Cannes. Delta.

"'A typical festival art film.' That was the judgment of a friend of mine after the Tuesday press screening of Delta, a competition entry from the Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"The festival film - slow, difficult, formally austere - can be a welcome antidote to the fast-moving, accessible movies that thrive in the sphere of commercial cinema. But it is also worth remembering - and Delta is hardly the only film here to remind me - that art movies, too, are susceptible to formula and cliché."

"Five years after launching the project and 18 months after starting to shoot it, with one tragic accident in the middle which almost sunk the entire production (the death of lead actor, Lajos Bertok, to whom the film is dedicated), Kornel Mundruczo is back on his feet with his best rounded and most mature work to date," announces Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily. "The themes he has been associated with in the past are now integrated in a perfectly coherent world and it seems as if he has found his own individual voice and a style he is most comfortable with, facts attested by the Best Film Award and the Gene Moskovitz prize offered by the foreign press, which he collected at the Hungarian Film Week."

"A classic structure, lots of the Hungarian peasant faces we know from Béla Tarr's films, a lyrical touch," writes Facets' Milos Stehlik.

"Staggeringly beautiful from an aesthetic perspective, the film manages to captivate viewers despite its minimalist plot and dialogues," writes Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa - which also has the trailer.

Fest21.com has notes from the press conference.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2008 12:40 AM