It’s fair to say The Weinstein Company is pretty high on the value of Cannes this year. And tonight will be all about their upcoming films as they pull the old “let’s show some footage, stir the interest pot and steal a little bit of thunder” trick.

The Weinsteins came to the fest with two heavily anticipated films already in tow (John Hillcoat’s “Lawless” and Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly”). But they’ve maintained a muscular presence in the market as well, acquiring light touches in Christian Vincent’s “Haute Cuisine” and Wayne Blair’s “The Sapphires,” as well as political angles on Muammar Gaddafi (“The Oath of Tobruk”) and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden (“Code Name Geronimo”).

They grabbed market title “Quartet” in advance of the fest, which could pop up as an Oscar play from first-time director Dustin Hoffman, while there is speculation that James Gray’s “Low Life” starring Joaquin Phoenix could come off the table and into their pocket soon enough, too. And speaking of Phoenix, he’s front and center in the new trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” one of three films the company will be teasing at tonight’s shindig.

Naturally with Anderson, the film is shrouded in mystery. But come on. We all know it’s pouncing on Scientology and Philip Seymour Hoffman will be playing a cipher of L. Ron Hubbard. And of course an early draft script has been knocked around for quite some time. I guess I understand not wanting to ruffle the feathers of that massive beast too much in advance of the film’s release, but the coy stops today with the trailer and the Cannes thing.

Guy won’t be at the event (“No ticket.”), but Drew McWeeny will be so there will be HitFix coverage of whatever pops up. It’s going on as I type, actually. And of course, it’s a dicey move.

Just a few years ago when Paramount brought a reel of David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to Telluride, the press corps — particularly the net-based folks — turned on it something fierce. That whiff of taint stayed with the film somewhat throughout the season, I think.

Quentin Tarantino is certainly no stranger to the Croisette, having been a welcome face and part of the family ever since he came to town in 1994 with a dazzling ensemble of stars for eventual Palme d’Or winner “Pulp Fiction” (which, speaking of Scientology, featured John Travolta). His latest, “Django Unchained,” will also be previewed and maybe give us some indication of how things are going on that one.

Finally, there’ll be a taste of David O. Russell’s latest, “The Silver Linings Playbook,” which is already in the cutting room. The film stars Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro and, again, could be an awards season player. Word is De Niro is finally doing more than phoning something in and is quite good in the film, while Lawrence could be positioned for a lead actress bid, capitalizing on her new-found “Hunger Games” stardom and opening Jacki Weaver up for a supporting run.

If I’m not mistaken, that’s every single Weinstein film so far in play this season. Certainly it’s most of them. Summed up in one post. About Cannes. Hmmm.

Yes, last year the Weinsteins grabbed “The Artist” early at Cannes, saw it play in Competition and delight the masses, walk away with a Best Actor prize for the affable Jean Dujardin and, well, we certainly know the rest. A few years prior, things were slightly different with Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds,” which didn’t exactly light the Croisette on fire but eventually caught its stride and had a solid awards season showing.

So is Harvey just doubling down on Cannes? There has been a “throw it all at the wall and see what sticks” strategy in his bag of tricks for years, as well as a tendency to take things off the table so they don’t interfere with bigger plans for other films down the line. And certainly he’s banking on stories like this one to drum up attention and exposure.

Whatever the case, the Weinsteins have a considerable presence at the fest this year, mining for gold on the French Riviera. What will they turn up? We’ll know soon enough.

If you haven’t seen the new trailer for “The Master,” check it out below, as well as the recently unveiled teaser poster for “Killing Them Softly.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oZDKFoCqAw&w=640&h=360]

You have to feel for any film appearing under The Weintein Company’s banner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. After last year, when The House That Harvey Built picked up “The Artist” — and, in doing so, made the wisest long-term purchase of the festival — everything else they touch is going to be scrutinized for similar potential to Michel Hazanavicius’s improbable Oscar sensation.

Saturday, then, was a big day for the company, as they presented two of their Cannes babies to the world. But while their widely publicized, star-studded Competition entry “Lawless” made a respectable debut, reaping much critical goodwill if few outright raves, it was a far lower-profile, more recent acquisition, premiering safely out of competition, that set the Croisette whispering. That film would be “The Sapphires”: a modest, good-natured musical comedy from Down Under, spinning the semi-true tale of an all-Aboriginal, Supremes-style girl group and their adventures entertaining US troops in Vietnam.

It unusually premiered the night before its press screening at Cannes — a canny bit of scheduling for a lightweight populist entertainment that, unlike the more delicate auteurist hopefuls in the Competition scrum, shouldn’t be dependent on high-end critical approval for its success. Not that being made to wait didn’t get many journos curious. Having been assigned to review the film for Variety, I was lucky enough to get into the late-night penguin-suit premiere: as I strolled home in the unseasonal Cannes drizzle, I ran into several colleagues with questions: “Ooh, what’s it like?” “Is it a hit?” “So, have we found this year’s ‘The Artist?'”

The last question, in particular, stemmed from the Chinese-whispers rumor mill of Twitter, upon which Harvey Weinstein was quoted as having said that, indeed, Wayne Blair’s dayglo, 1960s-set crowdpleaser was this year’s answer to the silent French phenomenon — an overly pressure-inducing claim under any circumstances, not least for a supremely affable but hokey confection with no bigger names attached than “Bridesmaids” breakout Chris O’Dowd. Whether Weinstein actually made the comparison or not, the correction/retraction was swift: “No, it’s not ‘The Artist,'” came the quote this time from the Cannes party-circuit grapevine. “But it’s a lot of fun.”

On that, almost everyone who has seen it thus far can agree: colorful, packed with a jukebox’s worth of infectious soul-standard covers and blessed with dynamite work from O’Dowd in his first major lead role as the girls’ boozy Irish manager, “The Sapphires” is little else but fun, a commodity always in short supply in the largely solemn Cannes lineup. Standing ovations are par for the course at official festival premieres, but the elated whoops echoing around the cavernous Grand Theatre Lumiere as the credits began rolling, coupled with the jack-in-the-box speed with which the audience leapt to its collective feet, made it clear that people like this movie, they really like this movie.

Whether that overwhelming good feeling can be parlayed into awards-season attention or not is really a secondary concern (that said, go ahead and pencil in a Golden Globe musical/comedy nod right now). The Weinsteins have far larger audiences to please than Academy voters, and with the right marketing, they could easily turn this exotic novelty into a word-of-mouth crossover hit that starts on the sunnier end of the arthouse and builds from there, ticking a lot of demographic boxes along the way. (It’s the kind of film you could just as easily see with a date or a grandparent.) 

It’s hard to imagine any critics genuflecting, but the Cannes response so far suggests nobody wants to kick this particular puppy either. I’m not able to review it twice, but with the caveat in place that quoting oneself is unbecoming, here’s the first paragraph of my Variety review:

“Ninety percent of all recorded music is shite,” opines Chris O’Dowd’s feckless band manager in Australian helmer Wayne Blair’s spirited debut feature, “The Sapphires.” “The other 10% is soul.” Soul music’s alleged redemptive powers are fully at work in this jumbled, sketchily written but vastly appealing true-life musical comedy. Closer to “The Commitments” than “Dreamgirls” with its broad Down Under humor, the colorful pic counts on sensational song-and-dance numbers and O’Dowd’s virtuoso comic turn to carry it through some bumpy key changes. Home-turf success is assured, while the Weinstein Co. has every reason to smell an international crowdpleaser.

The rest is here, while our HitFix colleague Drew McWeeny has voiced a similar opinion on Twitter. “The Sapphires” may well be the most commercially viable film I’ve seen at Cannes — and if it succeeds in making a leading man of Chris O’Dowd, then the Weinsteins have once more made a very useful purchase indeed. Keep an eye out.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter. 

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Earlier today I was pursuing the Interwebz for something to jump out and scream “write about me” when I was struck by the image of the new “Skyfall” poster beside a still from “The Dark Knight Rises.” The first teaser trailer for the new Bond film is set to go online early Monday morning and there have already been several “previews” of said trailer released via the journalists who were treated to a glimpse at this year”s CinemaCon.

There is a slight trailer spoiler ahead so if you”d prefer to avoid that please click through and skip to the paragraph following the one below.

According to Cinema Blend”s description, 007 is in the midst of a revelatory word association game throughout the teaser. When presented with the word “Agent,” he responds with “Provocateur” (which indeed provokes a number of theories about his meaning). The most revealing and fascinating bit of word play, though, happens when the prompt “Murder” is met with the terse “Employment.”

I was in Istanbul, Turkey recently visiting the set of “Skyfall” where director Sam Mendes told journalists that, among other things, Bond (played again by actor Daniel Craig) is going to be faced with some measure of, if not remorse, doubt about what he has chosen to do with his life — kill — in the new film. Is it not right for a man to question government sanctioned murder? Is it not, also, a signifier of a maturing audience that we seek to witness an internal reckoning as much as an external one?

Heroes don”t exist without the villains to counter them. It’s as Heath Ledger”s Joker tells Christian Bale’s Batman in “The Dark Knight.” It is a symbiotic relationship: day creates night simply by standing in contrast to it and vice versa.

But our contemporary men of action, the Bournes, Bonds and the broodingly Dark Knights are replete with deep inner conflicts that highlight the shadow-filled aspects of the human psyche. They are often driven by vice as much as by virtue.

As we have seen reflected in cinema, long gone are the days of the apple pie-munching paragons of upstanding citizenry. We”ve simply become too savvy to buy into such simplistic visions or versions of reality. More than that, we no longer have “real world” idols that stand in as the rigidly defined best versions of ourselves, few of which are untouched by the taint of scandal in any event.

Post-Watergate, energizing the public politically has been the presentation of “the lesser of the evils” candidate. There have been nominees here and there who”ve risen to a high level of public acclaim of course, but picturesque renderings of familial and ethical perfection are virtually nonexistent in today”s climate. News outlets are simply too desperate for content to refrain from reporting conjecture, speculation, rumor and damning pictorial evidence of celebrity failing. Almost no one is above the scathing eye of the 24-hour news cycle, and if that misses the mark, Twitter certainly will not.

The seeds of doubt are ever present and we see that reflected in the self-doubt that often plagues the mythic figures that we now hold dear. Even this summer”s colorful and primarily lighthearted superhero offering “The Avengers” touches on the idea that one”s faults can and should be transformed into strengths. The Hulk”s nearly uncontrollable rage becomes the team”s greatest asset.

The benefit of this societal shift is that many have become more accepting of human failings, both our own and those in positions of authority. We understand that, indeed, to ere is human. More so, we accept that the distance between us and those who would govern is not as far as we once may have imagined.

Furthermore, we become more active in charting the course of our destiny as we feel we are equally empowered with the skills to do so, and become more compassionate towards those who otherwise may seem diametrically opposed to us in the best case scenario. We relate at the level of fundamental humanity.

The disadvantage, or danger, in the current trend is that some become even more rigidly judgmental while others devolve into apathetic cynicism, neither of which nourishes the individual or the whole. There is, as mentioned, the possibility of a more adult conceptualization of leadership and the role of “the other” in our lives and connection in our united struggle to reconcile ourselves to our base drives and lofty goals.

Batman and Bond are wish-fulfillment figures. Their brooding visages are more apparent now (cinematically) than they have been in the bulk of their previous incarnations. Our response to their angst speaks volumes about our own.

The question then becomes: What does this turn mean for our collective psychological evolution? Is this simply a swing of the pendulum or does this period mark a transitional phase as we work toward a place of acceptance with both our enemies within and those whom we perceive as our enemies without?

The idea of such advance is perhaps my own somewhat hopelessly optimistic colors shining through. However, “The Dark Knight Rises,” by all indications in the marketing, will take on the question of the “class war” currently under discussion by the political punditry.

The nuance with which this issue is addressed in the film and the response of the audience at large may reveal much about the strange cultural paradox of (seemingly) endemic polarization in our geopolitical dialog and the current trend toward shades-of-grey heroes. Or…it may just be a good action film.

“The Dark Knight Rises” opens in theaters in the U.S. on July 20th and “Skyfall” on November 9th.

For year-round entertainment news and commentary follow @JRothC on Twitter.

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CANNES – Three feature films into his career, I rather imagine that high-haired Québécois wunderkind Xavier Dolan is getting a little tired of hearing the word “precocious” directed at his work — though one rather has to accept this occupational hazard when you not only make your debut feature at the age of 19, but get to premiere it at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight rather than in your mom’s living room.

Having now reached the ripe old age of 23, Dolan is a known quantity these days, his signature confident and identifiable, his reach expanding within reason. A notably young auteur as opposed to a mere upstart, he can probably shed the label any time he chooses to stop making films that are so very, very precocious — though “Laurence Anyways,” his sporadically rapturous and less sporadically maddening new effort, suggests precocity is a quality than can actually increase with age.  

Certainly, there’s something childishly self-impressed about the film’s 160-minute running time, an assertion of substance and consequence that belies the numerous short cuts taken with a story that could warrant intimate-epic treatment. There’s more going inside this one than there was in  his vapid, gorgeously dressed sophomore film “Heartbeats,” beginning with some discernible narrative stakes. Spanning the entire stretch of the 1990s, a decision seemingly made purely for soundtrack purposes, the film charts the back-and-forth peaks and troughs of one volatile heterosexual romance hit early on by an insurmountable snag: he, the Laurence of the title (played by Melvil Poupaud), wants to be a woman. His girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clement, excellent), initially stunned into break-up mode, decides she loves Laurence enough to be with him whatever his form — a moving pledge that proves ever harder to renew as the weight of others’ misunderstanding, not to mention their own shifting perspective on his new identity, persistently come between them.

Where Dolan’s first two films were effectively ripped from his personal diaries, “Laurence Anyways” (a clever title made overly pat by the film’s final scene) is attempting to engage with experiences and sensations more foreign to him. This is ostensibly nervy, big-thinking stuff, but the story leaves him with his wings a tad charred: for all the screen time in which the subject has to luxuriate, Laurence’s journey to womanhood is rendered in brushstrokes so vague and surface-focused as to call into question his interest in gender identity at all.  Yves Belanger’s lovestruck camera lingers over the superficials of male-to-female transsexuality — Laurence’s deliberately harsh makeup scheme, his wardrobe, much of it more outlandishly androgynous than expressly feminine. But the psychological intricacies of Laurence’s decision, plus its finer physical, medical and sexual practicalities, are something about which the film remains markedly coy, perhaps because they’d invite questions to which he simply doesn’t know the answer.

What Dolan does know, however, is how to art-direct the hell out of a sequence: crammed to the gills with design details and natural ones that may as well be designed, “Laurence Anyways” is even more wantonly beautiful than “Heartbeats,” with a wall-to-wall soundtrack of handpicked 1980s and 1990s pop gold that services many of the film’s bravura sequences even more than the Vogue-colored lensing. (A frenzied party sequence lit and choreographed to Visage’s fresh-as-ever “Fade to Grey” particularly stands out as art-trash bliss.)

He’s even filched a Stuart Staples track, thereby adding Claire Denis to the ever-growing crib sheet of directors that have none-too-subtly influenced Dolan’s auteur eye, making the experience of watching his films a bit like cinephile bingo: there’s Almodovar! There’s Wong Kar-Wai!  There’s Godard! Dolan’s magpie style is beginning, despite itself, to become something his own, but there’s still rather too much of it: it’s his most rough-hewn work, “I Killed My Mother,” that remains his most affecting. It’s not his underdeveloped narrative that swells “Laurence Anyways” to such an unwelcome length, but the young director’s apparent inability to throw out any one of his exquisite shots. Kill your darlings, Master Dolan, and then hang them on the wall. 

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter. 

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CANNES – It might sound the most backhanded of compliments to begin a film review with praise for its hairdressing, but here goes: John Hillcoat’s brisk, bloody and sharply appointed Prohibition thriller “Lawless” is the most immaculately barbered film in recent memory. From the pragmatically shaved planes of Tom Hardy’s short-back-and-sides to Shia LaBeouf’s dandily pomaded undercut to Guy Pearce’s unforgivingly skunky centre-right parting, no tonsorial decision in this robust period piece has been idly or accidentally made, every style revealing something of the wearer’s designs, demographic and disposition.

One of many well-tended details in a handsomely burnished production, this would be little more than an incidental virtue in most films, not least ones shooting straight for the multiplex crowd. In “Lawless,” however, it’s indicative of a second, subversive, perhaps even subliminal agenda, one that trumps its proficient, slightly over-simplified qualities as genre storytelling. I’m writing of its cool preoccupation with masculine presentation, how it can inform and sometimes disguise brackets of class and age — evident as much in the ratty shit-colored cardigans worn by Hardy’s stolidly rural moonshine merchant as in the newly acquired tailoring of LaBeouf as Hardy’s younger, more aspirational brother.

Acutely aware of how they look at themselves and how we look at them, the film is, by extension, a tangy exercise in movie-star gazing, the physical differences between its leading men reflecting opposed modes of maleness no less prevalent on today’s Hollywood star ladder than in the earthier climes of Depression-era Franklin County, Virginia, where “Lawless” spins its allegedly true tale. If that seems an esoteric way to approach an otherwise straightforward story of brothers defending their turf, their honor and their alcohol, that’s because the film’s sparse thriller structure, with its single villain, unconflicted heroes and straightforward series of shootouts, provides an awful lot of room for such subtextual speculation. The right to booze, after all, has been a stereotypical tenet of lad culture for eons; where better than a Prohibition drama, then, for a supposed lads’ film to get a little self-reflexive?

“There’s you, believing your own legend again,” Jessica Chastain’s escaped showgirl Maggie says to Hardy’s Forrest Bondurant, after he confesses assuming he made it to hospital unaided following a particularly grisly attack — a line that gently mocks masculine autonomy (it was, of course, Maggie who rescued him) but also supports the film’s own quasi-mythic construction of the real-life Bondurant Brothers as rebels with a cause, defenders of pleasure, last of the honest outlaws. Family head Forrest, in particular, is presented as a kind of real-man archetype, with the cannily cast Tom Hardy (himself currently celebrated as the brutish antidote to Bieber-era sexuality) wittily limiting himself to a repertoire of sage-savage grunts, his homely choice of knitwear accessorising his salt-of-the-earth presence.

Not for nothing is the instigator of trouble Forrest’s considerably more boyish, urban-influenced kid brother Jack (LaBeouf, his squirrelly physique never more aptly character-serving), whose initially successful attempts to bring the family’s quietly manufactured illegal moonshine to the big-city market catch the attention of less forgiving authorities: it’s not just his immaturity that endangers the family, but his discontent with his own rusticity. Not for nothing is the chief enemy of the piece Guy Pearce’s preening, excessively refined lawman Rakes (“It’s special deputy Rakes,” he snarls insecurely), whose own sexual identity is called into question by more than his dainty gentleman’s wardrobe: “Oh, you’re a peach,” he leers at a young male offender, smoothing creases in his white leather gloves all the while. (His ambiguities certainly don’t go undetected by the Bondurants, who retaliate against his bullying by sending him a grotesque gift that I won’t spoil here, though it does come delicately wrapped in pink tissue paper.)

If there’s something arguably regressive about this equation of heroism with rootsy, red-blooded manliness, the defense is that it comes parcelled in its own distanced reflection on American fraternal ideals — though even by that rationale, one still wishes its women, Chastain and the ever-engaging Mia Wasikowska as LaBeouf’s fallen-snow Amish girlfriend, had a little more to do. The boys certainly have all the fun here, playing variations on their established screen personae with varying degrees of intensity. LaBeouf, for his part, has never been more spry or appealing than he is as the smart-naif Jack, wearing the world like it’s his new suit, and his new suit like it’s the world. Pearce, meanwhile, is a riot, shading in Rakes’s campness without compromising his slithery, terrifying authority.

They’re all made to look a million dollars — in Hardy’s case, a very scuffed, mud-stained million dollars — with the aforementioned styling and Margot Wilson’s exactingly textured and silhouetted costumes, the centerpiece of a production that bears the influence of both old-school studio polish and the stone-colored restraint of Hillcoat’s previous features, the grain of Benoit Delhomme’s economically lit digital lensing just taking the edge off the nostalgia. Nick Cave’s score, storming era-hopping folk laced with the fluttery vocals of Emmylou Harris, is a thing of rather more range and intricacy than his serviceable script, which seems to be missing a few genre beats, as well as the flavorful vernacular of the Australian’s closer-to-home “The Proposition.” These absences aren’t felt as much as you might think in a sleek entertainment whose style — and whose sex — turn out to be its substance. As Jack discovers midway through the film, some vehicles can indeed run on moonshine. 

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Oh yeah, Peter Berg’s big ticket board game production (shoot me) hit theaters this weekend, too. I totally forgot (honest). Guy saw the film when it opened in the UK last month and was none too high on it in his Variety assessment. Anyway, if you have something to say about “Battleship,” again, hit the comments section below.

CANNES – With this year’s Competition still searching for that unifying critical and audience hit — though the two biggest hitters thus far, Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone” and Cristian Mungiu’s “Beyond the Hills,” have proven excitingly and necessarily divisive — the longest and loudest rounds of applause appear to have been heard in the sidebars. Two of the four films I saw today elicited that kind of response, with audience members cheering and reprise-clapping at odd points in the closing credits in the manner that comfortably exceeds required festival politeness and firmly establishes that they like you, they really like you.

One of these successes, an Un Certain Regard selection that had already slayed the Sundance crowds a few months back, was to be expected; the other, from the lower-profile Directors’ Fortnight selection, was more of a surprise. Chilean director Pablo Larrain hasn’t, until now, been the kind of filmmaker to court such all-round approval: his cold-blooded political comedies “Tony Manero” and “Post Mortem” are something of an acquired taste even to those not alienated by their contextually non-transferrable Pinochet-rule milieu. Indeed, following its Venice premiere two years ago, I remember the closing credits of “Post Mortem” being greeted by nothing noisier than the stunned shuffle of footsteps as viewers made a beeline for the nearest stiff drink.

So when the the tersely titled “No” (A-), the final instalment of his purported trilogy of pincered Pinochet-era satires, showed up in the Fortnight, instead of nabbing a more coveted Competition or Un Certain Regard slot, we had reason to think that Larrain’s penchant for audience-repelling grimness had reached some kind of almighty apex, despite the friendly star presence of pocket radical Gael Garcia Bernal. As much of a kick as that might have been for us existing fans, however, it’s even more gratifying to see Larrain wrongfoot us all by closing out the set with his most narratively robust and emotionally rousing film to date, a hearty celebration of hard-earned democracy spiked with just enough of the director’s acidly crooked humor to remind us whose house we’re in.

Dropping the previous films’ conceit of filtering political unrest through the blankly blinking eyes of half-aware civilians, “No” instead heads straight into the machine: set around Chile’s 1988 referendum that wound up overthrowing the longstanding Pinochet dictatorship, its core conflict involves not soldiers but two rival ad-agency colleagues charged with building the electoral advertising campaigns for the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ factions. Part “Mad Men” in stonewashed denim, part south-of-the-border Paddy Chayefsky, it’s an irresistible story hook that provides ample material for Larrain’s own deadpan satirical eye, not least in the often spectacularly banal advertising under scrutiny. (The Pinochet team’s sensitive TV spot featuring a steamroller bearing down on a defenceless toddler is par for the course.)

Bernal’s mulleted liberal adman may be the Don Draper of this setup, but the film appears less than convinced by his professional tenets, as his attempts to hawk democracy (“It’s a concept, not a product,” protests one colleague) to the general public with “nice” We Are the World imagery and upbeat jingles is questioned by radicals who think a revolution should be sold as one. How much of this is built around archive material and how much Larrain has wickedly recalled or reimagined for contemporary audiences is all but impossible to gauge, as the director and cinematographer Sergio Armstrong riskily and rather brilliantly eschew the stately, mannered compositions of “Post Mortem” for grubby Academy-ratio video stock that lends the whole film a musty, matt archival sheen.

In an unsubtly effective development, the framing opens up as Bernal and his team edge closer to victory, culminating in a gracefully orchestrated crowd scene as conducive to an involuntary throat-lamp as any Hollywood fight-for-your-right epic. To see this pristinely nasty formalist come over so sincerely stirring, without departing from the bristly preoccupations and tonalities that brought us this far into the trilogy, is exciting in or out of a festival context; that “No” is languishing comparatively unattended in Directors’ Fortnight while the tin-eared politicizing of “After the Battle” makes the Competition grade is utterly bewildering.

“No” may have edged ahead of Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone” as my festival standout at the Day Three mark, but to judge from the whoops echoing around the Debussy theater this afternoon, many others have given that title to “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (B), this year’s occupant of the recently mandatory Sundance Sensation slot in Un Certain Regard. (See also: “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” “Blue Valentine” and “Precious.”) Rapturously received in Utah, the film today proved that its mucky bayou poetry still translates across the Atlantic, perhaps transported into the realm of the universal by its untamed mythical flourishes. Approached from any angle, the film is a richly strange (forgive me) beast — yet like Kris, who offered some thoughts on the film at Sundance, I found debut director Benh Zeitlin’s swirling, sinuous tapestry of sensibly unidentified post-Katrina sentiment easier to admire than it is to love.  

A dazzling pre-credit prologue opens the film at a full Olympic sprint, establishing the open-eyed, open-eared perspective of our thoughtful yet pleasingly unprecocious six year-old narrator Hushpuppy (magnetic, wild-haired one-off Quvenzhané Wallis), rubbing our face in the living, dying, crawling soil of the titular locale while drawing cat’s-cradle zigzags between its many garrulous inhabitants, before literally culminating in fireworks, set off seemingly at Hushpuppy’s mere touch. It’s such ripe, abundant filmmaking one fears multi-award winning shorts director Zeitlin may have exhausted his possibilities before giving us time to unpick them. For the better part of its first hour, that proves to be the case, as “Beasts” hammers ecstatically away on these same exquisite notes, unpacking its geography more than its hostilely self-possessed characters.

This is social impressionism, after a fashion, more daring and revealing than the film’s arresting but finally strained attempts to add magical realism to an already bustling jambalaya: Hushpuppy finds herself trailed by visions (or not?) of prehistoric tusked mammoth-boars, metaphors (or not?) of the destruction set to rain down upon New Orleans, uprooting her from a home that scarcely had foundations in the first place. For all its daring and invention, however, it’s when the film stoops to conventional melodrama — as rescue authorities tear the near-feral girl from her dying single father, cuing a somewhat truncated quest for new securities — that the film’s heart and ours click into place, pinning the thrilling but ever-so-slightly over-aestheticized euphoria of what’s come before to the shock of the real. “The rest is weather,” Toni Morrison memorably wrote on the final page of “Beloved,” and this overwhelmingly impressive, impressively overwhelming debut is a lot of weather. The breath of the disremembered, however, might be an afterthought. 

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter. 

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I haven’t caught up with Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest shenanigans in “The Dictator” yet but the wife thinks it looks funny so maybe we’ll make it out this weekend. I do get the sense that things are running a bit thin and hope Cohen can jump into this Freddy Mercury thing ASAP for a nice shift (not that collaborations with Tim Burton and Martin Scorsese haven’t been refreshing). Anyway, I imagine many of you will be seeing it, too, so when/if you do, head on back here with your thoughts.

Focus Features has an interesting little slate of films to pitch this season. There’s Wes Anderson’s latest, “Moonrise Kingdom,” which opened Cannes earlier this week to mostly favorable reviews. Indeed, I found it to be one of his best, a charming mark of maturation for the filmmaker. There’s also Joe Wright’s big adaptation “Anna Karenina,” which looks to be the heavyweight in the stable.

Then there’s “Hyde Park on Hudson,” director Roger Michell’s latest. From the official synopsis: “In June 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor host the King and Queen of England for a weekend at the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park on Hudson, in upstate New York – the first-ever visit of a reigning English monarch to America. With Britain facing imminent war with Germany, the Royals are desperately looking to FDR for support.

“But international affairs must be juggled with the complexities of FDR”s domestic establishment, as wife, mother, and mistresses all conspire to make the royal weekend an unforgettable one. Seen through the eyes of Daisy, Franklin”s neighbor and intimate, the weekend will produce not only a special relationship between two great nations, but, for Daisy – and through her, for us all – a deeper understanding of the mysteries of love and friendship.”

The project has been interesting for me sight-unseen because Bill Murray is tackling the role of Roosevelt. We don’t get a really clear idea of what he’s bringing with his performance in the first trailer for the film (though he certainly seems wry and affable), nor Laura Linney, who plays Daisy. Though it does seem to me that Olivia Williams could be a delightful barb as first lady Elenor Roosevelt. Samuel West and Olivia Colman also star as King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The script was written by Richard Nelson, based on his radio play.

Have a look at the new trailer below, courtesy of Yahoo! Movies, as well as the first poster for the film.

On the heels of the recent news that Dolby Laboratories has wrangled naming rights to the Hollywood & Highland theatre (formerly known as the Kodak) that has played host to concerts, performance events and, of course, the annual Academy Awards ceremony, Walt Disney Pictures has announced that the “grand opening” of the venue will coincide with the world premiere of Disney/Pixar’s “Brave.” The June 17 event will take place in conjunction with the Los Angeles Film Festival.

“This is the first of many exclusive and exciting events-from movie premieres to awards ceremonies-in which Dolby and our technologies will play a featured role,” said Dolby executive VP of sales and marketing via press release.

As part of the naming rights announcement earlier this month, it was noted that Dolby “will continue to update the theatre with innovative, world-class technologies to ensure that the theatre remains state-of-the-art, beginning with the immediate installation of its recently released Dolby® Atmos™ sound technology.” The “Brave” screening will be presented in Dolby 3D.

Pixar’s film could be the first serious Best Picture contender to hit theaters this year. The expanded field allowed for 2009’s “Up” and 2010’s “Toy Story 3” to slide into contention, but the studio hit its first major critical and kudos speed bump with last year’s “Cars 2.”

Set against the ancient Scottish Highlands, “Brave” tells the story of a spirited heroine, Princess Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), who defies a custom that brings chaos and curse to her kingdom, leaving her to save the day. It promises to be a unique entry in Disney’s lineage of female leads and marks Pixar’s first feature to have a female character front and center.

The Los Angeles Film Festival opens this year with Woody Allen’s “To Rome with Love” on June 14. It runs through June 24 and closing night world premiere of “Magic Mike,” from filmmaker Steven Soderbergh. Gala screenings include Sundance sensation “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Ava DuVernay’s “Middle of Nowhere” and world premiere “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World,” starring Steve Carrell and Keira Knightley.

In related news, AMC Theatres has announced plans to release four of the most critically acclaimed films from the Pixar stable — “Ratatouille,” “WALL-E,” “Up” and “Toy Story 3” — over the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. Six bucks per movie gets you the opportunity to relive the magic on the big screen.

“Brave” opens nationwide on June 22.

For year-round entertainment news and awards season commentary follow @kristapley on Twitter.

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CANNES – As a general rule, it should be a bit further into Cannes, when the combination of punishing onscreen themes and depleted reserves of sleep have battered down all defences, that I have my first involuntary cry of the festival. And as a general rule, it should be several lifetimes before the instigator of such a reaction is Katy Perry’s plastic empowerment anthem “Firework,” with a wheelchair-bound young woman playing conductor to its ersatz emotional swell.

“Rust and Bone” (B+) a remarkable exercise in brute sentimentality and unwashed romance from French genre artisan Jacques Audiard, is not a film with much use for general rules: awash with aesthetic and narrative decisions that scratch at the boundaries of human empathy and simple good taste, it’s the rare Croisette provocation that invites polarized responses by flirting with convention, even cliché, rather than transgression. In no other context could the Wonderbread pop stylings of Ms. Perry sound more subversive. 

It’s apt that one of “Rust and Bone”‘s most electric scenes should seek to dignify disposable Top 40 fodder, since the film as a whole seems exactingly crafted to redeem an entire cinematic subgenre that has too long been submerged by its own least distinguished projects. The words “disability drama” are enough to prompt an unmasked groan from many a wary film fan, conjuring as they do drippy recollections of triumph-of-the-will awards bait, much of it unawarded, or soft-lit, true-life TV movies starring Lindsay Wagner as somebody’s mother. But they rarely promise a film engaging with the ugly, dramatically seething actualities of human damage, an awareness that hisses from Audiard’s film with alternating fury and euphoria. 

Everybody, and indeed every body, is broken in Audiard’s chosen working-class corner of the Cote d’Azur, where Marion Cotillard’s disaffected Sea World animal trainer and Matthias Schoenaert’s shiftless, lowering security worker meet following an altercation at the nightclub where he works — her bloodied nose and his swollen knuckles mordant omens of a relationship that they can’t yet know will be founded on rolling physical setbacks and recoveries. By their second encounter, she will have lost both legs, perhaps to an Orca whale, in a freak work accident; he’ll have turned to bare-knuckle fighting as a means of supporting his motherless young son, himself no stranger to the sting of his father’s palm.

She’s the medically disabled one, but neither is a fully functioning human being; as she gradually rebuilds her body, he finds repeated new ways to break down his. In Hollywood script-manual logic, that pat irony would invite mutual completion between one and the other. In Audiard’s more hardened human universe, their sex-led partnership destroys as much connective tissue as it forges; few films trading in equivalent subject matter have mapped out the enervating back-and-forth of the recovery process with quite such sensory candor. (The actors, it hardly needs saying, are superb — particularly Schoenaerts, hungrier and more reactive than he was in his impressive breakthrough in 2011 Oscar nominee “Bullhead.”)  Physical sensation is a driving storytelling aid here, magnified by the tactile floridity of Audiard’s filmmaking: cinematographer Stephane Fontaine’s blunt, shoal-hued compositions are wired with glittering natural light and warm flashes of skin and blood, as the film’s song-heavy sound mix seemingly checks in and out of an echoing headspace.

Few filmmakers are quite as adept at conveying not just a character’s sense of self, but their immediate experience of their environment. It’s this kind of grandly wrought specificity that keeps “Rust and Bone” from tipping into familiar sentiment even as scene after scene lends itself to visual and verbal platitude — and as the script’s occasionally ungainly subplots reveal all too obviously its adaptation from a collection of short stories. As the narrative reaches its emotional crescendos, capped by a staggering scene at a frozen lake than inspired gasps, sobs and eye-rolls in seemingly equal measure at this morning’s screening, the unfinished details of its construction matter very little indeed. Some will inevitably cry manipulation, as if eliciting such strength of feeling in a viewer could or should be anything but.

Would that anyone could accuse “After the Battle” (D+) the lone African or Middle Eastern film in an internationally spottier-than-usual Competition lineup, of successfully harvesting sentiment. Instead, Yousry Nasrallah’s shouty, inert, indefatigably earnest  drama of class, gender and societal conflicts in the wake of last year’s Arab Spring conflicts in Egypt has justifiably little faith in its routinely ill-placed digital camera’s ability to capture political subtext. Instead, it resorts to the trusty alternative of having characters spout helpful paragraphs of text out loud — an awful lot of it, given that the film feigns to see both sides of the fallout that followed the fatality-stained Battle of the Camels in February 2011. There, a group of working-class horsemen charged into a crowd of protestors in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, setting in motion a chain of conversations that led to the dissolution of the Mubarak regime.

With the topicality of the events in question representing catnip to most festival programmers, one rather hoped “After the Battle” would demonstrate other, less cynical reasons for its presence here. But with the level of its visual storytelling and rhetorical content hovering perilously around the daytime-TV level, Cannes selectors clearly had their diplomat hats on when admitting this one into Competition. Whether or not it’s too soon to tackle these events head-on is a moot point; Nasrallah clearly thinks it is, which is why he laces his vague, boiled-down observations thereof through an insipid, scarcely credible will-they-won’t-they romance between one of the socially reviled horsemen and an educated female NGO worker distributing handouts to him and his peers — a dynamic that could yield rich insights about shifting moral and social hierarchies in Egypt if they could only stop talking about that very thing.

“You’re always finding political solutions to personal problems,” one character chides another at one point. The same could be said for Nasrallah and Omar Shama’s didactic, thuddingly literal script, though when the personal talk begins (“You look like someone with a weight you can’t carry or unload, like a donkey”), it becomes clear that political solutions may be the way forward for these characters. Nasrallah’s most cinematic flourish is the insertion of cantering dressage horses into every other frame, an uncertain visual metaphor that does, at least, reassuringly suggest he’s as bored of his colorless human mouthpieces as we are. Bring on the empty horses, indeed. 

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter. 

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Are you ready for the year of Matthew McConaughey? And did you ever think you’d read that sentence?

Yes, the heartthrob best known over the last decade for turns in dubious actioners, countless rom-coms and a naked bongo drumming episode is set to have a pretty sensational 2012. And not to diminish the actor. Even in all that sludge there have been sparks of that natural flair. But few would argue that McConaughey hasn’t been off on an irrelevant tangent since “Reign of Fire,” at the very least.

But this year — with two films set to bow next week at the Cannes Film Festival in Lee Daniels’ “The Paperboy” and Jeff Nichols’ “Mud,” another in theaters already and two more on the way — the actor has saddled up to quality filmmakers for the first time in a while. Seemingly, he’s ready for a new, more meaningful phase of his career.

The seeds of this were evident in McConaughey’s hilarious portrayal of a dialed-in, energized Hollywood agent in Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder.” But the transition really seemed to click in last year’s “The Lincoln Lawyer,” a well-regarded Michael Connelly adaptation that might have stirred some consideration for the actor’s lead performance as a crafty, sleazy defense attorney had it been released later in the year.

This year, in addition to the aforementioned Daniels (following up 2009’s “Precious”) and Nichols (hot off last year’s indie standout “Take Shelter”), McConaughey finds himself under the helms of William Friedkin (“Killer Joe,” from laureled playwright Tracy Letts) and Steven Soderbergh (“Magic Mike,” closing this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival). Both films hit theaters this summer, and assuming “The Paperboy” and “Mud” land distribution out of Cannes, he’ll follow things up with another one-two punch in the fall.

Then there’s “Bernie,” Richard Linklater’s well-reviewed comedy featuring McConaughey’s turn as a charismatic Texas lawman, currently in theaters and highly successful in limited release thus far. And since TV is where it’s at these days, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention “True Detective,” a Lousiana gumshoe series recently picked up by HBO featuring McConaughey alongside best buddy (and “Surfer Dude” co-star) Woody Harrelson. And speaking of TV, he also delivered one of the funniest moments of “Eastbound and Down” in the series finale earlier this year.

(Interestingly enough, Harrelson has also shifted gears a bit lately with, an Oscar nomination for his work in 2009’s “The Messenger,” loads of praise for last year’s “Rampart” and roles in HBO’s “Game Change,” box office juggernaut “The Hunger Games,” the recently wrapped “Seven Psychopaths,” from “In Bruges” director Martin McDonagh, and the currently filming “Out of the Furnace,” from “Crazy Heart” helmer Scott Cooper.)

McConaughey will be dipping back into iffy action territory with next year’s Simon West-directed “Thunder Run,” but after 2012, McConaughey could be in a unique position to work with talented people and leave some lasting impressions as he enters the next stage of his career. Assuming the upcoming films are worthy, he might even be a fixture of the awards season, which will do wonders for the industry and audience’s perspective of him.

I think McConaughey is a considerable talent. It’s been unfortunate to watch him wallow in paycheck territory for so long, knowing he hasn’t lost the touch — just maybe the desire to do something substantial. Since he first hit the scene in Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” nearly two decades ago (though the real coming out was three years later with turns in John Sayles’s “Lone Star” and Joel Schumacher’s “A Time to Kill”), McConaughey has exuded a confident swagger and an ability to craft memorable characters. He’s a guy I want to see on screen, a guy I want to succeed.

Maybe the kick in the butt he needed was from top-tier directing talent. Really, the last filmmaker of consequence he worked with was Ron Howard way back in 1999 (“EdTV”). And detractors of Howard can trace it back another two years if they like, to Steven Spielberg (“Amistad”) and Robert Zemeckis (“Contact”). That’s a pretty significant drought.

So fingers crossed for McConaughey that this is a watershed year for him. It certainly could be. And who doesn’t like a story like that?

“The Paperboy” premieres in Cannes next Thursday, May 24. “Mud” hits the following Saturday, May 26. Be sure to check back then for Guy Lodge’s reactions to each.

CANNES – It’s not often that a filmmaker’s cheerleaders and detractors alike can agree upon a single convenient adjective. But for better and for worse, “precious” has been a defining term for Wes Anderson’s unapologetically affected filmography ever since “Rushmore” dressed up the grainy funk of “Bottle Rocket” into something a little more preppily composed.

From any perspective, “precious” covers the thematic and aesthetic delicacy of his films, their exactingly designed construction and perennially nostalgic gaze. Whether that degree of refinement is something cherishable or enervating, however, is in the eye of the beholder. To say, then, that “Moonrise Kingdom” — a neurotically designed and almost exhaustingly cute return to the pre-adult concerns of 1998’s “Rushmore” — is Anderson’s most precious film to date scarcely qualifies as a value judgment. But it is, and you can attach to it what value you will.

One might say that Anderson’s sweetly brittle tendencies as a stylist have met their textual match in the thin narrative of “Moonrise,” revolving as it does around two preternaturally wistful pre-teen misfits who sexlessly elope to a remote corner of the sleepy New England island they call home. Few contemporary filmmakers feel quite as directly qualified to evoke the candied blush of first love, in which the sensation of new feeling is more exciting than the feeling itself, or indeed the person who inspires it: he may have hit his forties, but the emotional maturity of Anderson’s films remains boyishly, sometimes appealingly, stunted, obtusely disengaged from the dirty practicalities of adult living.

Bullying, adultery, Dickensian orphanhood and, most uncharacteristically, literal bloodshed all occur in the summery snowglobe of “Moonrise Kingdom,” yet it remains a guarded, tastefully self-scrutinizing affair, more comfortable observing human emotions than participating in them. People don”t get truly hurt in this melancholy idyll, even when they”re stabbed with scissors or struck by lightning. “Was he a good dog?” one of the young protagonists asks, after a scout group”s mutt meets an atypically sticky end. “Who”s to say?” comes the reply, laced with trademark precocity. If any hearts break in Anderson”s woozy romantic junction of Henry Purcell and Francoise Hardy records, they do so with similarly quizzical disinterest.

The kids in question, and the latest in a line of vessels for Anderson”s articulately awkward persona, are Sam and Suzy (presumably, and aptly, named for the subjects of that twee 1970s radio hit “Muskrat Love”), a pair of 12 year-old voluntary outcasts who wear their respective diagnosed psychological complexes with as much coolly disguised pride as they would wear a new pair of sneakers. Sam (Jared Gilman), a foster-family nomad hiding sharp self-protective instincts behind Coke-bottle spectacles, meets willowy, sullen rich girl Suzy (striking young Lana Del Ray-alike Kara Hayward) at a church production of Noah”s Ark; not yet old enough to recognize she has a league or two on him, they recognize in each other a kind of mutual contempt for childhood, and strike up an intimate penpal relationship.

When, a year later, Sam proposes that Suzy run away with him, it”s not independence they crave as much as a semblance of domestic security – even before a morally off-center scoutmaster offers to make a ritual of it, their escape pact amounts to a marriage. With Sam having no parents at all, and Suzy disenchanted with hers after catching wind of a coy affair between her mother (Frances McDormand, stridently harassed as ever) and the town”s dim-bulb police chief (Bruce Willis), they”re keen to enact a hazy storybook notion of adult devotion.

It”s the most openly sentimental story hook of Anderson”s career, promising a work of rare emotional availability from the tweed-suited archduke of archness – so why is it that “Moonrise Kingdom,” stuffed as it is with moments of zonked wit and lightning-bug beauty, still feels so hollow, so lacking in truth or spontaneity? Perhaps because fastidiousness – fussiness, if you”re feeling less charitable – is part and parcel of Anderson”s art: with each individual frame composed and art-directed to the nth degree, the film finally lacks the porousness required to convincingly convey less disciplined or less rational urges. Anderson feels most assured, visually and structurally, with genial chaos, and true enough, the film finds its easiest rhythmic groove in its latter half, when matters devolve into a jazzy ensemble goose-chase, as dithering search parties circle the young lovers, with Tilda Swinton”s ominously cornflower-clad Social Services (yes, that”s the character name) its sprightliest comic relief. This is all well and good, but feels like idle wheel-spinning after the earlier, unfinished suggestion of starker, sadder, uncharted intimacy.

The pleasures that remain are both plentiful and predictable: many Anderson sceptics feel inclined to complain about the consistency of his films” mise-en-scene, which strikes me as a churlish gripe in a time when the indie landscape is littered with visually anonymous digi-fodder. Whether his technical signatures – the yellowed-paperback palette, the obsessive-compulsive symmetry, the shot-reverse-shot switches in scale – delight or irritate, there”s something pleasing about being able to identify A Wes Anderson Joint from almost any given still, and “Moonrise Kingdom” may be his most unreservedly lovely production to date.

Robert D. Yeoman”s camera appears to have taken the springy New England foliage as its chief cue for both color and texture; if you could hear it beneath Alexandre Desplat”s overbearingly intricate score, you”d hear each shot rustling as the breeze fuzzes the focus; more precise is Adam Stockhausen”s period production design, a concentric succession of dollhouses within dioramas within dollhouses, its distortions floating the possibility that all of this may be playing out in a character”s memory, which might explain why its every airy thought or idealized sentiment seems one beat removed from reality. The love that Wes Anderson lavishes upon his films has never been more richly in evidence, but he remains, as ever, all love and,well, precious little passion.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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Filmmaker Wes Anderson is back this year with his first live action film in five years, “Moonrise Kingdom,” premiering today as the opening night film of the Cannes Film Festival. In typical Anderson fashion, it features an ensemble of actors, though many of them are working with him for the first time. Over the years, Anderson has established an impressive stable of acting talent, a dedicated troupe of personnel that can slip right into his singular world with ease. Will first-timers Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Bob Balaban, Frances McDormand and Harvey Keitel join the crew after “Moonrise Kingdom?” Time will tell, but for now, here’s a look at the house that Anderson built. Click through the gallery below for a quick refresher.

It’s been a while since I last saw Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon.” It’s a film that demands attention be paid, and I so rarely find that I can sit down and settle in with it. But it’s a masterful piece of work that deserves a couple of looks over the years, to be sure.

The Academy is offering one such look as part of its “Member Selects” series on Monday, May 21 at the Lighthouse International in New York City. “Capote” and “Moneyball” director Bennett Miller will be on hand to introduce the film (as “Member Selects” is a series where Academy members introduce one of their favorite films).

“Barry Lyndon” landed at an interesting time in film history. It was part of a dying breed of film, done with a certain magnificence that was becoming rarer and rarer (and, indeed, is one of a kind for the way Kubrick approached the material). It landed seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Of course, it lost those top tier categories to Milos Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” so it shouldn’t hang its head. But the film did win a quartet of below-the-line honors for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography (an element of the film which is legendary), Best Costume Design and Best Music Scoring (Original Song Score and/or Adaptation).

I say 1975 was an interesting time in film history because of one particular accomplishment: Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” which, three years after “The Godfather” and two years after “The Exorcist” showed what was truly possible at the box office and heralded the age of the blockbuster. That and the other nominees for Best Picture (“Dog Day Afternoon” and “Nashville”) filled out one of the better slates in the Academy’s own history. It was a treasure trove, really.

Then, a year later, “Rocky” beats the likes of “All the President’s Men,” “Bound for Glory,” “Network” and “Taxi Driver.” Go figure.

Tickets for the event are $5 for the general public and $3 for Academy members and students with a valid ID. They can be purchased online at www.oscars.org or at the box office prior to the event (subject to availability).

Meanwhile, in case you hadn’t heard, Kubrick’s early films are set for home video release by Kino Lorber in the fall. Included in the set will be the short documentaries “Day of the Fight,” “Flying Padre” and “The Seafarers,” as well as Kubrick’s first feature, “Fear and Desire” (which recently aired on TCM for the first time). Completists will want to spring for that. I actually just happened to watch “Day of the Fight” yesterday, as it’s available on YouTube. It’s embedded below if you’d like to check out Kubrick’s first try at the moving image.

Elsewhere, “Barry Lyndon” star Ryan O’Neal recently released a memoir that’s worth mentioning: “Both of Us: My Life with Farrah,” which details his passionate but turbulent relationship with Farrah Fawcett over the years.

Oh, and one more Kubrick note. Rodney Ascher’s documentary “Room 237,” which explores the numerous theories about the hidden meanings of the director’s 1980 adaptation “The Shining” and was picked up by IFC Films out of Sundance, will be screening at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21. The same day as the “Barry Lyndon” screening, in fact. Coincidence? I THINK NOT. *Twilight Zone Theme*

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfgiZXyFBjM&w=640&h=360]

I’m not sure we could write much more about “Margaret” in this space. Last December, filling in the gaps with the rest of a press corps hammering out their top 10 lists for the year, I caught up to Kenneth Lonergan’s embattled film at one of two screenings Fox Searchlight politely scheduled for those who had missed it during its fleeting September release.

I loved it. I loved it so much it became, for me, the best film of 2011. I talked at length with Lonergan, who was unable to do press due to necessary legal hand-tying regarding lawsuits involving the studio and financier. Roth (also a fan of the film) talked at length with star Anna Paquin, a surreal experience for the “True Blood” vixen, given that she had worked on the film so long ago. And Guy, too, fell in love with it and ranked it pretty high on his list of the year’s best.

No, I don’t think there’s much more we could write…about the theatrical cut, anyway. But with a new extended assemblage finally coming to DVD/Blu-ray on July 10, you can bet we’ll find something!

Searchlight announced the news today, noting that the package will initially be available exclusively at Amazon. The theatrical cut (which ran just 11 seconds under the Fox-mandated 150 minute limit) will be included, as well as an extended version (supervised by Lonergan) that includes 36 additional minutes.

It will be a bare-bones package with no additional “special features” content, but beggars can’t be choosers. It’s a big deal for many that they will finally be able to see the film at all, let alone a version with so much more of Lonergan’s original vision.

The long, twisted road of “Margaret” has become legend, and naturally with something like that, and to paraphrase the great western, the legend has been printed a bit more than the fact. Searchlight was hammered at the end of the year for an apparent lack of publicity for the film, though few bothered to note the significance of the fact that Lonergan couldn’t really do much publicity, while Paquin was made available for this and that. Could the release have been broader? Yes, but with what marketing infrastructure to support it?

So I don’t think anyone should be tossing the studio (which sent screeners to the entire membership of the Academy last season) under the bus on this one. It was a big, fat, unfortunate situation all around.

The good news is #teammargaret resurrected the film’s spirit. Independent theater owners have kept that spirit alive (with prints of the film provided by Searchlight) as Lonergan has graciously brought his thoughts to audiences via Q&A sessions. And now, the film is set to reach a much wider audience on home video.

The legal situation is on-going. But great art will out, and for — to this viewer — the best film of 2011, it looks like a happy ending after all.

I can hardly believe it’s snuck up on like this, but today I jet off to the south of France for the Cannes Film Festival, which officially kicks off tomorrow with the premiere of Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom.” Currently, we’re in the exciting night-before-Christmas stage of the festival. 22 Competition films (among a buffet of others in secondary strands) lie unseen ahead of us: all of them have serious artistic intentions and creditable names attached, and have been hand-picked for the programme by the powers that be.

Yet there will be successes and there will be failures: predicting the annual critical disaster as much a sport as handicapping the jury awards. We have no idea what the prizewinners and/or future classics from the lineup might prove to be — and that “and/or” is crucial, since the two don’t always overlap. Cannes juries are no less capable than the Academy of missing the boat with their choices, of passing over long-haul masterworks for short-lived sensations. Will future generations care about Palme d’Or winner “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” — any more than people today care about “The Mission?”

Cannes awards are certainly nice to have, and can be invaluable in securing distribution for challenging no-name arthouse titles, but when push comes to shove, they’re no less arbitrary a measure of worth than, say, a Golden Globe — not least because they’re decided by only nine people. To prove that point, today’s list focuses on some of the finest films to play in Competition at Cannes, only to leave the Croisette completely empty-handed, with not so much as a Special Jury Prize to call their own. In some cases, they lost out to worthy competitors; in others, the outcome is a little more puzzling. All of them, however, deserved something for their pains.

Going through the Competition selections from each of the festival’s 64 years, I was surprised by the sheer amount of noble losers I had to choose from: even in years where the jury mostly gets it right, there tends to be an outstanding film or two left on the sidelines.

Honorable mentions include Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” “A Place in the Sun,” “The Tales of Hoffmann,” “Funny Face,” “Sons and Lovers,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “My Night with Maud,” “Murmur of the Heart,” “Walkabout,” “Thieves Like Us,” “The American Friend,” “Being There,” “Heaven’s Gate,” “Thief,” “Shoot the Moon,” “The King of Comedy,” Claire Denis’s “Chocolat,” “Sweetie,” “King of the Hill,” “Through the Olive Trees,” “Spider,” “The Headless Woman,” “Synecdoche, New York,” “Bright Star,” “Another Year,” “My Joy” and, from just last year, “Sleeping Beauty” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” Grand total of Cannes prizes between them? Zero.

So, remember these films (and, of course, the 10 listed below) when, in a little under two weeks’ time, Nanni Moretti’s jury doles out its prizes: a Cannes award is but a short-term victory. Have a browse through our embedded gallery, and feel free to share your thoughts below.

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Three-time Oscar winner Colleen Atwood has been designing costumes for some of the most elaborate Hollywood productions for the better part of three decades. Perhaps best known for her singular collaborations with director Tim Burton (another of which, “Dark Shadows,” is currently in theaters), she has made her career working with seasoned directors like Jonathan Demme, Michael Mann, Andrew Niccol and Rob Marshall.

But for “Snow White and the Huntsman,” Atwood found herself working with debut feature director Rupert Sanders on a large-scale endeavor bursting at the seams with design elements. And she came away impressed with the the first-timer’s ability to channel the stress and be all the stronger for it.

“I knew him from commercials and I always thought he had kind of a good quality to him,” Atwood says, surrounded by a gallery of costume elements from the film. “This is a lot of movie for a first-time director. He did all the right things. He kept enough strength up to make the film, where sometimes on a movie like this even a seasoned director by the end is just baked. I thought he really managed his energy and his focus in a great way and he just got stronger and stronger as the movie went on, and he got more confidence.”

The ability to defer to a veteran like Atwood certainly plays a hand in instilling that confidence. She’s taken stabs at the future (“Gattaca”), schlock (“Mars Attacks!”), 19th Century horror (“Sleepy Hollow”), razzle dazzle (“Chicago,” “Nine”) and fairytale fantasy (“Alice in Wonderland,” “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”). It’s the latter arena in which “Snow White” resides, a murky, twisted spin on the classic yarn.

“He wanted a little bit of a dark edge to it,” Atwood says of Sanders’s direction. “We weren’t locked into one particular four-year era. We could kind of re-imagine the feeling of a Medieval kind of time.”

There were some references of note, though. Neo-Romanticism and the work of British artist and designer Edward Burne-Jones was one. But mostly it was about broad ideas, elemental, even, and moving organically from there.

“Even though I have that leeway, I always start with the base and the architecture and design of the period,” Atwood says. “It was very basic. It was kind of modern in the sense that it didn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. They moved fabric around but they kept the lines pretty straight-forward. In a way it’s taking that and figuring out how to make it architectural and interesting and to change it up a bit from an empire-waisted dress to what it can become.”

And it can become any number of striking ensembles. From the leather and chain mail-clad stylings of the titular heroine (played by Kristen Stewart) and her pursuer/eventual protector (Chris Hemsworth), to the lavish, eerie elements of the diabolical Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron), Atwood covers a wide spectrum with her work on the production.

“In Ravenna’s clothes,” she notes specifically, “what we wanted was a sense of death and decay. So we utilize things that telegraph that in a way, the intimation of bones on the wedding thing, the feathers, the beetle wings from Thailand. There were some things reptilian in quality in chain mail that we came up with when we were making her army and then I used it on her at the end to kind of tie them together.”

Yes, you read that correctly: beetle wings. As you’ll see in the accompanying gallery, one of Theron’s ornate dresses was outfitted with rows of beetle wings.

“That was not easy,” Atwood says, “let me tell you. Drilling them — and the fabric was hard to handle. There were mechanical things with that one that were difficult. The feather cape was not particularly difficult but very time-consuming. One poor soul spent two weeks of his life trimming the feathers and attaching them to the cape.”

Atwood concedes that, even for a veteran like her, you’re always learning new things from project to project in the film business. Here, she says, she was able to work with a number of materials for the first time that made the crew experience all the more intense and, as a result, rewarding.

“I had an amazing craft element to this film that I hadn’t been able to use before,” she says, “because I had all this Medieval leather and all these leather craft people that did amazing stuff. So it was really fun to try to get into that a little bit…There was a lot of very painstaking hand work in everything and a lot of love went into it with the team I had.”

Check out a gallery of Atwood’s work below (as well as a video featurette on the costumes of the film in our related videos section above). “Snow White and the Huntsman” opens nationwide on Friday, June 1.