is in a box—a beautifully wrapped one, at that—allowing for no relaxation, casualness or spontaneous combustion. Except combustion is what takes place between Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a brainy orphan Scout, and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), the odd girl out in a family with three preoccupied younger boys, a checked-out dad (Bill Murray) and a mother (Frances McDormand) having an affair with a milquetoasty local cop, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis). A general panic is sparked when Sam goes AWOL from Camp Ivanhoe to run away with Suzy.”

Time Out London‘s Dave Calhoun will grant that “some of Anderson’s films, especially his last live-action work, The Darjeeling Limited, have felt too heavy on the furnishings and light on feelings, this one is so much more free, fresh and soulful…. This is an American story but it has an unmistakeable French flavour to it. The 1960s setting, the kids on the run and the wild plotting (a bit too wild in the final third), all give it a nouvelle vague feel. It’s an American Pierrot le Fou refashioned in retrospect with Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo as pre-teens.”

“Working with his long-time cinematographer Robert Yeoman, the director succeeds in turning young love into precisely the intense, transitory, impossibly idyllic sensation it can be in real life,” writes Tim Grierson for Screen. “Utilizing the Rhode Island locations to good effect, Moonrise Kingdom is like a live-action storybook of open skies and empty terrain in which Sam and Suzy can run free, creating a new life away from the sadness of their previous existence. Very consciously, Anderson signals the fact that this Eden can’t last, which gives the film such poignancy.”

Besides the trailer, there’s quite a lot of viewing out there to busy yourself with until Moonrise Kingdom opens in the States and parts of Europe on May 25. The official YouTube channel collects no less than five featurettes and six clips, all narrated by Bob Balaban. The Cannes Film Festival itself has collected a series of clips from Anderson’s earlier films illustrating his use of music. And Slate‘s Jacob Weisberg interviews Anderson; there are two parts. First, he’s got his own questions, and he then follows up with questions from readers. Anderson discusses, among other things, the influences on Moonrise, including Susan Cooper‘s series of books, The Dark Is Rising, and, musically, François Hardy, Benjamin Britten, and Leonard Bernstein.

More interviews with Anderson: Cath Clarke (Time Out London), Gregg Kilday (Hollywood Reporter) and Dennis Lim (New York Times).

Updates: The Telegraph‘s David Gritten: “If its ending feels faintly messy and rushed, Moonrise Kingdom (the name Sam and Suzy give their secret hideaway) is a worthy addition to Anderson’s canon—his deadpan wit meshes nicely with a generous view of human imperfections. A mood elevator of a movie, it’s an ideal opener to a sunny, blue-skies Cannes.”

“All the characters feel like they’re either older or younger versions of Anderson’s past creations,” writes David Jenkins at Little White Lies. “Murray retools that straight-from-the-golf-course-bar turn he perfected in Rushmore; the kids all feel like Tenenbaum juniors… Jacques Tati comes to mind at several points, not least due to the feeling that you’ll need to watch the film over and over to be able to unlock the jokes occurring in the background of each scene… [W]ith Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson has made a film about youth that feels like it was ripped from the overactive imagination of a 12-year-old. It’s like a Prairie Home Companion version of Romeo and Juliet as made by a raffish aesthete.”

Where the not-so-wild things are: 'Moonrise Kingdom.'

The BBC’s Kev Geoghegan has notes from the press conference, including Anderson’s comments on working with Bill Murray: “He’s just about the best person you could ever hope to have on a set with you. He’s a great ally, in my experience anyway, he’s someone you can rely on. You can say, ‘There’s a problem. Can you deal with this?’ And he’ll think of a way and go and handle it. Because he’s so funny, he’s the kind of person, if there was a mob that was going to try and destroy something, he’s one of the few people you could send to stop the mob and, depending on the circumstances, he’d have a very good shot.”

“It’s fun watching Anderson manipulate this superb cast, who deliver delicious, precisely scripted comic moments surrounded by such archaic 1965 props as walkie-talkies, megaphones and person-to-person split screen phone calls.” Anne Thompson: “As a sign of the times, the movie is one of the few in the festival shot on film (super 16). Anderson admits that it may be his last, as Technicolor stops processing film and the world goes digital. ‘Maybe there’s a great app that makes it look like film,’ he said, ‘but to my mind there is no substitute.’”

HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny finds that, with Moonrise, Anderson’s “at his very best, energized by the subject matter and blessed with a cast that came ready to play.”

“Among the filmmakers to emerge at the turn of the 21st century, Anderson was an intriguing oddity—lacking the grand ambition of Paul Thomas Anderson, the range and prolificacy of Soderbergh; shorter on hipster cred than Jonze or Gondry. Yet his aesthetic has been the most pervasive of all,” argues Tim Walker in the Independent. “As Tarantino defined the 1990s, so Anderson quietly claimed the 2000s. Some might argue that Anderson (PT) or Alexander Payne are equally influential, but their impact is hard to measure. Anderson (W)’s stylistic tics are unmistakable.”

“Nobody steals the show more than Bob Balaban in a handful of scenes as the local scientist predicting a storm that sets the stage for a dramatically exaggerated climax,” writes indieWIRE‘s Eric Kohn. “But Anderson movies have less to do with clever story twists than the relish the filmmaker brings to them. Within its first 15 minutes, Moonrise Kingdom nimbly employs a split screen, first-person mode of address, scenes flush with color schemes to indicate various moods and personality types, abruptly funny flashbacks and a camera that nimbly tilts from right to left—as if the entire Andersonian universe existed on a comic strip zipping before our eyes in real time.”

This month's cover boy, Wes Anderson.

“Where David Lynch finds a dark horror beneath the wholesome exterior, Anderson sees something else—something exotic but practical and self-possessed, a world that ticks along like an antique toy, much treasured by a precocious child.” The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw finds that Anderson’s “homemade aesthetic is placed at the service of a counter-digital, almost hand-drawn cinema, and he has an extraordinary ability to conjure a complete, distinctive universe, entire of itself. To some, Moonrise Kingdom may be nothing more than a soufflé of strangeness, but it rises superbly.”

“Moonrise Kingdom‘s opening scenes are vintage Wes Anderson,” writes Budd Wilkins at the House Next Door. “A series of pans and lateral tracks explores the Bishop household in studied tableaux, each isolated member of the family captured in their native habitat, while on a 45rpm record a disembodied voice guides listeners through the works of Benjamin Britten. Likewise, there’s a narrator (Bob Balaban) to guide us through Anderson’s film, in just one of many recursively referential (and, at times, painfully self-aware) touches. Examples could be further multiplied, but let’s stick with the Britten: Not only does his music recur in the epilogue that effectively bookends the film, but Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde, itself based on a medieval mystery play (see the Chinese puzzle box pattern emerge?), serves as an objective correlative for the acts of God or nature that dominate the second half. As the recorded voice intones late in the film, ‘Britten has taken the orchestra apart and now puts it back together again.’ Much the same could be said for Anderson’s direction and script work with co-writer Roman Coppola.”

“If anything defines all of Anderson’s work,” writes James Rocchi at the Playlist, “it’s that the kids seem awfully grown-up, and the grown-ups seem awfully childish. Sam and Suzy want to be adults, and know they aren’t there yet; the adults around them, in their own unhappy lives, seem to be looking on and saying ‘slow down.’ When Sam makes an excellent point, Captain Sharp sighs. ‘I can’t argue with you; then again, I don’t have to: You’re 12 years old.’ The film has the loose, playful feel of a light opera—the island’s name is no coincidence—but it’s interesting how the stakes stay high even as the leaping and laughing crank up to full-speed.”

“No matter how discontent Anderson’s latest film’s protagonists might feel, they are always in concert with the people who care for them,” notes Simon Abrams at Press Play. FirstShowing‘s Alex Billington: “This is one I liked, but didn’t love.”

You can listen to the press conference here.

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.

“Andrei Zvyagintsev‘s Elena is a tale of two apartments,” begins Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. “The film is bookended by shots that look in, covetously, on a spacious chrome, glass, and marble luxury flat that might be anywhere in prosperous Western Europe. In between, it commutes to a cramped unit in some exhausted-looking, distinctly Soviet-vintage apartment block with a view of a nuclear plant. Central to the movie is the distance, physical and psychological, and the mutual resentment, that exists between these spaces.”

“Zvyagintsev is able to get most of the necessary exposition out of the way in the first five evocative minutes,” writes Chuck Bowen in Slant. “A crow lands on the barren tree outside of an expensive and expansive residence. A middle-aged woman (the unforgettably wonderful Nadezhda Markina) awakes to the sound of an alarm clock. Tellingly, she’s sleeping on a couch. She takes a few deep breaths, resigns herself to the approaching day in a fashion that’s familiar to the deeply unhappy, and begins to comb her hair. She starts the breakfast tea and coffee and, more tellingly, proceeds to a bedroom to nudge an older man (Andrei Smirnov) awake who’s soon revealed through body language to be, at the least, a live-in lover. Eventually the couple sit down to breakfast and exchange a few pregnant not-quite-pleasantries that reveal that they’re somewhat recently married and that they mutually disapprove of how the other handles their adult child from prior relationships. We’re soon told that the woman is Elena and the gentleman is her husband, Vladmir, and it’s no accident that their association follows a series of rituals that are more characteristic of servant/master than wife/husband.”

“You are keenly aware of the distance between Elena, a former nurse from a proletarian background, and the imperious, hard-nosed Vladimir, whom she cared for while he recovered from peritonitis a decade earlier and then married.” Stephen Holden in the New York Times: “It’s not that they loathe each other. When he signals that he wants sex, she matter-of-factly obliges him…. Elena and Vladimir may live in splendor, but their upscale neighborhood is weirdly devoid of people. An ominous calm hangs over the area, except for the cawing of crows, which can be heard indoors as well as out. And the movie’s acute aural awareness of the animal kingdom within the city underscores its vision of Moscow as a jungle teeming with predatory wildlife.”

Benjamin Mercer in the L: “The director—whose first two films, The Return (2003, terrific) and The Banishment (2007, not released stateside), drew Tarkovsky comparisons, recently including their own footnote toward the end of Geoff Dyer‘s marathon Stalker recap, Zona—slides into the role of the contemporary-life anatomist here, showing the rottenness of an increasingly wealth-stratified society. As such, the rigorously composed Elena bears some resemblance to the grubbier motherland invective that has, in recent years, been imported from Russia for the American audience.”

Sam Smith's poster for 'Elena'

“Elena, in its concentrated austerity, often resembles a lost chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Ten Commandments-themed Decalogue,” finds Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. For Ioncinema‘s Nicholas Bell, Elena suggests “a film noir echoing Chekov’s class squabbles.”

“Even days after seeing Elena, I’m not sure how to feel about any of the characters, which I consider the highest compliment,” writes Tim Grierson for IFC. “Life isn’t simple. To capture it in all its complexity, Elena is heroic.”

Last summer, Eric Welles-Nyström attended Bergman Week on the island of Fårö and Cinespect is running a translation of his report for Rivista Studio. Zvyagintsev was, along with István Szábo and cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, a guest speaker. “I couldn’t wait to meet Zvyagintsev. Having picked up a pirated copy of  [The Return] during a high school trip to Rome in 2004 and having loved it deeply ever since, I consider Zvyagintsev to be one of the greatest modern directors. And besides admiring the distinctive style he has come to develop, I’ve always been intrigued by some of his very close resemblances to Bergman, as well: the reoccurring portrayals of weak, cowardly fathers; the strict usage of shadowless, natural light; and the lack of references to location or time, which deepens the mystique so perfectly in his first two films. Then one night, at last, after [The Return] was shown in an old, barn-turned-cinema, which had been built in the 1950s and still had its original movie posters on the walls, we were able to sit down and talk about his movies, his actors and his love for adventures—L’Avventura!”

Elena is at New York’s Film Forum through Tuesday, May 29, before it starts rolling out across the country throughout the summer. Zeitgeist Films has cities and dates. Last week, Adrian Curry spoke with Sam Smith about his poster design—and about his favorite movie posters of all time.

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.

“What is childhood if not an island cut off from the grown-up world around it, and what is first love if not a secret cove known only to the two parties caught in its spell?” asks Variety‘s Peter Debruge in an early review of the film that’s opening the 65th Cannes Film Festival. “While no less twee than Wes Anderson’s earlier pictures, Moonrise Kingdom supplies a poignant metaphor for adolescence itself, in which a universally appealing tale of teenage romance cuts through the smug eccentricity and heightened artificiality with which Anderson has allowed himself to be pigeonholed…. While Anderson is essentially a miniaturist, making dollhouse movies about meticulously appareled characters in perfectly appointed environments, each successive film finds him working on a more ambitious scale. Co-written by Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom may not be set anywhere so exotic as a Mediterranean boat (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) or a trans-Indian train (The Darjeeling Limited), but it feels even more finely detailed than any of his previous live-action outings. Still, the love story reads loud and clear, charming those not put off by all the production’s potentially distracting ornamentation.”

Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Ed Norton and Bruce Willis wonder what's up with kids these days in Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom'

“Even more than in his previous work, the dialogue and music possess an extreme degree of declarative definitiveness that works as an aural correlative to the visuals,” writes Todd McCarthy in the Hollywood Reporter. “Everything is in a box—a beautifully wrapped one, at that—allowing for no relaxation, casualness or spontaneous combustion. Except combustion is what takes place between Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a brainy orphan Scout, and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), the odd girl out in a family with three preoccupied younger boys, a checked-out dad (Bill Murray) and a mother (Frances McDormand) having an affair with a milquetoasty local cop, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis). A general panic is sparked when Sam goes AWOL from Camp Ivanhoe to run away with Suzy.”

Time Out London‘s Dave Calhoun will grant that “some of Anderson’s films, especially his last live-action work, The Darjeeling Limited, have felt too heavy on the furnishings and light on feelings, this one is so much more free, fresh and soulful…. This is an American story but it has an unmistakeable French flavour to it. The 1960s setting, the kids on the run and the wild plotting (a bit too wild in the final third), all give it a nouvelle vague feel. It’s an American Pierrot le Fou refashioned in retrospect with Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo as pre-teens.”

“Working with his long-time cinematographer Robert Yeoman, the director succeeds in turning young love into precisely the intense, transitory, impossibly idyllic sensation it can be in real life,” writes Tim Grierson for Screen. “Utilizing the Rhode Island locations to good effect, Moonrise Kingdom is like a live-action storybook of open skies and empty terrain in which Sam and Suzy can run free, creating a new life away from the sadness of their previous existence. Very consciously, Anderson signals the fact that this Eden can’t last, which gives the film such poignancy.”

Besides the trailer, there’s quite a lot of viewing out there to busy yourself with until Moonrise Kingdom opens in the States and parts of Europe on May 25. The official YouTube channel collects no less than five featurettes and six clips, all narrated by Bob Balaban. The Cannes Film Festival itself has collected a series of clips from Anderson’s earlier films illustrating his use of music. And Slate‘s Jacob Weisberg interviews Anderson; there are two parts. First, he’s got his own questions, and he then follows up with questions from readers. Anderson discusses, among other things, the influences on Moonrise, including Susan Cooper‘s series of books, The Dark Is Rising, and, musically, François Hardy, Benjamin Britten, and Leonard Bernstein.

More interviews with Anderson: Cath Clarke (Time Out London), Gregg Kilday (Hollywood Reporter) and Dennis Lim (New York Times).

Updates: The Telegraph‘s David Gritten: “If its ending feels faintly messy and rushed, Moonrise Kingdom (the name Sam and Suzy give their secret hideaway) is a worthy addition to Anderson’s canon—his deadpan wit meshes nicely with a generous view of human imperfections. A mood elevator of a movie, it’s an ideal opener to a sunny, blue-skies Cannes.”

“All the characters feel like they’re either older or younger versions of Anderson’s past creations,” writes David Jenkins at Little White Lies. “Murray retools that straight-from-the-golf-course-bar turn he perfected in Rushmore; the kids all feel like Tenenbaum juniors… Jacques Tati comes to mind at several points, not least due to the feeling that you’ll need to watch the film over and over to be able to unlock the jokes occurring in the background of each scene… [W]ith Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson has made a film about youth that feels like it was ripped from the overactive imagination of a 12-year-old. It’s like a Prairie Home Companion version of Romeo and Juliet as made by a raffish aesthete.”

Where the not-so-wild things are: 'Moonrise Kingdom'

The BBC’s Kev Geoghegan has notes from the press conference, including Anderson’s comments on working with Bill Murray: “He’s just about the best person you could ever hope to have on a set with you. He’s a great ally, in my experience anyway, he’s someone you can rely on. You can say, ‘There’s a problem. Can you deal with this?’ And he’ll think of a way and go and handle it. Because he’s so funny, he’s the kind of person, if there was a mob that was going to try and destroy something, he’s one of the few people you could send to stop the mob and, depending on the circumstances, he’d have a very good shot.”

“It’s fun watching Anderson manipulate this superb cast, who deliver delicious, precisely scripted comic moments surrounded by such archaic 1965 props as walkie-talkies, megaphones and person-to-person split screen phone calls.” Anne Thompson: “As a sign of the times, the movie is one of the few in the festival shot on film (super 16). Anderson admits that it may be his last, as Technicolor stops processing film and the world goes digital. ‘Maybe there’s a great app that makes it look like film,’ he said, ‘but to my mind there is no substitute.’”

HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny finds that, with Moonrise, Anderson’s “at his very best, energized by the subject matter and blessed with a cast that came ready to play.”

“Among the filmmakers to emerge at the turn of the 21st century, Anderson was an intriguing oddity—lacking the grand ambition of Paul Thomas Anderson, the range and prolificacy of Soderbergh; shorter on hipster cred than Jonze or Gondry. Yet his aesthetic has been the most pervasive of all,” argues Tim Walker in the Independent. “As Tarantino defined the 1990s, so Anderson quietly claimed the 2000s. Some might argue that Anderson (PT) or Alexander Payne are equally influential, but their impact is hard to measure. Anderson (W)’s stylistic tics are unmistakable.”

“Nobody steals the show more than Bob Balaban in a handful of scenes as the local scientist predicting a storm that sets the stage for a dramatically exaggerated climax,” writes indieWIRE‘s Eric Kohn. “But Anderson movies have less to do with clever story twists than the relish the filmmaker brings to them. Within its first 15 minutes, Moonrise Kingdom nimbly employs a split screen, first-person mode of address, scenes flush with color schemes to indicate various moods and personality types, abruptly funny flashbacks and a camera that nimbly tilts from right to left—as if the entire Andersonian universe existed on a comic strip zipping before our eyes in real time.”

This month's cover boy

“Where David Lynch finds a dark horror beneath the wholesome exterior, Anderson sees something else—something exotic but practical and self-possessed, a world that ticks along like an antique toy, much treasured by a precocious child.” The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw finds that Anderson’s “homemade aesthetic is placed at the service of a counter-digital, almost hand-drawn cinema, and he has an extraordinary ability to conjure a complete, distinctive universe, entire of itself. To some, Moonrise Kingdom may be nothing more than a soufflé of strangeness, but it rises superbly.”

“Moonrise Kingdom‘s opening scenes are vintage Wes Anderson,” writes Budd Wilkins at the House Next Door. “A series of pans and lateral tracks explores the Bishop household in studied tableaux, each isolated member of the family captured in their native habitat, while on a 45rpm record a disembodied voice guides listeners through the works of Benjamin Britten. Likewise, there’s a narrator (Bob Balaban) to guide us through Anderson’s film, in just one of many recursively referential (and, at times, painfully self-aware) touches. Examples could be further multiplied, but let’s stick with the Britten: Not only does his music recur in the epilogue that effectively bookends the film, but Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde, itself based on a medieval mystery play (see the Chinese puzzle box pattern emerge?), serves as an objective correlative for the acts of God or nature that dominate the second half. As the recorded voice intones late in the film, ‘Britten has taken the orchestra apart and now puts it back together again.’ Much the same could be said for Anderson’s direction and script work with co-writer Roman Coppola.”

“If anything defines all of Anderson’s work,” writes James Rocchi at the Playlist, “it’s that the kids seem awfully grown-up, and the grown-ups seem awfully childish. Sam and Suzy want to be adults, and know they aren’t there yet; the adults around them, in their own unhappy lives, seem to be looking on and saying ‘slow down.’ When Sam makes an excellent point, Captain Sharp sighs. ‘I can’t argue with you; then again, I don’t have to: You’re 12 years old.’ The film has the loose, playful feel of a light opera—the island’s name is no coincidence—but it’s interesting how the stakes stay high even as the leaping and laughing crank up to full-speed.”

“No matter how discontent Anderson’s latest film’s protagonists might feel, they are always in concert with the people who care for them,” notes Simon Abrams at Press Play. FirstShowing‘s Alex Billington: “This is one I liked, but didn’t love.”

You can listen to the press conference here.

A little romance in 'Moonrise Kingdom'

“As self-contained and narcissistic as, well, Cannes itself, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom proved to be a perfect opener for the world’s most important festival in its venerable 65th year,” writes Michal Oleszczyk at Hammer to Nail. “If anything, the director’s return to live action filmmaking after the successful 2009 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox only amplified his near-obsessive fastidiousness. So much so that Moonrise Kingdom can be counted as one of his best-controlled and most sustained efforts to date—even if after the movie is over you may feel you witnessed just one or two perfectly laid out shots of beautifully patterned paraphernalia too many.”

“Portraying Sam’s scoutmaster, who knows enough to hold his ever-present cigarette well away from a cache of fireworks, Edward Norton proves to be the cast’s ringer, perfectly at home with the stylized precision of Anderson’s preferred playing style,” notes the Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips.

“Plenty of films detail first love, but nothing short of George Roy Hill’s sweet A Little Romance (1979) has captured it with quite the originality and freshness of Anderson’s work here,” finds Pete Hammond at Box Office.

At the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Eugene Hernandez reminds us that the film’s set in 1965: “When the two young stars fall in love for the first time, the looming sense of what’s coming hangs over their burgeoning passion just as the society they are maturing into is about to see its own cultural shifts. ‘These characters are 12,’ filmmaker Wes Anderson explained, ‘When they are 18 they are going to be in a very different kind of America, I think. After so much stasis, there was change.’”

“When they run away, Suzy brings a kitten, a suitcase full of books about girls who have adventures, and a treasured pair of binoculars,” notes Kristin M. Jones in Film Comment. “Sam wears his dead mother’s pearl brooch, pinned to his uniform. Shadows seem to follow them, especially at moments when Moonrise Kingdom evokes darker movies. The armed Khaki Scouts who chase them through the woods are reminiscent of Lord of the Flies… But Suzy and Sam remain safe, as if they are children protected by a spell in a fairy tale.”

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed. Sign up for the email newsletter at fandor.com/daily.

Carlos Fuentes: Prolific and outspoken

“Carlos Fuentes, one of the most prolific and best known Spanish-language authors, has died,” reports Eyder Peralta for NPR. “His death was reported on Twitter by Mexican president Felipe Calderon.” Fuentes was 83. “In the United States, Fuentes is best known for his novel Gringo Viejo, or The Old Gringo, which was made into a film in 1989 starring Gregory Peck. Among his major literary awards was the Cervantes Prize in 1987.”

“His generation of writers, including Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, drew global readership and attention to Latin American culture during a period when strongmen ruled much of the region,” notes the AP. “The Death of Artemio Cruz, a novel about a post-revolutionary Mexico that failed to keep its promise of narrowing social gaps, brought Fuentes international notoriety. The elegant, mustachioed author’s other contemporary classics included Aura, Terra Nostra, and The Good Conscience…. Fuentes was often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel prize but never won one. A busy man, Fuentes wrote plays and short stories and co-founded a literary magazine. He was also a columnist, political analyst, essayist and critic. And he was outspoken. Once considered a Communist and sympathizer of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Fuentes was denied entry into the US under the McCarren-Walter Act. More recently, as a moderate leftist, Fuentes strongly opposed harsh policies against immigration and the war on terrorism in the US, though he expressed deep affection for the United States. He warned about Mexico’s religious right but also blasted Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as a ‘Tropical Mussolini.’”

From Books and Writers: “Fuentes has been often paired with the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, the original master of magic realism, of whom he has also written: ‘… he seemed to be literally looking inside himself, as if this were the only thing that counted in matters of sight,’ Fuentes said in ‘Borges in Action,’ ‘seeing outside being a totally frivolous affair.’ When Borges uses history as a basis for pure fantasy, Fuentes maintains a realistic stance of power and politics in Latin America—magical elements, myths of the past and wide range of cultural references are combined with social critique.”

Update, 5/16: The always-excellent complete review refers us to further remembrances and indexes its reviews of and roundups on Fuentes’s work.

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.

Michel Gondry’s new film will open the Directors’ Fortnight on Thursday. The official synopsis: “The We and the I is the heartfelt and comical story of the final bus ride home for a group of young high school students and graduates. As kids depart the bus for the last time, we get to learn about these graduates as they step into the world—their love, their conflicts, their despair and their hope.”

And here’s the new poster.

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.

By Kevin B. Lee

Chinese director Ying Liang cannot return to his country. On April 28, Ying debuted his film When Night Falls at the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea. The film is based on the true story of Yang Jia, who killed six policemen after allegedly suffering police brutality, and whose trial stirred controversy and protest over the fairness and due process of the legal system in China. As reported by David Hudson in the Keyframe Daily, after the film was shown in Jeonju, Ying’s family, in Shanghai, and his wife’s family, in Sichuan, were visited by Chinese authorities, who also tried “to buy the rights to the film.” Ying also learned that he would be arrested if he were to return to mainland China. He currently lives and works in Hong Kong, trying to manage the well-being of his relatives back home (asking them to document every interaction with local authorities), as well the fate of his new film.

When Night Falls has brought unprecedented scrutiny and pressure upon Ying Liang, but it’s not the first time his films have offered a sharply critical view of China’s societal dysfunction. Ying’s debut Taking Father Home examined the breakdown of families in the era of migrant labor. Good Cats views labor exploitation from the opposite end, following a young man’s entry into the inner circle of business and corruption in his hometown. Ying’s best feature, The Other Half, is perhaps the most thematically aligned with When Night Falls, as it also deals explicitly with the failure of China’s legal system to address the problems of its people. New Yorker film critic Richard Brody selected The Other Half as one of his ten best films of the 2000s, heralding Ying’s ability to bring a “laser-like analytical eye to the crossroads of private life and oppressive authority.” This video essay further explores the film and Ying’s ability to bring the “other half” of China into a stark spotlight.

Xiaofen attempts to lose herself in work in Ying Liang's 'The Other Half.'

TRANSCRIPT

“Women hold up half the sky,” goes the Chinese proverb. That’s one way to interpret the title of Ying Liang’s The Other Half, which is centered on the story of Xiaofen, a hapless young woman trying to hold her life together. Her personal life is a kind of trap, sandwiched between a no-good boyfriend caught in a downward spiral of drinking and gambling, and a proposed marriage arranged by her mother with a factory owner—a match that feels more like a business deal.

Xiaofen tries to lose herself in her work as a secretary in a law office, where prospective clients discuss their cases. This is where the title’s other meaning emerges. It’s in this office that we witness the other half of society, the one normally kept out of view, as messages of economic progress and social harmony are routinely broadcast in public. “The other half” is one of failing marriages and betrayed relationships, exploited workers and delinquent juveniles. Tradition buckles under new social and sexual dynamics: self-interest, distrust, and discontent.

‘The other half’ is one of failing marriages and betrayed relationships, exploited workers and delinquent juveniles. Tradition buckles under new social and sexual dynamics: self-interest, distrust, and discontent.

Director Ying Liang films these interviews with a deliberate crudeness that blends documentary realism with satirical caricature. It quickly becomes apparent how little these people understand how the legal system works, and how inadequate the law is in dealing with their problems. The law office is a stand-in for social institutions at large, barely maintaining its façade of order and justice against a tide of sweeping social upheaval.

That threat of upheaval literally explodes in the final act of the film, as an explosion in a chemical plant—one that announced new safety policies earlier in the film—threatens to wipe out the entire city. Director Ying Liang filmed The Other Half on a miniscule budget, yet he is able to convey the feeling of a metropolis on the verge of annihilation, with a directness that’s more chilling than a Hollywood blockbuster spectacle. In The Other Half, society is a bomb, whose ticking we ignore at our own peril.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog, Video Essayist for Fandor Keyframe, and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

André de Toth

Everyone seems to agree that Sâsvári Farkasfalvi Tóthfalusi Tóth Endre Antal Mihály was born on May 15 but there’s some dispute as to which year it was. Some say 1910, others 1913, but Wikipedia and the IMDb have settled on 1912, which would make today the 100th anniversary of his birth—so that’s the year we’re going with. We do know, of course, that he died on October 27, 2002; a few days later, Ronald Bergan wrote in the Guardian:

If we are to believe even a fraction of what has been written by and about the film director André de Toth…, then his life was even more exciting and varied than the plots of his movies. Having met him a few times in his 80s, I can only vouch for his extraordinary energy, passion and earthy humor, and the conviction with which he delivered his anecdotes.

These included stories of when he was taken for dead during a student riot in Vienna and woke up in the morgue; and how, when his girlfriend fell pregnant and her father whisked her away for an enforced abortion, de Toth saved her when he discovered her father visited male prostitutes and threatened blackmail. There was also the story of how during the war he fell in love with an anti-Nazi jewelery courier who had a passport made under the name of Mrs de Toth before embarking on a dangerous mission, and how the passport was returned to him covered in blood. Another told of how, while scouting for locations in 1973 in Egypt, he was kidnapped and interrogated by a group of young men who, because of his eye patch, thought he was Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan, until he revealed, literally, that he wasn’t Jewish.

Curiously, the one-eyed de Toth was married for eight years to Veronica Lake, whose “peekaboo” hairstyle gave the impression that she had only one eye, and he directed House of Wax (1953), the first horror film in 3D, the effects of which he couldn’t have seen.

But as Dave Kehr noted back in his days at the Chicago Reader, those “effects are done with playfulness, zest, and some imagination (they range from a barker batting paddleballs in your face to a murderer leaping from the row in front of you), making this the most entertaining of the gimmick 3Ds.” Later, in 2005, Kehr noted in passing that de Toth is a “great noir stylist,” and in 2009, Dan Sallitt reviewed Ramrod (1947) and Pitfall (1948) for MUBI. Picking up on Andrew Sarris’s notion that de Toth “had a knack and preference for depicting baseness and treachery,” he wrote, “I don’t know if I fully agree with that concept, but along the way he noted that de Toth’s villains speak quietly…. Quietness is sometimes character-specific in de Toth, a contribution to particular characterizations. But it is also a free-floating dramatic effect that de Toth employs because he likes the vibe. That a quiet response so often imparts dignity to de Toth’s characters implies, among other things, that de Toth likes to depict restraint and composure, and that his view of human nature may be more affirmative than Sarris believed. One senses that even the nastiest de Toth villains get points in his eyes for controlling their strength. In his own, somewhat brutal way, de Toth distributes virtue evenly across his universe, à la Renoir.”

Alain Silver‘s interview with de Toth, conducted in January 2000, ran in Senses of Cinema in 2003. Mike Grost breaks down aspects of de Toth’s style, film by film. In 2007, Peter Nellhaus reviewed Thunder Over the Plains (1953) and Riding Shotgun (1954), two westerns featuring Randolph Scott, and last year, David Cairns took another look at Play Dirty (1969) for MUBI.

For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.