Movie Magazine International Blog

By Moira Sullivan The Swedish Entry for Best Foreign Language Oscar is FORCE MAJEURE by Ruben Östlund. It was part of the Official Selection of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize Winner during Pablo Trapero’s reign as Jury President for this division. Swedes love to travel to the French Alps and this typically Swedish family takes time out for such a winter holiday. They are first snapped by a professional photographer on the slopes and look like the ideal family with father, mother and two children. The holiday, however, seems uneventful and routine, almost sterile in the depiction of traveling up the alps by ski lift and down by skis, retiring to the hotel room and piling in the bathroom with the family brushing their teeth together. Only the hotel cleaner knows that something is amok with this family who wind up spending time outside the room and eventually have a major family crisis. It is customary at ski resorts to blast the snow to bri...

Nicole Kidman plays 'Grace of Monaco' The 2014 Palme d'Or went to "Winter Sleep" by Nuri Bilge Ceylan on May 24. Ceylan is a veteran who has received other runner up prizes. The universal appeal of "Winter Storm" with many philosophical comments about life spoke to the jury headed by Jane Campion. The presenters of the top award, Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman, were in Cannes for the "Cinema de La Plage" (cinema on the beach) screening of "Pulp Fiction". "Pulp Fiction" was a milestone in film history, but the night belonged to Ceylan whose film is a 210 minute morality tale about a former actor who runs a hotel in remote Anatolia. As winter approaches, he is alone with his young wife and her sister going through a divorce. The cold weather makes the hotel not only a shelter but a site where the three must confront their feelings. There were critics who would have preferred that the Palme d’Or went to Xavier Dolan ...

Jane Campion, President Movie Magazine International will again be at the Cannes Film Festival, this time for the 67th festival held from May 14 to 25th with Jane Campion as Jury President. The festival started off with the debut of the out of competition film "Grace of Monaco" directed by Olivier Dahan and starring Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelley, and Tim Roth as Prince Rainier. The film will not be released at least for now in the US according to distributor Harvey Weinstein. The Royal Family of Monaco has boycotted the Cannes festival because of the film, which takes liberty with details about life of Grace Kelley. It is generally understood that Grace Kelley was ambivalent about her life as a princess in Monaco and was homesick for the US, and preferred speaking English as much as she could. Dahan claims that his film is not a biopic, but reality, and that the film is about cinema. Critics have blasted the film, not because of the controversy but because of the sha...

By Moira Sullivan *Spoiler Alert* Debuting at the Cannes film festival last year in the official competition was Young and Beautiful , in French young and pretty (Jeune et Jolie) a typically French film involving lots of sex with a beautiful woman. It displays the kind of homework that Lars von trier could have done for his film Nymphomaniac Volume 1   and Volume 2 . This time it is Francois Ozon who missed some classes on his subject. His tabloid film form of four seasons and four songs does not succeed in imbuing the film with any notable quality. It is the film where every scene is filled with the beautiful face of his lead actress 24 year old Marine Vacth . As such it is a role that will bring her forward in her career and even like Catherine Deneuve who transcended playing the beautiful prostitute from home, and not from the street, ( Belle de Jour , France 1967) it will be the cornerstone of Vacth's by which all subsequent films will be judged. The 17 year Isab...