Cannes, 5/13.

"Does this festival still matter?" asks AO Scott in the New York Times. Surely, he must think so, given how much time and effort he's putting into covering it. Besides this initial overview, he's blogging right along with Manohla Dargis and those audio slide shows are getting downright fancy.

Also in the NYT: Thomas Crampton's quick blurbs, Eric Pfanner's assessment of the British presence at the festival, Doreen Carvajal on the possibly diminished importance of actually being there and Joan Dupont's review of Hiner Saleem's Kilometre Zero, "a road movie that takes place in Kurdish Iraq, about a soldier recruited by force into Saddam Hussein's army to fight Iran," both picked up from the paper's European outpost, the International Herald Tribune.

Gus Van Sant remembers Kurt Cobain in Libération (and in English). Via Movie City Indie. Related: From indieWIRE's Cannes blog, Eugene Hernadez's question for Kim Gordon.

Three interviews from the Hollywood Reporter's special coverage: Gregg Kilday with Gus Van Sant, Liza Forman with Shane Black and Mark Russell with Kim Ki-duk.

Plucking just one story from the Guardian's ongoing coverage, I'd have to go with Stuart Jeffries's interview with Adam Curtis even though we've just posted David D'Arcy's over at the main site. The Power of Nightmares is simply that important. "[Michael] Moore is a political agitprop filmmaker," Curtis tells Jeffries. "I am not - you'd be hard pushed to tell my politics from watching it. It was an attempt at historical explanation for September 11. You see, up to this point nobody had done a proper history of the ideas and groups that have created our modern world. It's weird that nobody had done before me."

Mary McNamara's keeping a breezy diary for the Los Angeles Times.

At Movie City News, J Sperling Reich adds his rave to the collection rapidly mounting up around Woody Allen's Match Point. So, too, does Jeffrey Wells.

Morocco's quite nicely represented at the festival, reports Karima Rhanem in the Morocco Times. Via the Alternative Film Guide.

"I don't know exactly how many times I've been to Cannes," writes Wim Wenders in Die Zeit (and in German), launching into a long reverie that stretches back nearly thirty years. Also: Katja Nicodemus on Christoph Hochhäusler's Un Certain Regard entry Falscher Bekenner (Low Profile) - and on why films like his have such a tough time at home. Hochhäusler: "In Germany, people look, above all, for content. Discussion of cinema, too, is focused on content. In France, on the other hand, the image has a different value; there's an entirely different tradition of seeing."

Naturally, there's a helluva lot of business going on, too, but probably the most interesting items in the long run involve Bob Berney and Harvey Weinstein. Brian Brooks has the first story at indieWIRE: "At the Majestic Hotel in Cannes, Berney revealed initial plans for the newest mini-major, Picturehouse." Cinematical's Karina Longworth has been following the second wheeler and dealer.

Posted by dwhudson at May 13, 2005 2:45 PM