In Contention

Tag: Frederick Wiseman

  • VENICE: Follow the Lido — a festival preview

    “Why Venice and not Toronto?” a colleague asked when I mentioned I was heading to the Lido for the world’s oldest film festival for the third straight year. Given the North American bent of this site, it was a fair question, but also one I found easy to answer — and not just for the dully practical reason of relative airfare expense.

    Toronto may have become the bigger and, depending on your field of interest, more influential festival (certainly so if you’re in the Oscar-watching business). But with its abundance of pre-premiered films and no juried competition, it’ll never have the grandeur or ever-so-slightly scuffed glamor of the Venice event, with its beachside location, soaring marble delegate halls and saturated aroma of overpriced espresso — not to mention the artsier exclusivity of its film programming, a once hit-and-miss virtue that scored a bulls-eye with a 2010 lineup that beat last year’s Cannes for range, relevance and vitality.

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  • CANNES PREVIEW: The best of the rest

    Okay, so you’ve combed through the 19 films in the Competition lineup for Cannes 2010, and you still haven’t found much to get excited about? Fret not. You wouldn’t know it to read most media coverage of the festival, but the Competition is only one course at the Cannes buffet – and not necessarily the most filling.

    Surrounding it are a host of alternative sidebars, both competitive and simply exhibitory, ranging from glossy out-of-competition Hollywood premieres to independent strands yielding more familiar names than the casual festival-watcher might expect. In today’s preview, I’ll pick out some potential highlights from the non-Competition hinterlands.

    The ones you’ll hear the most about, of course, fall into the Out of Competition category, a refuge both for arthouse attractions that fell between the cracks in the selection process (chief among them, Olivier Assayas’s five-hour Carlos the Jackal study “Carlos”) and big-budget studio pictures seeking the prestige of a Cannes stamp without the risk of actually competing.

    Here you’ll find the star-laden pair of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” and Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” – both projects that have me worried for different reasons, but neither of which you really need me to remind you about.

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