NYFF's lineup digs Baumbach, Haneke, and Assayas

After a week of slowly revealing the three exclusive premieres of their festival, New York Film Festival has now unveiled the Berlin, Cannes, Toronto, and Venice scattered main slate for their 50th run. Amongst the already announced primary three, "Life of Pi", "Not Fade Away", and "Flight", also chosen for this year's festival are Cannes champion "Amour", Christian Mungiu's "Beyond the Hills", Leos Carax's apparent fireball of "Holy Motors", and Pablo Larrain's universally acclaimed "No". Also of close interest from Cannes is "Like Someone in Love", a film that split critics decisively at Cannes, which promises an experience that's captivating at minimum.

From Berlin this year are "Barbara", "Caesar Must Die" (No, it's still not a sequel to "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"), and "Tabu", the last of which has had quite a few very outspoken champions. Out of Toronto are quite a few interspersed foreign features, plenty of which are likely to emerge as prominent candidates for this year's Foreign Language Film race. Fixed along with them are Noah Baumbach's rather secretive new project "Frances Ha", which instantly receives my attention based on up-and-comer Greta Gerwig's central role in the film. Less interesting is Oscar bait "Hyde Park of Hudson", which seems all too much like the "Albert Nobbs" of this year.

CANNES 2012 WRAP-UP: Best of the Fest

After a long, exhausting, and honestly rather underwhelming, week of the Cannes Film Festival, plenty thoughts and feelings are going about. There's plenty optimism towards the unseen properties of the year, as well there should be. There hasn't been a reaction from the fest that's absolutely demolished my anticipation for any single film. Are there a few out there? Absolutely, with the utmost being most definitively Abbas Kiarostami's "Like Someone in Love", but then again, what could you really expect? Even the atmosphere of the film seemed rather cooler than that of "Certified Copy". I am still quite completely intrigued by what Kiarostami has to offer with this piece, but it's definitely now more of an object than a film.

Another weakened film, quite massively in fact, is Andrew Dominik's "Killing Them Softly" which has had a divided response from the festival, but not so encouragingly. The main word I've heard wringing from the films rags is "heavy-handed", which I never find to be an encouraging feature. Still interested? Again, absolutely, but there's that massive weight that's restraining it far in advance. Topping off a triplet of deflated expectations is David Cronenberg's "Cosmopolis", which is also dividing the festival up, though not to such leveling effect as "Killing Them Softly". It remains as intriguing a property as it was before Cronenberg brought it to the festival. There will be insane positivity right along with the negativity, and we should be glad to hear that.

CANNES 2012 REACTIONS: Leos Carax's "Holy Motors"

So let's talk about Cannes films that came totally out of nowhere to surprise us with how brilliant they are. Last year that slot could so easily be filled by either "We Need to Talk About Kevin" or "Drive", films that journeyed beyond the beaten path to find something exciting and new. I hesitate to say the year prior was for "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives", since that film has faded from memory a great deal since, and only really got attention due to Tim Burton's fancy for it.

In any case, the Cannes surprise is a well honored tradition to come in one shape or another, and this year seems to have finally delivered one such artifact to us in the form of Leos Carax's "Holy Motors". I have little to no knowledge of what the film is about, who is involved, or where it is coming from, but the sudden eruption of enthusiasm surrounding it is not something you turn your nose up at. Of course there's still "On the Road", "The Paperboy", "Mud", "Cosmopolis", and others to stir up the pot, but we may have our Palme D'or champion already.

Guy Lodge (Time Out London): "Weird, yes. But even at its most wilfully absurd (let’s just say chimpanzees are involved), there’s something fragile, tender and even truthful about Carax’s hall-of-mirrors irrationality, the sense of an artist so weary of decayed human realities that he has no choice but to twist them into the more beautiful shapes afforded by cinema. By the time the film ends with Scob subtly referencing the character she played 52 years ago in ‘Eyes Without a Face’, you might feel an involuntary shiver down the spine – it’s hard to say what forces are propelling this ecstatic, idiotic, fizzy, frightening provocation, but we’re moved by them too."