Enduring Hits and Sorry Flops
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All the eyes currently focused on Cannes were briefly averted this week when Venice sent out word that Alexander Payne will preside over its jury and Locarno let it be known that Jackie Chan will receive this year’s Pardo alla Carriera, a career achievement award. Cannes, in the meantime, has filled out its juries.
The festival’s seventy-eighth edition will open on Tuesday and run through May 24, and the main competition jury is pretty impressive: Juliette Binoche (president), Halle Berry, Payal Kapadia, Alba Rohrwacher, Leïla Slimani, Dieudo Hamadi, Hong Sangsoo, Carlos Reygadas, and Jeremy Strong. Molly Manning Walker, who won the Un Certain Regard Prize in 2023 for How to Have Sex, will preside over this year’s UCR jury. Walker will be joined by Louise Courvoisier (Holy Cow), International Film Festival Rotterdam director Vanja Kaludjercic, Roberto Minervini (The Damned), and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, who led the cast of Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats per Minute).
Today sees the opening of the twelfth annual Chicago Critics Film Festival as well as series spotlighting Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes in Berkeley, Malcolm X in Los Angeles, Vittorio De Sica in Berlin, Adolfas Mekas in London, and Carlo Lizzani in Paris.
This week’s highlights:
- Due to what Warner Bros. is calling an “overwhelming popular and critical response,” Ryan Coogler’s Sinners will see a re-release in Imax 70 mm from May 15 through 21. Coogler’s absorbing aspect ratio primer may have sparked particular interest in seeing this movie extra-big, but for the most part, Sinners is, as Ty Burr puts it, simply “the most ambitious American film of 2025 to date, commercially and thematically and artistically.” In an outstanding profile for the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb traces Coogler’s life and career from a viewing of Boyz n the Hood (1991) when he was five to his being mentored at USC by that film’s director, John Singleton, followed by his first independent feature, Fruitvale Station (2013), the commercial breakthrough of Creed (2015), the global sensation stirred by the Black Panther movies, and the conception and realization of Sinners. “Listening to Coogler,” writes Cobb, “it began to make a kind of sense that, if a superhero movie could be a vehicle to understand the African diaspora, a vampire flick could address Jim Crow and the so-called Devil’s music.”
- The new issue of Senses of Cinema opens with a dossier, “Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance,” and includes articles on Angela Schanelec, Abbas Kiarostami, and David Lynch; interviews with Miguel Gomes and Raoul Peck; and of course, the latest festival reports, book reviews, and program notes. Two names have been added to the quarterly’s collection of tributes to Great Actors, Michelle Yeoh—with a special focus on her work in Hong Kong—and Mikheil Gelovani, who portrayed Joseph Stalin in fifteen Soviet films, “performing a role to the best of his abilities where failure would have resulted in instant death both for himself and his family.”
- Sabzian founder Gerard-Jan Claes has translated Jean-Michel Frodon’s conversation with Isabelle Huppert about her work with Hong Sangsoo and the three films they have made together: In Another Country (2012), Claire’s Camera (2017), and A Traveler’s Needs (2024). Describing her experience of Hong’s methods in considerable detail, Huppert says that “the only real comparison that comes to mind is Jean-Luc Godard. Not just because of the lack of a prewritten script, but because of the way he sends out signals, often indirect, suggestive, and constructs, almost without seeming to, a network of references: places, colors, music, fragments, and so on, which help one get closer to what the filmmaker is aiming for, even if it’s something he hasn’t yet fully defined himself.”
- Lee Kang-sheng, who has appeared in every one of Tsai Ming-liang’s films since the made-for-TV feature Boys (1991), is “the greatest actor in the world at simply being a body,” writes Dennis Zhou for Metrograph Journal. “He’s the greatest performer of eating, sleeping, and walking, because he eats without hunger, sleeps without dreams, and walks without destination. It’s probably for those reasons that Tsai has, throughout his oeuvre, cast him as a man playing a corpse floating on a river, a man paralyzed in a coma, a walking billboard, and a passionless porn star.” As Tsai slows down, Lee is branching out, and Zhou finds that when Lee directs himself in Help Me, Eros (2007), while “there’s still the same yearning and tinge of alienation and squalor as in Tsai’s oeuvre, there’s also much more appetite.”
- Painter and filmmaker Harry Hurwitz once said “that ‘the real history of movies’ is Orson Welles constantly hustling for money and D. W. Griffith dying while looking for a job,” notes Vince Keenan in his latest newsletter. It’s a deep dive into an eclectic career sparked by his research while writing “The Curious Case of The Comeback Trail” for CrimeReads. Hurwitz’s 1982 film never saw an official release and the remake, directed by George Gallo, who wrote Midnight Run (1988), was completed in 2020 but only limped out into a limited release earlier this year—despite a cast headlined by Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Tommy Lee Jones. “It’s a miracle whenever a movie is made,” writes Keenan. “Galaxies must align for it to be made again. But for both versions to then fall through the cracks is a singular curse, one I felt compelled to investigate. I can’t resist a showbiz story, especially one that never clears the lower rungs on the ladder.”
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