A young and beautiful woman has untold amounts of power over men and most women don’t realize it until we’re long past it. Francois Ozon’s Jeune et Jolie is about a teenage girl who goes from virgin to prostitute in two seasons. Summer, she loses her virginity to a German tourist at the beach. It’s...
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Barcelona-born, Mexico City-raised Amat Escalante is three for three with Cannes. His first two films, Sangre (2005) and Los Bastardos (2008) both played in the Un Certain Regard category and this year he’s graduated to the main competition with Heli, a confidently mounted but mostly unpleasant exercise in human cruelty. I didn’t see Sangre, but Los Bastardos...
Under the New York Times headline “Shimmying Off the Literary Mantle,” A.O. Scott reminds us that a film adaptation doesn’t always need to be a book’s conjoined twin. Especially when the book is already everything a novel needs to be. The best way to enjoy Baz Luhrmann’s big and noisy new version of “The Great Gatsby” — and despite what...
Scott Foundas, Variety Of course, to accuse Luhrmann (who also co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Craig Pearce) of overkill is a bit like faulting a leopard for his spots. Love it or hate it, take it or leave it, this is unmistakably his“Gatsby” through and through, and as with all such carte-blanche extravaganzas (increasingly rare in this cautious...
