Cannes. Classics and more movies about festivals and film.

"Few experiences are richer than to be able to see a film again, ten years after the first time, while remembering the reception it got fifty years earlier," writes Emmanuel Burdeau in the Cahiers du cinéma Cannes diary.

"One must count the years; hold several scoring boards at the same time. This suits Lola Montès, which is in many ways a story of calculation. Higher, Lola, higher, repeats Ustinov to her constantly. Higher than what?"

Updated.

Related: In the Guardian, Agnes Poirier reports on what Marcel Ophüls remembers of the premiere in Cannes of his father's film in 1955.

Mary Corliss for Time on David Lean's The Passionate Friends: "It's not one of the great director's masterpieces, but it had an emotional gravity that locates the difference between love and being in love, and it fulfilled the basic dictum of Golden Age movies: beautiful people with difficult problems, in radiant black-and-white."

Further down that same page, Richard Corliss reports on a sprightly appearance by Manoel De Oliveira as he collected an honorary Palme d'Or and saw his first film, Douro, Faina Fluvial (Working on Douro River, 1931), screened to an audience that included "Cannes Jury President Sean Penn, Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis and a young pup named Clint Eastwood, who will be 78 at the end of the month and who was a year old when Working on the Douro River opened in Portuguese theaters."

Related: Why do some directors carry on working into their 70s, 80s and 90s, a few of them quite well, too, while others seem to dry up and blow away, wonders Ronald Bergan at the Guardian.

"The often stormy, sometimes downright crazy, history of what the Cannes Film Festival still refers to as a 'parallel section' rather than by its actual name gets a warm 40th anni pat on the back from a battalion of big names in docu [40X15: Forty Years of the Directors' Fortnight]," writes Derek Elley in Variety. "Anchored by an in-depth interview with the wry Pierre-Henri Deleau, head of the Directors' Fortnight for its first 30 years, this makes required viewing for movie aficionados, especially with some trimming of its more discursive second half." In the Hollywood Reporter, Duane Byrge finds it "a comprehensive, affectionate look at the 40 years of the Cannes sidebar that began in the wake of the protest tumults of 1968."

Derek Elley on a "once-over-lightly look at the man, the movie and director David Lean," Once Upon a Time... Lawrence of Arabia: "Most entertaining, and occasionally perceptive, about the movie and Lean himself is Omar Sharif, who relates the story of the helmer asking his cast each day for ideas on how to shoot a scene."

Update: "Longtime documentarian and Time film critic Richard Schickel brings both privileged access and humble cinephilia into Warner Bros' vaults for five-hour You Must Remember This, the first 116 minutes of which were shown at Cannes in advance of full version's three-part PBS broadcast - and tie-in book's release - in September," writes Rob Nelson in Variety. "Celebrating the studio's 85th anniversary, docu - judging from the footage shown at Cannes, spanning WB's first quarter-century - is clip-heavy almost to a fault. But Schickel's unsurprisingly smart assemblage of talking heads gives it a valuable measure of critical and scholarly sensibility."

Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2008 1:06 AM