May 22, 2008

Cannes. Surveillance.

"Fifteen years after the career-killing debacle of Boxing Helena, Jennifer Lynch dares to raise her head above the parapet once more," writes Allan Hunter in Screen Daily.

Surveillance

"Eccentric thriller Surveillance shows no signs of any lasting impact on her self-confidence as it mixes together a lurid cocktail of jet black humour and bloodshed with a startling, left field plot twist."

Updated through 5/23.

"Think Rashomon meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Twin Peaks, and give lots of leeway for the gooniest improv overacting, and you may get on the warped wavelength of this semi-comic parable of social anarchy," writes Time's Richard Corliss.

"A twisty thriller with an unabashedly nasty streak and an almost theatrical taste for excess, the movie stars Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond as FBI agents investigating a massacre in the flatlands of Nebraska, where they must contend with the dim local cops and a host of highly unreliable witnesses." For the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim lunches with Lynch and notes that "Magnet Releasing, which acquired the film just before Cannes, is set to open it later this year."

"With a high splatter quotient and many scenes of deviant humiliation, the film will have its fans even if the eventual twist hardly comes as a surprise and probably isn't meant to," writes Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter.

Screening Out of Competition.

Update: Ben Kenigsberg, blogging for Time Out Chicago, finds Surveillance "just as unwatchable as Boxing Helena, albeit lacking in the gender-warfare pathology that made that film marginally interesting."

Update, 5/23: "Ooh, this one is a real dud," declares Charlie Prince at Cinema Strikes Back.

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.



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Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2008 8:58 AM

Comments

Great job on all this Cannes coverage. I'm beginning to think you never sleep.

This is certainly a movie to know as little about as possible. It's nuts that some of the reviewers are spoiling the movie. Of real note to me in the film is the performance of Bill Pullman as he completely out weirds his roles in Zero Effect. His performance is so perfectly odd and beaming with life you can't feel like your watching a thespian space alien from another galaxy act a human. I don't mean that as a knock by any means as it makes the film with some very dark subject matter all the more enjoyable. I love Bill Pullman in this movie!

Posted by: Blake at May 22, 2008 8:36 PM