CANNES – A late, not-entirely-incidental scene in “Behind the Candelabra” finds Swarovski-encrusted pianist Liberace holding forth on the 1981 Academy Awards. The showbiz legend is due to make his long-desired debut appearance as performer and presenter, and you may or may not be surprised to learn that he”s backing “On Golden Pond,” that maudlin, Vaseline-lit ode to comfortable expiration, to take the gold. “I”m so glad Jane Fonda”s dropped all those awful causes and made a nice film with her father,” he coos primly. “Our job is to entertain the world and sell lots of drinks and souvenirs.” 

Steven Soderbergh”s alternately raw and riotous account of the last years of Liberace-if that sounds like a reference to an era rather than an individual, it should-is crammed with delicious asides like this, and they”re not the throwaways they initially seem. Much of the film”s blithest humor is used to expose its subject”s deepest social and personal limitations, though its stance is more bemused than vindictive: as well as a touching and tough-minded love story, “Behind the Candelabra” is a sympathetic study of a man defiantly resisting his own significance. Its own causes, still politically hot a quarter-century after the man”s death, are subtly enfolded into its goggle-eyed celebrity spectacle. It”s entertainment with a capital, fur-lined E, though I suspect Liberace wouldn”t have cared much for it.

For one thing, the musician who yearned for big-screen stardom probably wouldn”t have been amused that his outsized life is being treated as a TV movie – albeit a TV movie that has seen the inside of the Cannes Film Festival”s cavernous Grand Lumiere theater. The good news is that “Behind the Candelabra,” for all its seamy up-close intimacy, feels neither structurally nor formally compromised by the nurturing hand of HBO; it”s a biopic that bristles with life at the edges, luxuriating in the excesses of its personalities and production design alike.

In terms of content, meanwhile, the film”s televisual backing seems to have had an expanding effect. Soderbergh has remarked that he chose the small-screen path only because Richard LaGravenese”s script was “too gay” for theatrical film studios, and it”s certainly hard to think of a more forthright portrait of homosexual domesticity in mainstream cinema: it”s a film that takes sexuality as a given, all the better to magnify what”s genuinely queer about the sixtysomething Liberace”s relationship with gradually disillusioned young buck Scott Thorson.

While Michael Douglas”s shrewd, rude, wickedly funny turn as Liberace (known to his loved ones as Lee) is undeniably the star attraction of a film that, at least for its glitter-strewn first half, doesn”t stint on the seductive properties of camp, the story belongs chiefly to Scott, smartly played by Matt Damon as a stolid yet corruptible soul born of the foster-care system, who suddenly finds in the older man more family than either one can really handle.

Introduced to Liberace toward the end of the 1970s, with disco dying just as the AIDS crisis looms, Thorson”s sexual attraction to the bouffant-wigged showman is never far from a desire for the security of parental care; the rot sets in when Liberace takes this daddy complex to belief-defyingly literal levels. Under the principle-free knife of plastic surgeon Jack Startz (a frightening, hilariously hollow-eyed Rob Lowe), Scott is rebuilt in the less handsome image of his master; by the time formal adoption papers are drawn up, this relationship can bend no further without breaking.

Scott is sufficiently blinded by the lights (and what lights) to miss the obvious fact that his union with Liberace is a practised life cycle rather than a happy ending: when he enters the scene, he either can”t or won”t see the pricelessly bilious reaction shots of Lee”s outgoing boyfriend (Cheyenne Jackson). But he knows on which side his bread is buttered: in one of many ingenious shot choices by Soderbergh”s cinematographer alter ego Peter Andrews, the couple”s first kiss is shown in dignified long shot, framed by row upon row of expensive crystal glassware. It”s these material rewards that prove the sticking point when the couple eventually, inevitably exhaust their affections for each other in the film”s devastatingly exact final act, which bests last year”s “Keep the Lights On” as the most detailed, emotionally acute and sexually specific gay breakup story in recent film memory.

The film is too much fun – and ultimately, as Lee and Scott resort to the ugliest of ways to evict each other from their lives and minds, too raw-nerved – to feel much like social tract, but a cool-headed, universal advocacy of gay marriage prevails amid its flashy indulgence of this particular relationship”s peculiarities. Soderbergh and LaGravenese don”t shy from the tabloid salaciousness of the older man”s adoption of the younger, but the film it”s also posited as an extreme example of how social structures can be subverted, and potentially warped, if gay men are denied the right to conventional legal partnership.

Would the marriage have ended any less disastrously, in a dry hail of paperwork and stern lawyers” tones, had it been officially sanctioned? Probably not, given Liberace”s vampiric reliance on younger men as a kind of elixir. (“I”ve always had an eye for new and refreshing talent,” he says in one of LaGravenese”s most memorable exchanges, to which Scott”s priceless snapback is, “No, you”ve always had an an eye for new and refreshing dick.”) But as the hard-won tenderness of the film”s final moments suggest, homosexuals also have the right to end their relationships as ceremoniously as they begin.

Soderbergh”s knockout run of recent commercial films – “Side Effects” and “Magic Mike” chief among them – have highlighted his knack for slyly packing dangerous social and sexual politics into conventionally crowd-pleasing forms, so it”s no surprise that “Behind the Candelabra” gets this riskily subtextual within a structure that doesn”t stray far outside the parameters of the well-made Wikipedia biopic. “Well-made” is no veiled knock on its gorgeous craft, either: from Soderbergh alias Mary Ann Bernard”s crisp, witty editing to the tacky period splendour of the film”s extraordinary production and costume design to remarkable prosthetic work on the stars at all stages of the narrative, this is a reminder of just how invisible the line between television and theatrical production is these days.

Most of all, though, it”s Soderbergh”s ever-intuitive instincts over the manipulation of star power that make the film so vibrant. Casting Michael Douglas – established in such films as “Fatal Attraction” and “Disclosure” as a kind of bastion of well-oiled but faintly insecure heterosexuality – as America”s first camp icon (whether America knew it or not), is a stroke of genius. The actor, meanwhile, adds his own inspired touches with a performance that stops short of the all-consuming, transformative impressions that routinely impress awards voters, playing on his own onscreen prissiness. A star turn that”d be a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination if it weren”t primed to take every small-screen award from here until next spring, it”s the closest Liberace could ever have come to being a movie star himself.

CANNES – Adding the title of “film critic” to his well-strung bow of professional achievements, actor-writer-director-artist-musician-academic-activist-probable-ceramicist James Franco recently spoke up for this year’s Cannes opener, Baz Luhrmann’s flash-and-sizzle adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” against the predictable armada of critics dismissing it. “These people make their living doing readings and critiques of texts in order to generate theories of varying levels of competency,” he wrote for VICE magazine. “Luhrmann”s film is his reading and adaptation of a text – his critique, if you will.”

It was a fair and thoughtful defense of a fellow artist that he was under no obligation to defend — though I do wonder if it was also something of a pre-emptive strike, having appeared online not even a week before his own skeptically-anticipated adaptation of a Great American Novel, William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” was set to premiere at the same festival. 

If so, it’s an optimistic one. Alternating between the textually straight-ahead and the stylistically mannered, Franco’s “As I Lay Dying” is hardly a critique of Faulkner’s furious study of mud-class mourning, while as interpretation, it’s timid at best, taking the emotional accents of its irony-strewn, often bitterly funny source very much at face value. If he seems cowed by the material, that is as pretty much any filmmaker — let alone one of Franco’s modest abilities — would and should feel. Yet the film’s staid CliffsNotes approach is still a surprise coming from this restless Yale literature graduate, whose previous directorial efforts have been less competent and often more compellingly self-styled. 

If you haven’t read it — and I admit it’s been a good 15 years since I have, so I’m grazing a paperback as I write — Faulkner’s novel turns a simple family tragedy into something considerably more prismatic and resonant by dint of sheer literary exhaustiveness. The story of the cursed Bundren family and their addled quest to bury their mother in her fictional home town of Jefferson, Mississippi sprouts a near-comical number of subsidiary misfortunes along the way: mental breakdowns, drowned livestock, an unwanted pregnancy discovered and troublingly treated, a leg broken and gruesomely amputated. (Small wonder the erstwhile onscreen Aron Ralston responded to it.) All the while, perspective is passed like a relay baton between multiple participants in the unhappy proceedings. 

“Unfilmable” is one of my least favorite adjectives in criticism — as a shorthand term for conveying degree of difficulty, it’s only scarcely less imaginative or accurate than “unwriteable.” But Faulkner’s whirling modernist landmark comes closer than most to meriting it, both for the pragmatic challenge of maintaining 15 narrative voices (as spread across 59 chapters) on screen, and the artistic one of finding suitable visual and rhythmic reflectors of the novel’s bracing, racing interior monologues that don’t simply translate it into reams of turgid voiceover.

In transcribing Faulkner’s busy catalogue of misery to the scripted page, Franco and co-writer (and former college bud) Matt Rager have remained — within reason — loyal to the text, necessarily reducing or even eschewing a number of secondary characters (some of them rather dry) without throwing the novel’s rambling, episodic structure out with the bathwater. On an incident-by-incident basis, comprehensibility may be an issue for readers unacquainted with the novel (or indeed with Faulkner), though the overall accumulation of abuse and despair is more the point, and registers with grimace-inducing clarity. (The book’s stony humor, however, mostly falls by the wayside, until a final scene that is rather too breezily played.)

His chief formal stroke is less confident and considerably more bothersome. Having wisely kept voiceover a scant imposition in a treatment that’s stodgy enough without it, Franco has settled on a theoretically emphatic non-verbal method to convey the presence of multiple perspectives in the narrative: a split screen, in which cinematographer Christina Voros keeps the action in both halves judderingly handheld.

This Russian-doll stacking of visual affectations can be maddening, making veritable pinballs of your pupils as they puzzle over where to look, but you can at least grant the technique a kind of Filmmaking 101 tidiness on the occasions where the two duelling images reflect two scene partners’ opposing points of view, or even a chronological split. More often than not, however, Franco forgets such thematic purpose in favor of redundant frilliness: the same image held in close-up and long shot, for example, with the occasional unmotivated cut to the sky — just to keep us on our toes, and our nerves on edge. (The filmmaking elsewhere, meanwhile, is pretty rudimentary, with the rich environmental textures of Faulkner’s faux-Mississippi rendered merely wheaty by stifling HD.)

Hemmed into this naively academic framework, the cast seem a secondary concern, though they mostly get by: as callous patriarch Anse, Tim Blake Nelson somewhat overdoes the Cletus Spuckler-isms, though conjures pathetic menace in his best scenes. As two of the younger, more fragile Bundrens, Ahna O’Reilly and Logan Marshall-Green (looking more than ever like Tom Hardy beneath a spiky thatch of facial hair) give some individual flicker to their characters beyond the page (either Franco’s or Faulkner’s).

The weakest link in the ensemble, disappointingly, is Franco himself, who retains a smirky remove even during Darl Bundren’s most emotionally bare scenes — though he does at least give himself the best close-ups. You might say that remove characterizes Franco’s direction, too: sporadically clever as his treatment is, he never seems all that invested in the novel except as a particularly challenging exercise for his ongoing artistic self-invention. Challenge passed, then. “As I Lay Dying” is not unfilmable; it has been filmed, and with competence at that. But the task of creating a film even obliquely equal to the rageful literary brazenness of Faulkner remains a hopeless task that Franco, with nothing to lose, should have attacked with the hell-for-leather eccentricity of his more flamboyant performances and art pieces. “As I Lay Dying” is the rare film that might have been better for being a bigger failure. 

When last year’s Oscarcast producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron were tapped for the 2014 Academy Awards, speculation immediately swirled around the possibility that they would offer hosting duties to Seth MacFarlane once again. With Academy president Hawk Koch keeping the “consistency” mantra going — citing a ratings boost, though failing to consider that the films in play had plenty to do with it — it made sense that MacFarlane might be back, regardless of the critical thrashing he and the telecast took in February.

Indeed, an offer was extended to the “Family Guy” funny man, despite his stern “no way” response to a Twitter query in the wake of the 85th annual show about whether he’d consider it again. Well, whether he was game or he wasn’t, MacFarlane has officially dropped out of the running today, he revealed on Twitter. And he even took a bit of a shot at that critical thrashing in the process.

“Traumatized critics exhale,” he wrote. “I’m unable to do the Oscars again. Tried to make it work schedule-wise, but I need sleep. However, I highly recommend the job, as Zadan and Meron are two of the most talented producers in the business. My suggestion for host is Joaquin Phoenix.”

First, let’s consider: Joaquin Phoenix as host of the Oscars. I say do it in “I’m Still Here” character. But in any case, count MacFarlane out. It’s interesting that he was clearly trying to make it happen (despite some breathless reports elsewhere that he wasn’t offered the gig — obviously he was).

With that news (or lack thereof) comes the age-old question: Who should host the Oscars this year? Here are our suggestions from last season (dated as such), but offer up your choices in the comments section below.

CANNES – As a rule, Sony Pictures Classics tends to make the first big acquisitions strike at the Cannes Film Festival: last year, they moved quickly when Chilean sensation “No” started getting sidebar buzz (and steered it all the way to an Oscar nomination.

This year, their first big buy is a film that was already a hot prospect before the festival started: Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past.” The Iranian director’s French-produced follow-up to the Oscar-winning “A Separation” premiered on Friday (which already feels an age ago in festival time) to generally glowing reviews — including my own, in which I called it “an intricately knotted, almost exhaustingly even-handed examination of tensions and untruths in a trio of marriages … further showcas[ing] Farhadi’s dexterity as a dramatist of uncommon perspicacity and fairness.”

It’s hardly surprising that Sony have taken it on, and not only because the film, in terms of its status and audience appeal, is a perfect it for them. The company also picked up “A Separation” after it stormed the Berlinale in 2011 with far less advance fanfare and turned it into a significant arthouse success, winning the foreign-language Oscar and scoring an additional nomination for Farhadi’s screenplay. With the new film being taken similarly seriously by critics — and, unlike “A Separation,” featuring recognizable names in stars Tahar Rahim and Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo — there was no reason for SPC not to maintain its relationship with the director.

No release date has been announced yet, though it’s worth bearing in mind that “A Separation” bowed at the very end of the year in the States. Of course, that was with the film established as a legitimate Oscar player, having been selected as Iran’s official submission in the race.

The awards future for “The Past” is a little hazier. It’s unlikely to feature in the Best Foreign Language Film race: Farhadi’s home country can’t submit a non-Iranian production, while France (which invariably has a wealth of major arthouse titles to choose from) tends to select films by native directors. If critical buzz continues to build in its favor, Sony could feasibly campaign the film in other categories, angling for another writing nod for Farhadi, or Best Actress for Bejo’s revelatory performance — the French-Argentinian star, best known for her winsome silent turn in “The Artist,” is currently the favorite for that award here at the festival.

CANNES – For artists now closing in on their thirtieth year of sustained filmmaking success, Joel and Ethan Coen still find an inordinate amount of inspiration in failure. From Barton Fink to Larry Gopnik to the Dude himself, underachievement – whether by personal or social standards – has been the hallmark of many a great Coen hero, sometimes more proudly (and more deservedly) than others. To this estimable gallery of schmucks, we can now add Llewyn Davis: a sincerely talented musician, a compellingly gauche social maladjust and, as played by the winningly rumpled Oscar Isaac, star of one of the brothers” most bittersweet films. 

A wise, wintry ode to artistry lost, found and placed in storage, “Inside Llewyn Davis” finds the Coens perhaps more sympathetic than ever before to the curiosities of their chosen protagonist. Gone is the pointed, arch mockery of a “Barton Fink” or, more recently, “A Serious Man,” replaced by a kind of benevolent fatalism – the film follows its hapless protagonist with the reserved anxiety of an invested parent determined to let their children make their own bad decisions.

Perhaps middle-aged melancholy has finally caught up with the dark indie princes, spurred on by the colossal box office for 2010″s “True Grit,” their most sentimental, studio-flavored release to date. Or perhaps the heart-on-sleeve integrity of pre-hippy 1960s folk music simply rubbed off in the research. None of which is to say “Inside Llewyn Davis” is a soft or overly forgiving film: rather, it”s as generously dimensional an individual character study as anything in their canon.

The setting is Greenwich Village, circa 1961, though Jess Gonchor”s exquisite production design locates it squarely in the shabbily dreamlike wasteland of American kitsch that most Coen Brothers films, regardless of period, tend to favor. These ramshackle surroundings, coupled with the brittle atmosphere of late-winter drag tangibly conveyed at every turn, could as easily be outward reflections of our protagonist”s current New York state of mind: homeless, penniless, nursing the still-raw emotional wound of his former musical partner”s suicide, Llewyn opens the film performing a jolly little ditty entitled “Hang Me,” and seems to be extending the invitation rather too keenly. (The song is one of several poignant, playfully applied folk pastiches written for the film by T Bone Burnett and Marcus Mumford; consider that troublesome Oscar category salvaged for another year at least.)

With his music career having stalled at the next-big-thing stage, and his minor label (essentially a mom-and-pop joint run by two distinctly Coen-esque old coots) having failed to secure one cent of royalties from his debut album (the source of the film”s title), Llewyn is living an essentially temporary life, alternating his extended bouts of couch-surfing between the homes of assorted friends and family: his frosty sister (Jeanine Serralles); vindictive fellow folkie Jean (Carey Mulligan), who”s married to wholesome muso Jim (Justin Timberlake) but may or may not be pregnant with Llewyn”s child; and a kindly academic couple whose unfailing hospitality is returned only with the harshest manifestations of Llewyn”s own social autism. (Oh, and a lost cat, whose resemblance to the skittish feline in 1961″s “Breakfast at Tiffany”s” can hardly be a coincidence.)

The scant narrative is livened up with a misguided road trip to Chicago in the company of a zonked beat poet (Garrett Hedlund, wittily outpouting his own Dean Moriarty from last year”s “On the Road”) and junkie jazzman (John Goodman, whooping it up in his first Coens collaboration in 13 years). Otherwise, however, the brothers” typically flavorful, verbally spiky script follows a necessarily repetitive circuit, as Llewyn keeps visiting the same old haunts and calling on the same, increasingly frayed allies, in half-hearted pursuit of himself.

Though set 52 years in the past, it”s a setup that will strike a cold nerve with anyone who has ever pursued a career as a self-supporting artist – be it singer or actor, poet or filmmaker – and belatedly faced the possibility that one”s life may not ultimately be shaped by one”s talent. “It”s not so bad being normal,” lectures Llewyn”s homemaker sister, though her gifted loser of a brother is no more capable of that than anything else.

Llewyn”s self-absorption and occasional stridency could make him tiresome company in less charismatic hands, but Oscar Isaac is a genuine revelation in the part: previously best known for “Drive” (in which he also starred opposite Carey Mulligan) and “W.E.,” his soulful gaze and shuffling physical gawkiness strike the ideal balance between movie-star magnetism and Coen-picked eccentricity. With Isaac barely off screen, the uniformly excellent ensemble is very much at his service, though in a touching cameo as a Chicago gig promoter telling Llewyn what he least wants to hear, F. Murray Abraham claims at least one key scene as his own. 

Visually and sonically, meanwhile, this is among the Coens” richest and most ornate films, with Bruno Delbonnel proving a thrilling substitute for the directors” vacationing regular cinematographer Roger Deakins: Delbonnel”s trademark palette manipulation and misty focus enhance the bitter seasonal atmospherics, as if the screen itself has frosted over and oxidized in places. (Awards potential isn”t the only good reason to release this in December.) Early on, I feared this beauty was at the service of one of the Coens” wispier films, though its sensual textures prove part of its very substance. If there”s a sense of slightness that never quite leaves “Inside Llewyn Davis,” that”s for the good in a story that, to some extent, is about life”s slightness, and the scattered moments of bliss – a hit, a song, a round of applause – that fleetingly make it whole.

You didn’t think “Argo” and its Oscar run was through with you yet, did you?

Tonight on “Saturday Night Live,” last year’s golden boy Ben Affleck took up hosting duties for the fifth time in his career, bringing the 38th season of the show to a close and putting a big bow on the 2012-2013 Oscar season.

Things got started with an appearance by Affleck’s wife, Jennifer Garner, and some self-ribbing over his Best Picture acceptance speech. “I want to thank you for working on our marriage for ten Christmases,” he said on the stage of the Dolby Theatre in February. “It is work but it’s the best kind of work, and there’s no one I’d rather work with.” Somebody’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.

They charged on through a sketch soon after with departing cast member Fred Armisen as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, responding to the “lies” of “Argo.” He decides to make his own movie called “Bengo F*** Yourself.” Affleck shows up and — what else? — takes a shot at “Gigli.”

Check out the opening monologue and the “Bengo F*** Yourself” clips below. And consider this, in all likelihood, the last note on a season that already feels like it happened ages ago. (Also, check out Ryan McGee’s recap of tonight’s season finale here.)

Oh, one more thing — a bit of trivia: Bill Hader (also departing after this season) first introduced his popular “Stefon” character not on Weekend Update but on a 2008 episode Ben Affleck hosted in which he starred as Affleck’s screenwriter brother. Naturally tonight was a good opportunity, with the character being retired (well, until Hader’s guest spots kick in), to call back to that bit. Here’s the original from five years ago:

[hulu id=e2ogbknek5fx3eilmojqng width=512 height=288]

J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek Into Darkness” has arrived. From here the film goes out into the unforgiving summer and we’ll just have to see where it stands fiscally on the other side of things. But I imagine at the very least its various craft achievements will be in the awards discussion at the end of the year.

So with that in mind, how has a franchise that spans 12 films over 34 years fared at the Academy Awards all this time? It seemed like something worth digging into for our purposes here and with the new film on screens, so let’s take a look…

“Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979)
When Robert Wise first ushered the story to the big screen in 1979, It wasn’t hugely admired by hardcore Trekkies or, indeed, most critics. But Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic score (which would later be used as the theme for television’s “The Next Generation”) picked up a nomination, as did the film’s art direction and visual effects.

“Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” (1986)
Two films went by before “Star Trek” was finally represented at the Oscars again, and this time it was a respectable quartet of citations (the most of any film until J.J. Abrams’s reboot tied the mark). Donald Peterman’s cinematography was recognized, as was Leonard Rosenman’s score. The sound effects and sound mixing were chalked up as well.

“Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” (1991)
With the scars of “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” somewhat healed, the franchise brought the original series storyline to a close on celluloid with “The Undiscovered Country.” The film picked up a pair of Oscar nominations, for Best Makeup and Best Sound Effects Editing.

“Star Trek: First Contact” (1996)
Pretty much all of the “Next Generation” films missed the mark and seemed like little more than extensions of the TV show each time out. And only one managed to get any recognition from the Academy: “First Contact.” The film was nominated for Best Makeup

“Star Trek” (2009)
The era of J.J. Abrams brought a lot of awards season promise for the franchise. Indeed, there was plenty of talk in 2009 that the newly expanded Best Picture category could be a boon for films like “Star Trek.” The film picked up PGA and WGA nominations but, alas, a Best Picture Oscar nod wasn’t in the cards. Nevertheless, it did land four nominations, for Best Makeup, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Visual Effects. Most notably, it marked the first Oscar win for a “Star Trek” film, taking the trophy for Best Makeup.

And then, well, there was one other recent appearance…

…but let’s not revisit that.

How will the latest “Star Trek” installment fare? Time will tell, but I think it’s fair to consider the same quartet the last film landed to be possible. And like the first film, the art direction and cinematography are top notch, but in all likelihood those branches will stick with less overt genre work (like usual). I imagine Benedict Cumberbatch will have his champions, but all of that will just be fuel for peripheral pushes in “August: Osage County,” “The Fifth Estate” and “Twelve Years a Slave.”

What’s your Oscar speculation on the new film? Have your say in the comments section below.

“Star Trek Into Darkness” is now playing at a theater near you.

CANNES – Something’s ailing Benicio Del Toro’s title character in “Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian),” but let’s lay that to one side for now. More pressingly, what is up with Arnaud Desplechin? The French writer-director is typically one of his country’s liveliest talents, with big, crowded, unapologetically chaotic films like “A Christmas Tale” and “Kings and Queen” bristling with emotional and intellectual curiosity — but he’s come a cropper in this lethargic, self-important psychiatry study, which he himself seems to have directed from the couch.

Playing to virtually none of his strengths either as a stylist and a storyteller, it’s a curious misfire from a director whom one had hoped would return stronger to English-language fare after 2000’s coolly received “Esther Kahn.” Certainly, neither its doughy structure nor its vague, tin-eared evocation of post-WWII middle America are a immediately indicative of a passion project that Desplechin has reportedly been nurturing for over two decades: we’re always plagued the longest by the problems we have the least natural ability to solve, and that’s a pearl of psychiatric wisdom you can have for free.

It’s not hard to see why Desplechin labored so long in bringing renowned Hungarian-born ethnologist and psychoanalyst George Devereux’s 1951 text “Reality and Dream” to the screen. The academic material doesn’t present a surfeit of natural options to dramatists, and despite the best efforts of the script — by Desplechin with Julie Peyr and American film critic Kent Jones — to make a character study of a case study, the onscreen incarnations of Devereux and one of his most intensely scrutinized patients, Native American war vet James Picard, aren’t given much life in the film outside their own restlessly talking heads. And while even the stuffiest psychiatry dramas (here’s looking at you, “A Dangerous Method”) can derive some voyeuristic tension from the testy push-pull of doctor-patient negotiation, “Jimmy P.” offers us two characters who cooperate to mutually beneficial effect pretty much from the get-go — which, while it presumably makes a rich and substantive case study in “Reality and Dream,” is a rather wan dynamic on which to build a feature film.

The film’s scene-setting is not unpromising: it’s 1948, and the brooding, taciturn Picard is being carted around Kansas by his no-nonsense sister (Michelle Thrush, all-too-briefly essaying the most convincing human being in the entire film) to various medical specialists, none of whom can adequately treat the mood swings and migraines that have plagued him since a wartime head injury. “He may be merely an Indian,” one doctor dares to offer as diagnosis, and it seems we may be in for a penetrating personal account from one of the most shameful collective social blind spots in American history.

Until we aren’t. Enter Mathieu Amalric’s bumbling, brilliant, rule-busting Devereux, a specialist in Mojave psychology, and all personal conflict in the film turns to mush; as written and played here, he’s effectively Patch Adams with an indeterminate accent and more impressive degree, and it isn’t long before his unorthodox methods are coaxing Catholic guilt and cathartic revelations of childhood sexual abuse out of Picard by the brainload.

Slowly but surely, his headaches disappear — only to be inherited by the viewer, in response to the film’s tortuous structure of dream-interrupted one-on-ones, and the duelling accent work in the leads’ monotonously mannered performances. (This is Amalric’s fifth collaboration with the director: one note they can take going forward is that the actor clearly does better with Desplechin characters who are more patient than shrink.) If it’s a relief when Gina McKee rather randomly turns up as Devereux’s fruity-toned mistress, that not because her wholly incidental character makes any sense whatsoever: she dispenses some snappy bon mots, rides a horse for a bit and leaves a farewell note bizarrely delivered as a seated to-camera address, but we’ll take the switches in rhythm we can get at this point.

The intrusion of McKee suggests even Desplechin would admit two-handers aren’t really his thing. His best film thrive on mess and bustle and fragmentation, and even the burnished, autumnal visual beauty of “Jimmy P.” — Stephane Fontaine’s serene, serge-textured cinematography is easily the film’s most accomplished feature — seems a strain on his sensibility. (Howard Shore’s ceaselessly swelling score, meanwhile, is simply a strain.) “Jimmy P.” culminates with its eponymous patient making a further, rather drastic bid for physical recovery: a complicated operation that involves an injection of pure oxygen into his spine. Here’s hoping Desplechin, with this airless film finally out of his system (and sure to be swiftly out of ours), has something similar in mind.

CANNES – Nothing I’ve seen at Cannes so far — not even the current Palme d’Or favorite, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s button-cute parenthood drama “Like Father, Like Son” — has, to my ear, pushed the end-credits clap-o-meter quite as far into the red as Alain Guiraudie’s Un Certain Regard entry “Stranger by the Lake.” Elated whoops and whistles greeted this minimalist French thriller’s final fade to black: not the reaction you’d usually expect from a civilian festival crowd for a work of such sleek, stark nihilism as to prompt visions of Robert Bresson adapting Patricia Highsmith. All of which leads me to at least one conclusion: audiences out there are really starved for gay sex.

Yes, “Stranger by the Lake” features more graphic man-on-man action on screen than you can, er, shake a stick at, granting it an immediate festival-world notoriety that will dissipate swiftly as many distributors simply cast it into the “unreleasable” pile. But while some will deem the film barely distinguishable from gay pornography, its surfeit of explicit sex scenes has a function beyond base titillation (though, let it be said, there’s plenty of that too). If many films have put the practicalities and politics of casual sex to more rigorous examination on film in recent years, I either haven’t seen them or napped through a lot of the subtext in “Hitch.”

The setting — from which the film never strays over a timespan of several days, lending proceedings an oddly airy claustrophobia — is a picturesque lakeside cruising ground in rural France, frequented by a small but restlessly circulating crowd of gay regulars and holidaymakers, who turn up on a daily basis for a spot of (in ascending order of importance) swimming, sunbathing and al fresco shagging in the rough woodland behind the beach.

New to the scene is Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a handsome twentysomething more in the market for a partner than a sex buddy, but taking his chances in the meantime. His best chance, as he sees it, arrives in the form of Michel (Christophe Paou), an older, mustachioed swimmer on whom Franck becomes inordinately fixated. Michel is immediately flirtatious, though initially beholden to another sex partner; that only further stokes the younger man’s desire, which doesn’t waver even after, one balmy summer evening, he witnesses Michel murdering his mate in broad moonlight.

Franck tells no one what he has seen — least of all Michel himself, with whom he willingly enters a steamy no-strings commitment, built on bareback intercourse and never leaving the confines of the cruising ground. The threat of murder proves a sufficiently powerful aphrodisiac for Franck to pursue a deeper relationship with Michel. Persistently rebuffed, he instead fosters a sexless companionship with chubby, closeted beach patron Henri (an excellent Patrick D’Assumcao), whose suspicions about the psychotic Adonis edge ever closer to the truth — as do those of the police inspector who begins sniffing around when the corpse of Michel’s last victim washes ashore.

This is already far too psychologically cumbersome to qualify as porn: porn noir might be closer to the mark, given how Guiraudie’s stylish thriller framework plays the dangers of rough sex against its oneiric allure. One may choose to see Franck’s outlandish fatal attraction as an allegory for more widespread hazards of homosexuality: if repeatedly hooking up with a known murderer doesn’t kill him, having regular unprotected sex with a known player might do the trick in the long run. Not that Guiraudie and cinematographer Claire Mathon — whose luscious, sun-dappled but eerily remote widescreen compositions plant the entire film in an uncertain Eden — are passing judgement too harshly on these bronzed transgressors, nor those who delight in watching them. Hot and cold and provocative in more than just the expected ways, “Strangers by the Lake” presents even the most dishonest sex as an honest thrill.

A year ago at Cannes, Dogme 95 co-founding filmmaking Thomas Vinterberg was stirring up talk with his film “The Hunt.” It went on to win an acting award for Mads Mikkelsen, currently creeping out television audiences in NBC’s “Hannibal.” Drew was a fan of the film, noting that it “infuriates in all the right ways.” This year’s fest brings news for Vinterberg’s next.

The Danish director is set to adapt Thomas Hardy’s novel “Far from the Madding Crowd.” The film is being produced by Fox Searchlight Pictures along with the UK’s DNA Films. Carey Mulligan (currently on screens in “The Great Gatsby”) will star alongside Matthias Schoenaerts.

The novel tells the story of a headstrong farmer in the mid-19th century and her three suitors. It has been filmed a handful of times, most famously by director John Schlesinger in 1967 with Julie Christie and Alan Bates in the roles Mulligan and Schoenaerts will tackle. That film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score.

Interesting note about Schoenaerts: You may not realize he has appeared in back-to-back Oscar-nominated films. He was the lead in 2011’s foreign language nominee “Bullhead” as well as 2012’s live action short nominee “Death of a Shadow.” He was also utterly captivating in (and sadly passed over most of the season for) Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone.”

Both Mulligan and Schoenaerts have films screening at Cannes this year. Mulligan, as noted, is in festival opener “The Great Gatsby” as well as the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis.” Schoenaerts, meanwhile, is back with “Rust and Bone” co-star Marion Cotillard in Guillaume Canet’s “Blood Ties.”

Here’s some counter-programming for you. Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” is slipping into select theaters this year as “Star Trek Into Darkness” dominates the wide release conversation. I saw and was delighted by the film at the 2012 Telluride Film Festival, and that’s coming from someone not particularly in love with Baumbach’s aesthetic. It’s also one of our under-the-radar films for the 2013 summer movie season. Will we be talking about the screenplay and Greta Gerwig’s performance come Oscar time? Can the film push out of the critics and indie awards circuits? Time will tell, but for now, those of you who get around to seeing it (or have caught it on the festival circuit the last few months), tell us what you thought in the comments section and by voting in our poll below.

It’s here. Was the mystery box worth it? You tell us. Yes, J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek Into Darkness” is finally in theaters and I imagine many of you have either seen it already or will be making it out to see it this weekend. We’ve covered it about as much as we can. Drew’s review was favorable. We charted the best and worst of the franchise to date. There are plenty of interviews to chew on at the site. (And stay tuned this weekend for some discussion on “Star Trek” at the Oscars.) But now it’s your turn to tell us what you thought. Dug it? Didn’t? Give us your take in the comments section, and as always, feel free to boldly vote in our poll below.

CANNES – For Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi, following up the near-unanimous acclaim of his Oscar-winning 2011 film “A Separation” with a similarly articulate dramatic study of, well, separation was either the most foolhardy thing he could do — or the smartest. An intricately knotted, almost exhaustingly even-handed examination of tensions and untruths in a trio of marriages — one past, one future and one stuck in a purgatorial present — “The Past” further showcases Farhadi’s dexterity as a dramatist of uncommon perspicacity and fairness.

If that’s a dangerous gift to take for granted, Farhadi’s previous films have brought us close to that point; the response of “The Past,” his first film set and shot outside his homeland, is to see if said gift can flourish outside his usual cultural context. The answer is a qualified yes: where fractious Iranian politics complicated the upscale relationship drama of “A Separation” and its similarly impressive predecessor “About Elly,” “The Past” hooks its audience without that degree of subtext. That may make it a thinner accomplishment by a certain yardstick, but good storytelling is good storytelling: whether he chooses to return home or not, “The Past” proves that Farhadi’s international career is ready for takeoff.

In a film where pretty much every other unhappy secret is laid on the table at some point, we never learn quite what motivated the break-up from which everything else in this catalogue of bruised and broken relationships spirals. It’s been four years since Marie-Anne (Bérénice Bejo) and Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) called their marriage a day; the film opens on their first meeting since the initial parting. It’s a civil, brittle reunion in which the polite acknowledgement of surface change (she’s taken up smoking, his hairline has notably receded) stands in for roughly unfinished business. The suggestion is that it was an abrupt withdrawal on Ahmad’s part as he fled Paris for his native Iran, leaving Marie-Anne a single mother to her two young daughters from her first marriage — a largely unacknowledged ghost of a heartbreak in a narrative that doesn’t want for them.

Later in the film, Ahmad teeters on the edge of telling Marie-Anne why he left, a confession that could well lend Farhadi’s script a political dimension. The words never come out; she professes not to care. She may or may not be lying, but it’s water under the bridge compared to the tumultuous emotional rapids the two find themselves negotiating with her new live-in lover Samir (Tahar Rahim) — a marital triangle too preoccupied with additional, problematic third parties for standard-issue jealousy to rear its head.

Ahmad is back in town to belatedly sign the divorce papers that will enable Samir and a pregnant Marie-Anne to marry. It’s a union opposed by both Marie-Anne’s elder daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet) and Samir’s pre-teen son Fouad (Elyes Agui): the latter out of loyalty to his absent mother, comatose after attempting suicide eight months previously, the former for reasons more darkly veiled than standard teen resistance. With mother-daughter communication having reached a near-total breakdown, it’s left to the coolly rueful Ahmad to tease out the details over the film’s densely packed 130-minute running time.

“I wanted to spare you suffering,” one character tells another in the wake of a further bombshell. “Am I not already suffering?” comes the pained if semi-amused reply. Farhadi is laying on the emotional pain almost perversely thick here, but “The Past” is less a melodrama than an anatomy of one, less interested in the salacious hows and whys of devastating personal crisis — many of which are never fully clarified — than in the slow creep of its absorption by all related parties. It never feels torrid or shrill, though its less compelling final act does raise the question of whether a writer can be democratic to a fault: blame is distributed and delegated so many times in the run-up to its ambiguous finale that dramatic momentum takes a slight hit.

Tension between the actors, happily, never wavers, with Bejo a particular livewire as Marie-Anne, a woman who seems to be clinging to her current relationship at least partly because she seems to have grown less self-possessed with every break-up. An Oscar nominee last year for her sprightly breakout turn in “The Artist,” Bejo inherited the role from an over-scheduled Marion Cotillard, and attacks it with the conviction of an actress hungry to surprise — her take on Marie-Anne is not outwardly sympathetic, but has a hostile, last-nerve vulnerability that plays excitingly against the more evenly tempered performances of her excellent male co-stars. (That said, after this and last year’s devastating Cannes entry “Our Children,” which found Rahim married to an even more volatile Emilie Dequenne, one wouldn’t blame the guy for seeking out a nice romantic comedy.) 

For all its rich emotional intelligence and impeccable craft — in particular, “A Separation” cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari has really raised his game here, subtly modulating his own depth of focus with that of the relationships in play — “The Past” is unlikely to surpass “A Separation” in most critical estimations. Then again, it’s unlikely it could ever have done so. Though I’d venture that some of its flaws (including a slight stentorian quality to its most vocal conflicts) are ones it actually shares with its marvelous predecessor, you can only follow an arrival with a return — something that might also be said of the damaged characters of this intimate but exacting film, forever turning in doorways and never quite saying goodbye.

A new Starfleet adventure hits theaters this weekend in the form of “Star Trek Into Darkness.” It will enter a long legacy of films capturing the spirit of Gene Roddenberry, including, of course, the 2009 reboot that paved the way for a sequel.

The crew’s first celluloid excursion, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” was released back in 1979. There was a new “Star Trek” film at least every three or four years until the 30th anniversary brought J.J. Abrams’ re-imagining. Going into this weekend’s release, that’s 11 films, three Enterprise captains and a lot of canon to play with.

The HitFix staff put our heads together to crank out a ranked list of those films. But how will “Star Trek Into Darkness” fit into that legacy? Audiences will find out this weekend, but for now, click through the gallery below for the best and worst of the franchise to date. You can rate the films as you go. And feel free to vote on your favorite “Star Trek” film in the poll as well.

The Weinstein Company has announced today that production on “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon II: The Green Destiny” will begin in March of 2014 in Asia. Yuen Wo Ping is set to direct after serving as a choreographer on the original film, which was directed by Ang Lee and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, winning four.

Yuen Wo Ping helped make Jackie Chan a star, directing films like “Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow” and “Drunken Master.” The Wachowski siblings also tapped him for fight choreography on their 1999 cyberpunk extravaganza “The Matrix” and subsequent installments of the trilogy, as did Quentin Tarantino for his “Kill Bill” films.

The sequel will see Michelle Yeoh reprise her role as Yu Shu Lien. She’ll be joined by Donnie Yen in the role of Silent Wolf.

“I loved Ang Lee”s film,” TWC co-chairman Harvey Weinstein said via press release. “I thought it was a master class in directing, but I know we are in fantastic hands with Yuen Wo Ping directing the second installment of ‘Crouching Tiger.’ Master Yuen worked with me on ‘Iron Monkey,’ ‘Kill Bill’ and now ‘Grandmaster.’ He is a first-class director and choreographer, and I am thrilled to be teaming up with him once more. With John Fusco”s incredible script and the dream team of Donnie Yen and Michelle Yeoh we are in great shape.”

Fusco’s script is based on “Iron Knight, Silver Vase” by Wang Du Lu, the fifth book in the “Crane-Iron Pentalogy” series on which Ang Lee’s film was based. Previously the film had “Freddy vs. Jason” helmer Ronny Yu attached for a May 2013 start date, but obviously things have shifted up and the Weinsteins are going ahead with Yuen Wo Ping. Perhaps it’s serendipity, given his connection with the original.

“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” scooped up $213 million worldwide and is still the biggest hit Sony Pictures Classics ever had. It is still to this day far and away the highest grossing foreign film in the US, having made $128 million on these shores.

Harvey Weinstein, Donnie Yen and Yuen Wo Ping will be participating in a press conference Saturday in Cannes to discuss further details of the production.

CANNES – Most likely in sheer desperation at having to say anything at all about Colin Farrell dud “Dead Man Down,” veteran critic David Thomson recently turned his review into a plea to Hollywood casting directors to make bolder, braver, weirder choices — to throw gender and other demographic demarcations to the wind and let familiar screen stars become other people entirely. “We need to revolutionize casting,” he wrote, “often enough to live up to our sense of ourselves: that we are not one fixed persona — we contain multitudes.”

One can only guess whether or not Thomson was aware of Ari Folman’s bold, brave and distinctly weird new film “The Congress” when he wrote that piece, but it makes him look rather canny all the same. A loopy Hollywood satire that morphs, via a dramatic medium shift, into a poetic sci-fi fever dream, its premise represents the most literal interpretation possible of Thomson’s words: an unhappy vision of what happens when actors, and eventually everyone else, are able to detach themselves entirely from their own persona, the multitudes we contain becoming parallel beings entirely. 

If this sounds like an idea roughly cribbed from Stanislaw Lem, it is: Folman’s script is a loose riff on the Polish philospher and speculative storyteller’s 1971 comic novel “The Futurological Congress,” a morbidly absurdist work set in a world where psychotropic hallucinations have supplanted reality or most of its inhabitants. It’s heady, inscrutable material on its own, and stranger still when Lem’s male protagonist Ijon Tichy is replaced by the actress Robin Wright — not a character played by Robin Wright, you understand, but Robin Wright herself, here basking in the spotlight of the oddest fictional co-opting of a real-life movie star since “Being John Malkovich.”

It’s the most elaborate screen showcase the 47-year-old actress has had in her career, though it shows good humor on her part to be the emblem of a film that spends a good deal of screen time tell us just how over Robin Wright is. The opening scene finds the actress enduring a lambasting from her longtime agent (Harvey Keitel) on the “lousy choices, lousy movies and lousy men” (heh) that have precipitated her supposed career slump; shortly afterwards, “Miramount” studio boss Jeff (Danny Huston, effectively playing Harvey Weinstein with more capacity for hair oil) bemoans the latter-day creasing of Wright’s “Princess Bride” visage.

Their proposed solution to the decline: scanning and perfecting the actress’s image, allowing her to continue as an ageless, finely pixellated movie star while the original Wright enjoys a plush, premature retirement. Disgusted by the idea, she acquiesces for the sake of her son Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee, presumably not interpreting Wright’s own son Hopper), a bright kid facing the irrecoverable loss of his sight and hearing.

So far, so interesting: this live-action setup is entirely Folman’s invention, and the serious-minded Israeli director of “Waltz With Bashir” is a surprisingly enthusiastic showbiz parodist, reserving his cattiest gag for Tom Cruise later in proceedings. Moreover, the silliness of the premise nonetheless feels touchily relevant: with motion-capture performance growing more sophisticated by the year, the idea of a star vehicle with no flesh-and-blood star involvement is disconcertingly plausible.

Things come a little unstuck, oddly, when Folman finally turns his attention to the source material: the narrative leaps forward 20 years, with a sleekly aged Wright coming out of hibernation to address the masses at a Miramount congress where even more extreme developments in digital body-snatching are set to be unveiled. Folman marks this transition rather clunkily by having the 2033 Maramount empire contained within a “restricted animation zone” — which allows the director to revert to the rotoscope-style aesthetic that dominated hybrid doc “Bashir.”

Conceptually, it’s a sound enough tactic, but Folman’s chosen animation style — bright, poppy cartoonism that recalls nothing so much as the 1970s work of adult animator Ralph Bakshi, as opposed to the elegant high-contrast futurism of “Bashir” — has a near-ruinous effect on the film’s already confusing fantasy world. With the design invoking no threat, and the rules of this dayglo “zone” never clearly established (some appear able to drift in and out of it with relative fluency, while others are trapped), the film’s sense of urgency and currency take a considerable hit.

A 2D Jon Hamm, looking more like a Disney prince than Donald Draper, shows up to steer Wright through this environment of imposed hallucination — much of it closely allied to celebrity worship. (A waiter turns up looking for all the world like Michael Jackson; a Grace Jones clone nurses Wright in hospital.) Hamm rather wanly romancing her in the process, but both stars wind up playing second fiddle to the florid visual kitsch of Folman’s id, as tentacled blossoms spring up in the lovers’ wake and the two wind up doing the nasty against a mood-setting backdrop of multiple blazing aircraft — all while searching for her son, who may have become somone else entirely.

It’s precisely as bonkers as it sounds, and at two hours, both wearisome and claustrophobic. (I’m somewhat surprised, though not disappointed, that Folman resisted the lure of 3D for the animated stretch that makes up the majority of the film.) But flashes of fury and beauty remain — and I’m not just talking about the electrifying orchestral score by Max Richter. There’s something exhilarating — mesmerizing, even — about “The Congress”‘s most ludicrous flourishes. Unlike “Rebel Robot Robin,” the cloned Wright blockbuster advertised at various points in the narrative, is not a film a computer could ever conceive. Robin Wright, meanwhile, is fiercely up to the task of Being Robin Wright, and thank goodness for that. 

The story of how Truman Capote’s first novel, “Summer Crossing,” came to public light is surely as interesting as the love story within its pages. To Capote, it wasn’t worthy of publication, so he trashed it. A housesitter at Capote’s Brooklyn Heights abode recovered it, along with a number of other works, but merely held onto it. And for 50 years, “Summer Crossing” was thought lost. When the housesitter died, his nephew discovered them and tried to sell them at Sothebys’ auction, but they were eventually sold to the New York Public Library and the novel was finally published in 2005.

Capote’s story, about a 17-year-old debutante who pursues a covert roman with a Jewish parking attendance during the hot New York City summer of 1945, was announced as actress Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut nearly two years ago. The news out of the Cannes Film Market today is that Aldamisa will sell international rights at the festival, while CAA will make the domestic distribution deal. Oleg Boyko (“Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For”) will co-finance with Aldamisa.

Says Johansson, “Several years ago I began working alongside the Capote estate and writer Tristine Skylar to adapt ‘Summer Crossing,’ an inspired early work of Truman”s which has long captured my heart. Being able to bring this story to the screen as my full-length directorial debut is a life dream and deep privilege.”

Johansson has learned the profession under the helm of many, many masters over the last decade or so: Robert Redford, the Coen brothers, Terry Zwigoff, Sofia Coppola, Woody Allen, Brian De Palma, Christopher Nolan, Cameron Crowe — it’s been quite the role call. And she just headed up a big production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway (a lackluster one, though she excelled). She’s always seemed like someone who would eventually make this transition and I’m excited by her choice of material.

She’ll next be seen in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “Don Jon” and Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin.”

CANNES – “For a moment, a band of thieves in ripped-up jeans got to rule the world.” In all likelihood, pop princess Taylor Swift wasn’t thinking of the Bling Ring when she penned these lyrics to “Long Live,” a sweetly non-specific 2010 ode to that fleeting invincibility that any teenager claims at some point between her first kiss and her first crisis of purpose. After all, had Swift been one of the fashion-conscious female stars targeted by this band of thieves in, well, expensive Japanese selvedge denim, her sense of generational self-awe might have been tainted with rueful concern – a line that Sofia Coppola’s brisk, funny, unexpectedly substantial study of a tabloid diversion walks with considerable grace.

The Bling Ring, as you may not have surmised from the film’s coolly oblique marketing, was a group of well-to-do Los Angeles teenagers who, over a 10-month period in 2008 and 2009, managed to steal over $3 million worth of personal property from celebrities including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox. How did they do it, you ask? They just walked in: in the way that good things so often come most easily to those who most expect them, the doors to these plastic palaces were left mostly unlocked. 

Even kids this brazenly entitled couldn’t pass this extended prank off as a Robin Hood scheme-robbing the rich to give to your bourgeois self is no one’s idea of heroism, however good it feels-but it did come perilously close to being a victimless crime. Amusingly, Ms. Hilton herself only noticed the burglary after several raids had taken place, by which point seven figures’ worth of jewelry had vanished from her overstocked stash. Shot throughout with a distanced, non-judgmental camera, Coppola’s film doesn’t exactly delight in such detail, but it doesn’t decry it either: dispassionately subversive and quietly modern, “The Bling Ring” may well be a morality tale with no moral. 

Some would argue that this is well-worn territory for Coppola, an unapologetically silver-spoon-fed filmmaker who has charted the ennui and corruption of celebrity culture in every film she’s made since her 1999 debut “The Virgin Suicides” – which at least bookends “The Bling Ring” as a study in warped adolescent self-actualization. But to lazily rehash already skimpy jabs at Coppola for her privileged tunnel vision would be to miss her new film’s significant shift in perspective. After three films about those firmly ensconced in the ivory tower – the Chateau Marmont in one incarnation, the Palace of Versailles in another – Coppola is, for the first time, on the outside looking in. 

Celebrities are not humanized in “The Bling Ring”; they’re objectified and finally commodified in a manner that equally strips them of their intrigue, their gilded refuges surveyed with post-”MTV Cribs” irony, and reduced unwittingly to self-image supermarkets for our young protagonists. (Not for nothing is Paris Hilton’s much-vaunted “cameo” a tossed-off long shot of her in conversation across a crowded room – no one’s interested in actually hearing her speak.) 

What’s gratifyingly fresh about the film is Coppola’s refusal to sentimentalize the kids’ crimes as a form of starry-eyed celebrity desire, which would be the easiest and most self-flattering stance for a celebrity filmmaker to take. The girls don’t steal Paris Hilton’s Louboutins to feel like Paris Hilton, whom at least some of them hold in blatant contempt; they steal them because they’re nice shoes, and readily available at that. Ringleader Rebecca (played with dry confidence by promising newcomer Katie Chang) at one point wheedles her sexually ambiguous sidekick Marc (Israel Broussard) into another spree with the invitation, “Let’s go to Paris”; by the end, her pleas have changed to, “I need some Chanel.” 

Never one to resist the allure of a designer label herself, Coppola is at least partly sympathetic to such material concerns: in an era where celebrity can be founded on personal achievements as tenuous as those of a Kardashian or a Hilton, their self-enhancing possessions do, rightly or (probably) wrongly, carry genuine currency. Taking them away theoretically shortens the gap between haves and have-nots, or at least it would if the haves didn’t have so damn much; we’re still nowhere near noble territory, but the film’s politics get more fractiously sophisticated the longer you consider them. 

All that, and it’s kind of a blast, too. The Ring members-faintly fictionalized in Coppola’s script, which also brings the action to the present day-exude the nasty charisma of a constructed-reality TV ensemble, only with tarter, smarter dialogue on their side. Playing gleefully against type, Emma Watson is a particular standout as Nicki, a toxic piece of work whose dull go-along attitude masks an astonishing capacity for self-promotion when crunch time comes. (“I’m a huge believer in karma,” she tells a Vanity Fair interviewer, without a flicker of irony.) 

Coppola’s first-hand knowledge of reality-shy LA society, meanwhile, lends her script a tickling frisson even when it plucks the lowest-hanging fruit. Said fruit comes chiefly in the form of a hilarious Leslie Mann as Nicki’s daffy mom, who perkily pesters her daughters with morning prayer circles, morning enemas and “vision boards” dedicated to Angelina Jolie. (“What qualities do you admire about Angelina?” she asks brightly. “Her husband?” the girls shoot back without a moment’s hesitation.) If anything, “The Bling Ring” would have you believe that the younger generation’s celebrity worship is more healthily in check than that of their parents. 

I’m sure I won’t be the only critic to suggest that “The Bling Ring” would make a handy double-bill with Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers,” another sexily constructed film that casually remodels the American Dream via a girls-gone-wild narrative. I suspect, however, that such a pairing would flatter Coppola’s film, which steers more successfully clear of complicity with problematic onscreen escapades. Much of the film’s expensive Top 40 soundtrack is deliberately filtered through tinny speakers. Working with two ace cinematographers in the late Harris Savides (who passed away during production) and his successor Christopher Blauvelt, Coppola cleverly keeps the lighting flat and the compositions practically closed-circuit in their distance, laying bare the characters’ world without ever openly inviting us into it. 

The film’s formal masterstroke-a patiently held long shot of a Beverly Hills mansion with a burglary in progress, lights flicking on and off like neon tiles on a dance floor-is, in its remote precision, reminiscent of Gus van Sant’s finest hours. As, indeed, is much of the film, Coppola’s least romantic and most questioning to date. Sure to be misunderstood by some viewers who take its affectlessness at face value, “The Bling Ring” neither offers nor claims a direct line to the minds of its characters. “We were all young once” used to be the adult’s standard riposte to youthful misbehavior; we’re left wondering whether that’s actually true of these chilly, culturally over-caffeinated children of the century.