Wrapping Cannes, 5/30.

"So: a good Cannes, but not a great Cannes," decides the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "For my money, the best films were out of competition: Paul Greengrass's magnificent United 93, about the passengers who fought back on 9/11, body-slammed every film in the competition. And Douglas Gordon's gloriously funny and audacious Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, following the footballer over 90 minutes, was the most purely enjoyable event at the festival." Also, Stephen Moss looks into Ken Loach's clenched fist.

Cahal Milmo has a fine long profile of Loach in the Independent: "[E]xperience shows that efforts to paint Loach as a dour realist with a messianic zeal to raise the portrayal of proletarian toil to an art form often fall on stony ground. For a start, his films are more free-form than many would imagine."

"Every film festival produces its quintessential film," writes J Hoberman. "For Cannes 2006, it was Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel. Maximalist cine-globalism, Babel was shot in four languages on three continents by a Mexican director with an international cast, including Hollywood top dog Brad Pitt.... Cannes's 2006 competition may not have been the strongest in recent years but it was certainly the most relevant." Also in the Voice, Rob Nelson talks to Richard Linklater about his Cannes double bill.

Kenneth Turan looks back in the Los Angeles Times: "Perhaps the best of the slighted films was Pan's Labyrinth, the latest work by the most accomplished fantasist in contemporary film, Guillermo del Toro."

Roger Ebert, too, is evaluating the fest: "But what about another much-touted film, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette? No other film was so loved by the French critics, although of course they are not the jury. And as the festival came to its close, I found the film growing in my memory and appreciation."

Matt Dentler lists his top 7.

For Mike D'Angelo at Nerve, "it seems clear that this jury wanted to make a statement about an artist's responsibility to grapple with his or her times." And Bilge Ebiri argues that the Palme d'Or matters more than its currently fashionable to admit. For example, "To say that Tarantino wouldn't have happened without the Palme would be silly, of course. But it would be equally silly to argue that Pulp Fiction's explosive debut at Cannes, capped off with its Palme win, did nothing for its stateside prospects."

Posted by dwhudson at May 30, 2006 2:09 PM