Karina Longworth

After operating at maybe 75 percent of its potential for almost its first full week, on Sunday the Cannes Film Festival kicked into full auteurist gear, with the premieres of three formally audacious new works from three contemporary international art-film stars: Michael Haneke's Amour (which we already discussed); In Another......

Eighty-something couple George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anna (Emmanuelle Riva), former music teachers with one adult daughter (Isabelle Huppert), are comfortably settled into their senescence together in a not-small and yet claustrophobic Paris apartment. One morning at the breakfast table, Anna goes blank -- her eyes blacken, she can't seem to......

As a major festival like Cannes wears on, my notebook accumulates more scrawl than I can translate into full blog posts. So, behold! The first of likely several notebook dumps, with thoughts on John Hillcoat's bootleggers-with-hearts-of-gold vs. sexually-ambiguous-evil-fed and weak-ass local lawmen Western Lawless; Xavier Dolan's tranny-coming-out epic Laurence Anyways;......

Today in unexpected Cannes headline news: A convicted felon turns in one of the best performances at the festival thus far (and it's not Roman Polanski -- rimshot! -- who was the subject of a softball vanity documentary that screened here earlier in the week, and isn't really worth talking......

Hot French double-amputee on bare-knuckle boxer sex. Fleshy Austrian cougar cycles between multiple young, fit African gigolos. Loglines of highly-specific fetish porn, or of movies premiering Thursday in the Cannes Film Festival main competition? Perhaps both, but definitely the latter: Oscar winner Marion Cotillard plays the fetching legless woman opposite......

In his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, The Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen's rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. Yet Aladeen himself is so attracted to Western......

It's 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky, isle-strewn coast of New England. Sam (Jared Gelman), a scrawny, bespectacled outcast with an unusual aptitude for cartography, disappears from the Khaki Scout camp supervised by Scout Master Randy Ward (Edward Norton), absconding with a couple of bedrolls and an......

At the start of Joss Whedon's long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube that fell to the ocean floor after Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer — is in the hands of NASA......

Will (Ben Foster) — a lone-wolf American cartographer on a contract to collect data on the ground to match to satellite maps in Armenia's rural, disputed Eastern territory — is bailed out of a lost-in-translation situation by beautiful, feisty, Armenian-born/Paris-schooled photographer Gadarine (Lubna Azabak). Soon the attractive pair hit the......