Clint Eastwood’s The Changling The Exchange, name change according to Screen Daily, has been getting rave, and I mean rave reviews, especially focusing on Jolie’s performance, and I for one am thrilled. Also screening is Delta, Of Time and the City, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Maradona by Kusturica, Johnny Mad Dog, Los Bastardos, Birdsong, I will probably add to the list later, sounds like a fantastic day indeed.

In Competition:

“The Changeling/The Exchange” by Clint Eastwood

Richard Corliss, “juggles elements of LA Confidential, The Black Dahlia, The Snake Pit and any number of serial-killer thrillers. But at its center are the heartache and heroic resolve of a woman who has lost the one person she loves most and is determined to find him, dead or alive, against all obstacles the authorities place in her way. In that sense the movie is a companion piece to last year’s Cannes entry A Mighty Heart, in which Jolie played the wife of kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl – except that Changeling is far more taut, twisty and compelling.”

Kim Voynar, “Because the film is based on real events, we know going in how it’s going to end; the film’s tension rides, therefore, not in the destination but in the journey to get there,”

Glenn Kenny, “Its old-fashionedness, or I should say respect for verities, goes hand-in-hand with a particularly Eastwood-esque directness. The result is not as perfect a film as Eastwood has made, but it’s damn strong, both as a story and an exploration of the parent-child bond and a polemic. Because despite the fact that it deals with the corruption and venality of a past era, Changeling is at times a very angry picture; Eastwood’s angriest, I think, since Unforgiven.”

Todd McCarthy, “A thematic companion piece to Mystic River but more complex and far-reaching, Changeling impressively continues Clint Eastwood’s great run of ambitious late-career pictures,”

Mike Goodridge, “Beautifully produced and guided by Eastwood’s elegant, unostentatious hand, it also boasts a career-best performance by Angelina Jolie who has never been this compelling,” 

“Delta” by Kornél Mundruczó

Milos Stehlik, “A classic structure, lots of the Hungarian peasant faces we know from Béla Tarr’s films, a lyrical touch,”

Fabien Lemercier, “Staggeringly beautiful from an aesthetic perspective, the film manages to captivate viewers despite its minimalist plot and dialogues,”

AO Scott, “The festival film – slow, difficult, formally austere – can be a welcome antidote to the fast-moving, accessible movies that thrive in the sphere of commercial cinema. But it is also worth remembering – and Delta is hardly the only film here to remind me – that art movies, too, are susceptible to formula and cliché.”

Dan Fainaru, “Five years after launching the project and 18 months after starting to shoot it, with one tragic accident in the middle which almost sunk the entire production (the death of lead actor, Lajos Bertok, to whom the film is dedicated), Kornel Mundruczo is back on his feet with his best rounded and most mature work to date,”

Out of Competition:

“Maradona by Kusturica” by Emir Kusturica

Peter Bradshaw, “It is pure penis-envy cinema. Kusturica has no obvious affinity with the cinematic possibilities of football; his clips of Maradona’s goals are unimaginatively chosen and presented, and often repeated to pad out the film.”

Kaleem Aftab, “It’s the director’s good fortune that everything about Maradona rags-to-riches tale of a fallen anti-hero is classic Hollywood material…”

Jonathan Romney, “Kusturica deserves credit for revealing Maradona to be more articulate and thoughtful than he usually appears, but what a strange, blustering, macho film this is.”

 Un Certain Regard:

“Los Bastardos” by Amat Escalante

Todd McCarthy, “A nihilistic high-art film marked by fashionable static takes, banal minimalist dialogue, glacial pacing and ultra-violence, “The Bastards” will attract support from the usual suspects in the critical community…Enthusiasm in certain quarters ensures an extensive fest life and likely limited release in select sophisticated markets internationally, but pic’s commercial prospects remain similar to those always faced by the director’s mentor and co-producer, Carlos Reygadas.”

Peter Brunette, “subtly sketches the daily frustrations of these impoverished, uneducated men far from their families, along with the backbreaking but badly-paid work they perform and the ethnic taunts they endure, a sense of hope slowly arises in the viewer that this is going to be a very special film…Alas, Escalante perversely chooses to dash that hope by suddenly changing gears in the direction of a half-baked plot twist.”

Dan Fainaru, “Escalante’s arguments are valid and the film’s horrific climax will shock the audience out of its complacency but the film’s style – with its static first shot to a drawn-out ending – places this firmly in the art house niche.”

“Johnny Mad Dog” Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

Jonathan Romney, “Cinema is forever inventing new ways to tell us that war is hell, but few recent films have explored the extremes of that hell as vividly or intrepidly as Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s African drama Johnny Mad Dog,”

Manohla Dargis, “The brutal French-Belgian-Liberian movie Johnny Mad Dog, an assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers made with boys and girls who actually fought in that country’s recent war, left me wrung out – furious, confused, deep in thought,”

Duane Byrge, “Fiction based on unbelievable fact, Johnny Mad Dog chronicles the atrocities of the ongoing civil war in that West African nation. Although hard to watch, it’s an important document that should scorch sensibilities on the festival circuit.”

 Special Screenings:

“Of Time and the City” by Terence Davies

Howard Feinstein, “Davies has always been fascinated by both out-of-reach glamour and the banality of everyday life,…Revisiting what he calls ‘the happy highways where I went and can not come again,’ is obviously cathartic for Davies, even if melancholy seeps through every frame.”

Ty Burr, “Davies himself narrates over the inspired onrush of historical and archival footage, and his hoarse, whispered cadences have the urgency of the confessional and the scornful humor of the outsider…. It’s easily the most haunting work I’ve seen at Cannes.”

Geoff Andrew, “the one truly great movie to emerge so far has been Terence Davies’s ‘Of Time and the City’; it’s not only this writer who considers it some kind of masterpiece….Watching the film, you realise that Britain has no other filmmaker to match Davies in terms of his purely cinematic sensibility. Fine as our other far-from-inconsiderable big names are, it’s hard to imagine any of them creating sheer filmic poetry as may be found here. Davies’s juxtapositions of music and image, especially, are consistently audacious, original and exhilarating, whether the compositions reflect and reinforce each other or whether they make more complex by way of superbly sharp irony.”

Mary Corliss, “This is mainly a biography of a place and time, of its stately old civic monuments and, later, its soulless estates (an expression, Davies says in the narration, of ‘the British genius for creating the dismal’); of its residents’ football mania and fondness for radio’s corniest comics; of the contrast between postwar rationing and the regal excesses of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation (’the Betty Windsor Show’).”

Directors Fortnight:

“Birdsong (El Cant dels ocells)” by Albert Serra

Justin Chang, “Hushed, contemplative but often quite droll experiment offers beautifully sculpted images on a black-and-white canvas across its sometimes hypnotic, sometimes tedious runtime.”

Daniel Kasman, “Some stories are told so many times there is no longer any need for words. Albert Serra understands this,…”His digitalized, elliptical, nature-bound adaptation of Quixote, Honor de cavalleria, and now his story of the three wise men’s visit to Jesus, El Cant dels ocells, leave storytelling behind and envision tales worn ragged until the pages the film adapts must have faded away, and all we are left with is minimal, uneventful human beauty.”

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