Cannes. Chelsea on the Rocks.

"Abel Ferrara's new film, Chelsea on the Rocks, represents a kind of homecoming for the Bronx-born director and longtime chronicler of the New York City underbelly," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times.

"Chelsea on the Rocks, which had its premiere as a special presentation at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday night, is a documentary about the 125-year-old Chelsea Hotel, the spiritual home of Manhattan bohemia, where Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls and the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death. It's Ferrara's first proper New York movie since 2001's 'R Xmas."

"A skittery, rambling but often absorbing portrait of the Chelsea Hotel, pic shuffles together vintage archive footage, scrappy dramatic re-enactments of famous moments at the hotel, and original interview material in helmer's first go at docmaking in more than 30 years," writes Leslie Felperin in Variety.

Writing in Screen Daily, Allan Hunter finds the doc "more effective in its conventional talking heads material than some ill-advised dramatic recreations of key events in the establishment's illustrious past."

Update, 5/25: "Chelsea Hotel is commanding, and Ferrara remains a sick god, the ingenious hunchback of Notre Dame du Cinéma," writes Cahiers du cinéma's Emmanuel Burdeau. "This is how he appears to us, in a hallway, his shoulders hunched up to his ears, his pale head thrown backward in order for his hair to reach a woman's genitalia painted on the wall. The is the first time we see him in one of his films, his silhouette resembling Keith Richards's, with his cough and his winded feline's walk. The film is fairly nondescript, outside of a few shots of rooftops and a few palimpsests of images to which Ferrara holds the secret."

Update, 5/26: "It might be the boldfaced names that are going to sell the thing, but the best material here, the spots where Ferrara seems most comfortable, involve the usually drug-related shock-horror stories of relative nobodies," writes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog. On the other hand, "The reenactments cheapen what might otherwise have been a bittersweet document; as it is, it's an extraordinarily entertaining but not totally satisfying mess."

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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 24, 2008 8:10 AM