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Wonderstruck Review: Todd Hayne's Marvelous New Movie. It was only Day 2 of the 7. Cannes Film Festival and, already, there was a flutter of controversy: During the opening press conference, jury head Pedro Almodovar read a prepared statement, in Spanish, decrying the fact that new players in the film business, like Netflix, don’t always premiere their movies in theaters. Two entries in this year’s competition—Bong Joon Ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories—are Netflix films that are not slated for a theatrical release in France. Earlier this month, Cannes officials sought to persuade Netflix to find a way to bring the two films to French theaters before they’d be available to stream.

1. The very first combined MTV Movie and TV Awards is almost here, various favourites from the last year nominated for the teen-friendly prizes. This year’s show not.
2. Times film critic Justin Chang is at the Cannes Film Festival, taking in the scene and all the movies he can watch on very little sleep. In this, his Cannes.
3. The film then flashes forward to quieter times, where teenage Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) is raising her super-pig Okja in the mountains in South Korea.
4. Comic-Con: Best Of 2017 Film Schedule Includes Marvel,

Netflix balked, largely because it couldn’t circumvent French film- distribution regulations that require a waiting period of 3. As a result, Cannes officials have now changed the eligibility rules for next year.

But Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories, of course, remain in this year’s competition. In his statement, Almodovar said he wanted everyone to be able to see a film for the first time in a theater and not via streaming. Both Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories will be released in U. S. Did that mean Almodovar was essentially, if unofficially, disqualifying these two films from winning anything next Sunday? Welcome to Cannes, where it’s always something!

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Personally, my heart is with Almodovar, though I don't think it’s fair to punish any platform that supports interesting work made by gifted filmmakers. Since that press conference, Almodovar has clarified his statement, saying that he and the jury fully intend to give Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories a fair shake in their deliberations.

In light of bigger crises faced by Europe, and the world, right now—an unusually large number of films here at the festival seek to address the refugee crisis—the finer points of how audiences see films isn’t particularly grave. And yet, at a time when the world seems to be cracking apart, a sense of community, even just communal film watching, could mean more than ever. At some point after its release in theaters, viewers will be able to stream Todd Haynes’s new film, Wonderstruck—playing here in competition—and watch it wherever and however they please. Wonderstruck tells the dovetailing stories of two 1. Ben (Oakes Fegley) and Rose (Millicent Simmonds), living 5.

Ben, growing up in 1. Gunflint, Minn., has just lost his mother (Michelle Williams), and has always wondered about the father he never knew. His mother refused to answer any of his questions, and now he feels more lost than ever: He’s haunted by a recurring nightmare in which he's pursued by wolves, clearly a sign that his mind is working overtime to make sense of his suffering. Then he suffers a freak accident in which he loses his hearing. It seems almost too much for him to bear. But he clings to one small clue that might help him learn more about his father: A receipt, tucked between the pages of a book that belonged to his mother, from a bookstore on New York’s upper west side. He runs away from Gunflint, hopping on a Trailways bus, and finds himself in a city that’s outwardly unforgiving and yet, on its own terms, filled with singular and magnificent magic.

In 1. 92. 7 Hoboken, young Rose, who is also deaf, feels anxiety of another sort. She lives with her father, who’s rich enough to put a comfortable roof over her head but who can’t be bothered to try to understand her.

At one point he tosses a book on lip- reading at her, barking orders that she should study it. It’s filled with tiny print and macabre- looking line drawings, and it clearly terrifies her—she tears a page from it and folds it into the shape of a small tower, which she adds to a little fantasy city she’s made completely out of paper.

Rose finds comfort in the movies, too. She idolizes a silent- film actress named Lillian Mayhew (Julianne Moore), and in one of Wonderstruck's most astonishing scenes—among too many to count—she gazes at the onscreen image of this radiant, expressive creature who speaks a language of silence she fully understands.

On the silent screen, Mayhew—whose character is clearly modeled on Lillian Gish—speaks in an alphabet of broad physical gestures and eyes that reflect anguish or joy like light from a prism. Rose watches, rapt.

What she sees on- screen makes her feel, if only for a few moments, understood. She learns that Mayhew will be performing onstage in New York, and so she, like Ben runs away to the city—which is not, as we're always told, a place that makes dreams come true, but rather one that’s lit by all the dreams people bring to it. Ben and Rose’s stories will intersect, but it’s not easy to guess how—that mystery is what draws us through the picture. This is an intricate and ambitious piece of filmmaking, and there are places where the mechanics don’t run as smoothly as they should. But the film’s beauty runs so deep that it doesn’t matter. Wonderstruck embraces so many shimmery, evanescent ideas, it’s a marvel that any one picture—let alone one you can take your kids to—can hold them.

This is a romance of New York City, a love letter to the pleasure of making anything by hand (with paper or paint or even, possibly, film), a story of finding the place where you belong, and of finding your way to the people who understand you. Haynes has found his way to those people over the years, and with Wonderstruck, he draws many of them close: The costumes, perfect in their details, are by the goddess of needle and thread Sandy Powell (who also, it turns out, persuaded Selznick to write a screenplay from his book, with the intent that Haynes should direct). Cinematographer Edward Lachman gives us a New York whose majesty lies in its textures and colors, a world of warm, silvery black- and- white and gritty- glorious gray- greens. And every performance is wonderful, though it’s young Simmonds whose face is likely to haunt you. Simmonds is deaf, and to watch her face—to see how, as Rose, she virtually breathes in the world around her, as if sounds and visuals were color values you could absorb into your very being—is to step over a border you perhaps didn’t know existed. What does it mean to listen, as opposed to just being able to hear?

Wonderstruck is about listening with our ears and our eyes, the surest way to feel a hearbeat.

Cannes diary: Closing thoughts on a so- so festival but a satisfying set of winners. At the 7. 0th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, recently concluded on May 2. Watch Pelle The Conqueror (2017) Movie Stream. L. A. Times film critic Justin Chang took in the scene and all the movies he could watch on very little sleep. In this, his Cannes diary, he gives us an up- close view of one of the world’s most glamorous events, a mecca for film lovers. DAY 1 . And rest assured, this year there will be no indignant screed against their decisions from yours truly.

What’s remarkable about this festival is that, even with a much less impressive competition than last year’s, the jury managed to come up with a much more discerning and satisfying set of winners. Not entirely satisfying, of course: My personal choice for the Palme d’Or would probably have been “Loveless,” followed closely by “A Gentle Creature” (what can I say, it’s been a good year for devastating portraits of modern- day Russia), and I regret that the Safdie brothers and Robert Pattinson won nothing for their sensationally entertaining “Good Time.”But in the end, I can't fault a jury for honoring a film as provocative as “The Square,” as moving as “1.

Beats Per Minute” or as stylishly single- minded as “You Were Never Really Here.” A title that more or less captures what it would probably feel like to be in Cannes now — once more a sleepy beachside town, with the red carpets rolled up and the metal detectors stowed away for another year. Until then .. The charge of excitement delivered last year by the likes of “Toni Erdmann,” “Elle,” “Paterson,” “The Handmaiden,” “American Honey,” “Aquarius” and “Personal Shopper” — bold, confident visions all, regardless of what you may think of them individually — has struggled to reproduce itself here. And yet — as always, a blanket sense of disappointment doesn’t tell the whole story. The highs may not have been stratospheric this year, but there have been highs nonetheless. One of them, for me, is the Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s “A Gentle Creature” (“Krotkoya”), which is unequivocally one of the toughest, darkest and longest movies playing in competition.

Rebuffed at her local post office, she decides to travel to the prison and deliver the parcel herself — a journey that will lead her through her a Kafka- esque bureaucratic nightmare and into the very heart of Putin’s Russia, a place where violent absurdity and everyday inhumanity reign. Loznitsa, making his third appearance in the Cannes competition (after “My Joy” and “In the Fog”), uses richly textured visuals and sustained long shots to usher us alongside this “gentle creature” down the rabbit- hole.

That allusion comes from the story itself, whose surreal climax plays like something out of “Alice in Wonderland,” at least until — well, I’ll leave that horror for you to discover. With its single most challenging offering out of the way, the competition has seemed to speed toward the finish with several brisk, light- footed genre movies that have been, if not a series of unmitigated delights, then at least something of a relief. That’s not unusual given the track record of Thierry Fr. The 2. 00. 4 selection, one of the first under his reign, included the now- infamous “Oldboy,” whose director, Park Chan- wook, sits on this year’s competition jury. Robert Pattinson and Benny Safdie in the film . The action is so brisk and kinetic that you may not notice the social insights that the Safdies have so shrewdly tucked into the margins of their story: Nick and Connie may have had a rough upbringing, but the Safdies are not so sympathetic that they overlook their characters’ undeniable privilege and the even more marginalized people they exploit along the way. A2. 4 is releasing “Good Time” in U.

S. Adapted from a Jonathan Ames novella, the movie stars a heavily bearded Joaquin Phoenix as a severely troubled, hammer- wielding assassin whose latest job will either kill him or give him a reason to keep living. What follows is a kind of 2. Taxi Driver” that morphs, by the end, into a stealth art- house remake of “Logan” — a deranged odyssey across a wide- ranging New York hellscape that combines sleek formal elegance, fatalistic humor, unsparing violence and another gorgeously unnerving score by Jonny Greenwood.

Ramsay’s unwillingness to compromise artistically has often run afoul of a bottom- line- minded industry, which explains why “You Were Never Really Here” is only her fourth film in the 1. Cannes- premiered debut feature, “Ratcatcher.” Her return seals her standing as one of our most fearless and forceful filmmakers, if not one as prolific as she deserves to be.

Fitting the Hobbesian criteria of nasty, brutish and short — it’s been ruthlessly whittled down from an anticipated 9. Ramsay’s film brought the competition to an electrifying but polarizing close.

Some declared it precisely the tour de force the festival had been waiting for; others stayed behind to loudly boo the film as the lights came up, perhaps repelled by its brutal nihilism or its placement in the competition. I may be crediting them with too much thoughtfulness: It’s entirely possible that they’re verbally incontinent morons who should be banned from ever attending the Cannes Film Festival again. As thoughts turn toward the jury prizes that will be handed out on Sunday, no film has stood out as a clear frontrunner for the Palme d’Or. If forced to hazard a guess, I would reiterate my suspicion that Robin Campillo’s AIDS- activist drama “1. Beats Per Minute,” one of the competition’s most roundly satisfying emotional experiences, stands the best chance.

Meanwhile, Jacques Doillon’s suffocatingly dull and didactic artist biopic “Rodin” must surely rank near the bottom of the list for everyone who saw it. Slow, taxing films are par for the course at a major international film festival, but this inexplicable competition entry is the rare experience to which watching clay dry would be infinitely preferable. J. Full of bright primary colors, punny chapter breaks, all manner of meta- winks and other strenuous bits of Godardian business, the movie draws an unambiguous parallel between the disintegration of their relationship and the loss of Godard’s filmmaking mojo as he is swallowed whole by his own surly, disagreeable post- ’6. Redoubtable’s” critical take on Godard threatened to divide audiences between his fiercest acolytes and those who are convinced he hasn’t made anything watchable since 1. Weekend” (for what it’s worth, I fall into neither category). Still, I can’t imagine even the most diehard Godardian working up enough passion to loathe this self- satisfied pastiche, which has none of the effervescence or stylistic dazzle of Hazanavicius’ Oscar- winning “The Artist.”Far more deliriously entertaining among the French titles in competition was Fran.

Not because it isn’t good, but because it’s exactly the sort of exuberantly disreputable pleasure that could not have been more of a tonic at the end of a long competition. The movie stars Marine Vacth (also in Ozon’s “Young and Beautiful”) as a woman who falls for her therapist (J. It also features what may be one of the greatest opening shots in the history of cinema, one that drew gasps, laughs and claps from the audience with its speculum’s- eye view of its central character. I won’t say more, but the non- spoiler- averse among you should check out Kyle Buchanan’s excellent deep dive over at Vulture. What of the other awards? My personal jury of one would give Pattinson the best actor prize for “Good Time,” and given his impassioned social- media fan base, I frankly pity the man who wins if he doesn’t.

Still, he does have strong competition from Claes Bang, the talented Danish discovery who stars in “The Square,” and Nahuel P. Ironically in the year that the president of the jury is none other than Pedro Almod. A tense, methodical courtroom drama ensues, followed by a more personal search for justice.