Like Michael Haneke's Amour, Holy Motors, the first feature film in 13 years from erstwhile enfant terrible Leos Carax, leads with a reflexive shot of a theater audience confronting the audience viewing the film. Whereas in Haneke's film the shot has some naturalistic grounding, Carax ventures into dreamy surrealism right from the start, and doubles down on the meta by making his a film-going audience. (Bursts of silent-film footage riddle Holy Motors like machine-gun fire.) Carax himself plays the sleepwalker who discovers a hitherto unseen door in his bedroom wall that, taking a page from E. T. A. Hoffmann, ushers him into the dream palace's balcony.

Holy Motors is Carax's Finnegans Wake, an all-encompassing dream story featuring a protean, everyman protagonist, played by the chameleonic Denis Lavant (who's listed in the end credits as "Denis Lavant X 11"). From scene to scene, Lavant shifts shape into an entire dramatis personae: a woman, an elderly man, the character M. Merde from Carax's segment of the omnibus film Tokyo!, both assassin and victim, and others. Chauffeured around Paris in a white stretch limo by Edith Scob (last seen in Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours), Lavant's Monsieur Oscar assumes these various roles for some unspecified, theoretically benevolent reason, a form of histrionic therapeutics perhaps. At any rate, Holy Motors shares this emphasis on performance with Alain Resnais's You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet. Whether angel or devil, M. Oscar operates, as he puts it, in "the back of beyond." His metaphysical shenanigans include posing as the green-screen model for CG demons, abducting a Kate Moss-like supermodel (Eva Mendes), and assuming the role of a dying man. Whatever the role, Lavant's sinewy physicality dominates the film.

Granted, these scenes, taken individually or at one clip, may not add up to a whole lot, occasionally feeling like little more than rough sketches for a project that was eventually abandoned, which is, in fact, what some of them were. Tonally, the film ranges from anarchic comedy to high drama, even including a swooningly romantic musical number from Kylie Minogue, set atop the abandoned Samaritaine department store overlooking the nearby Pont Neuf. As well as this obvious nod to his own Lovers on the Bridge, Carax's film also includes subtle (and not so) references to Nagisa Oshima's Max Mon Amour and, in its final moments, Georges Franju's hypnotic horror gem Eyes Without a Face, which also starred Scob.

Self-critique or self-indulgence, Holy Motors isn't afraid to attempt everything under the sun. Shifting gears at a moment's notice, Carax's film repeatedly runs the risk of going off the rails altogether. And while it's refreshing to witness such derring-do in the midst of a festival whose films often seem content to bask in their own self-important humorlessness, that's still pretty cold comfort when it comes to actually sitting through this misshapen mess, as stultifying as it is surreal, heavy-handed as it can be hilarious.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

Anchored by an impressively modulated, admirably restrained performance from Mads Mikkelsen (best known for his work with Nicolas Winding Refn), The Hunt is otherwise an indecisive, weak-kneed film. The story of a man (Mikkelsen) ostracized and persecuted by his small-town Danish community owing to allegations of child abuse never clicks into place, mostly because director Thomas Vinterberg can't draw a bead on how to approach his hot-button material. (Truth be told, this kind of thing has been done so often, the material's really more lukewarm.) Half the time, in scenes where suspicion spreads like a contagion and folks begin to act in increasingly inexplicable ways, Vinterberg seems to think he’s filming Franz Kafka's The Trial. Other times, The Hunt feels grounded in a specifically Scandinavian mode of realism derived from Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Failing to reconcile these tonally disparate modes, Vinterberg's film flounders.

Also, it doesn't help that The Hunt's storyline is 43 varieties of improbable. This is one of those stories so necessarily founded on contrivances, on characters acting in ways that are unmotivated and senseless, yet entirely necessary to maintain all the narrative balls in the air, that one false move will bring the whole shebang down like a house of cards. And that's precisely what occurs, not just once, but time and again throughout The Hunt: A properly placed phone call, a heartfelt conversation, could clear things up as easily as a strong antiseptic, but it never happens. Structurally, too, The Hunt is entirely conventional in its dialectics, moving Mikkelsen's character Lucas from social integration through alienation and then back into comfortably redemptive reintegration. Nothing feels ventured, so nothing can be gained. What's utterly lacking is a sense of risk, let alone the demolition-derby wreckage inflicted on the Danish family in Vinterberg's best film, The Celebration.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

Jim Parsons comes out.

American Idol winner Phillip Phillips cloaks his chops in modesty.

The U.S. Air Force Academy graduates first openly gay cadets.

Man in custody being questioned in 1979 Etan Patz case.

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The United States Postal Service gives four great filmmakers its, wait for it, stamp of approval.

Hungarian director Bela Tarr has revealed that he is to shut down his production company.

Richard Brody is reminded of a quarrel he once had with Susan Sontag. (More here.)

A Jennifer Egan original...tweet by tweet.

Inside the dubs during drum major Robert Champion's fatal hazing.

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For Fandor, Kevin B. Lee hijacks Michael Haneke:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

George V. Higgins wrote downbeat Nixon-era crime novels like The Friends of Eddie Coyle (turned by director Peter Yates into a bleakly brilliant vehicle for an aging Robert Mitchum), pulp fictions full of toothy, profane dialogue and petty-criminal patois, with all the pitch-perfect accuracy of a court stenographer. Though its publication predated Watergate by several years, there's something especially resonant for the times in its sad saga of busted dreams and quisling betrayals. Updating Higgins's Cogan's Trade for the new millennium, Andrew Dominik sets Killing Them Softly against the onset of the economic meltdown and the run-up to the 2008 election, a thread of radio reports and TV spots running through the film like a leitmotif, all the better to establish Killing Them Softly's thematic core: "America isn't a country, it's a business." Whether the cash gushes forth from subprime mortgages or high-stakes poker games, disruption to the status quo can't be abided, and necessary measures will be taken to reestablish its steady flow.

In the case of Killing Them Softly, wherein a couple of criminal caste bottom-feeders conspire to rip off a mob-run card game, those necessary measures come in the form of one Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt). The slicked-back hair and black leather jacket are all the indication you need to know you're looking at one smooth fixer. As solid as Pitt is here, working once again in squinty, snarky Tyler Durden mode, ultimately he winds up playing straight man to a colorful supporting cast that includes Ben Mendelsohn and Scoot McNairy as the bickering petty criminal pair and James Gandolfini as a hit man who hits the booze and bitches in an attempt to eclipse his own private woes. In fact, Pitt doesn't even show up until almost half an hour into the film. It's indicative of the film's sly and satirical tone that Johnny Cash's apocalyptic "The Man Comes Around" plays Cogan onto the scene, just as (in a clear nod to David Lynch's Blue Velvet) Ketty Lester's "Love Letters" orchestrates one of Cogan's hits, rendering the killing a glass-spraying, bullet-time ballad. Other bravura set pieces abound, from the initial holdup, accomplished in several sinuous Steadicam shots, to a subjectively filmed smack-shooting session scored to the Velvet Underground.

With his latest, Dominik mines an altogether different vein, worlds apart from the mournful, meditative, Malickian The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Yet his approach to the material feels entirely assured, anchored this time out by Greig Fraser's grimy, granulated cinematography. In many ways, Killing Them Softly makes a perfect companion piece to Dominik's previous film, amplifying and modifying its themes, while at the same time working within an entirely new generic approach. Both films are equally about mythmaking and myth-breaking. In Jesse James, the unrelenting quest for fame and fortune will get you nowhere but dead. Killing Them Softly, especially in its final scene, debunks the illusion that there's any adhesive that can keep together the fabric of the body politic, delivering a curt rebuff to the bluff and bluster of election-eve sloganeering. And the malaise goes deeper, on down into the very belly of being. As one of the doomed gunmen puts it, "The world's shit. And we're all alone."

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

The curious experiment in communal living was instigated by 34-year-old George Davis, who at the time was fiction editor for Harper's Bazaar. Davis persuaded a talented, eclectic bunch to move into the house at number 7 Middagh Street, among them English writer W. H. Auden, already an established poet of distinction, who moved in with his young boyfriend, aspiring poet Chester Kallman; up-and-coming British composer Benjamin Britten, who moved in with Peter Pears, the English tenor who remained his lifelong companion; Southern novelist Carson McCullers, who had recently achieved major success with her debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; and, most intriguingly, burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee, who wrote a bestselling crime novel, The G-String Murders, during her stay at the house in Brooklyn. The artists were in their 20s and 30s at the time, with McCullers, the youngest at 23 and Auden the eldest at 33.

The saga of this volatile mix of young artistic sensibilities, all at crucial points in their careers, is documented in a nonfiction work by Sherill Tippins, titled February House, the name given to the dwelling by writer Anaïs Nin because many of the residents had birthdays in February. We recently caught up with Kahane and Bockley to chat about February House, a musical based on Tippins's book.

Gerard Raymond: February House certainly features a fascinating group of people. Was there something in particular that drew you to this material?

Gabriel Kahane: What spoke to me about the work as a theater piece is that our three protagonists—George Davis, Carson McCullers, Wystan Auden—represented a theme where we found a contemporary resonance. For Carson McCullers there was this idea of a coming-of-age story and the crippling effect of overnight success. I read Sherill's book in 2006, when I was 25, and so I really got the sense of resonance there.

Auden, of course, had been profoundly political in the 1930s, up until the beginning of the WWII. He lost his political will after the Spanish Civil War. When I read the book, we were very much at war in Iraq and there were a lot of progressives being kind of idiotic in public and not really giving particular intellectual grace to the anti-war movement. I started to understand how someone like Auden could have great political convictions, have the right ideas in mind and yet not want to associate with what he thought was this intellectually feeble progressive movement. Also having marched against the Iraq War in 2003 and being amid the sweat and stink of people chanting really idiotic slogans like, "Bush is Hitler," "Jews are Nazis"—all this polemical bullshit—that could really turn you off from wanting to advocate for something you believe in deeply.

Seth Bockley: And there's this role that a poet, especially Auden, had in 1940, which is comparable with Bob Dylan in the 1960s, which is the kind of expectations associated with fame—that you had to ally yourself with the important issues of the day. That pressure was enormous and I think both artists had a certain period when they resisted that identity quite strongly. This is the moment for Auden where he tries to resist because he was so disenchanted by the virtuous left crusaders in the Spanish Civil War.

GK: And then, finally, with George Davis, this den mother and brains trust of the house at Middagh Street, there's this fundamental question of to what extent can we choose our family and to what extent can we build family. That for me somehow connects to the question of architecture and how our emotional connections to memory and buildings and place—something that has preoccupied me in my work as a songwriter for a long time. The moment when I knew that I really wanted to do this as a theater piece was when I took a friend down to the site where the house stood. Standing over by this chain-link fence overlooking the BQE and the absence of any marker whatsoever, not only of the house, but of any sort of land—just open air—and trying to reconcile for myself all of the insanity that took place in that house with nothing to mark it by. Maybe, in a way, this piece is about honoring the memory of the lives there.

SB: I came on board a little bit later. For me, what attracted me was the compression of life, of action, the energy of people and a house such as this, which is a natural fit for the theater. This singular location is very appealing to me as a dramatist.

GR: How did you set about writing the book? Was there a lot of research involved?

SB: There was a big period of research, not only historical research, but, because these are artists and writers, it also involved reading things they wrote. We had many versions of the show. One of the challenges is that it's not about simply teasing something out of it, there are an infinite number of ways that you can do it in this basic concept. We also had to make our own fictional interventions into the historical record. For example, the character of Erika Mann in the musical is really a combination of three historical people. There was Erika Mann and her brother Klaus, who's actually the one who started Decision magazine, and also Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, a friend of both the Manns and who was the one that Carson fell in love with. It felt very right to make that choice, because Erika Mann was also Auden's wife.

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Amy Taubin, Gavin Smith, Todd McCarthy, and Scott Foundas roll up their sleeves.

More on Cannes from Smith and Foundas here.

Dennis Lim interviews Michael Glawogger.

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The trailer for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

One of the most interesting offerings in this year's Migrating Forms festival didn't always feel like a film at all. Roughly half of Naeem Mohaiemen's The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army) was sound, with the text projected on a black screen. With red, green, and white subtitles to help the audience identify the different voices of the speakers, the overall effect was like listening in on a private conversation or wiretap.

The images, when they did appear, didn't create a narrative as much as a time capsule. The limited archival footage seemed to play on a loop, but if Mohaiemen did in fact encounter a scarcity of archival material to draw on, he's turned it to his advantage; he has frozen time, making the few images last and permeate our imaginations with a power that's hard to experience nowadays, in the 24-hour news cycle that constantly feeds us new visuals.

The documentary captures the few days in 1977 when Mohaiemen, then an eight year old in Bangladesh, became a witness to a high-stakes political event: An airplane hijacked by the Japanese Red Army had landed in Dhaka. Mohaiemen, as he wittingly tells it, was about to watch his favorite television show, The Zoo Gang (of which he includes a few clips), when the TV channel began relaying the hijackers' demands to the Japanese government via a Bangladeshi negotiator.

What followed was a careful dance between the hijacker speaking on behalf of the Japanese communist militant group proclaiming the need for armed violence, and the men in the airport control tower negotiating the release of the hostages. Although the chief negotiator remains faceless and bodiless, our experience of him coming only through his voice, the story we follow is at least partly his: We hear his exasperation, his expressing his private doubts, or urgently, and later desperately, calling on the airport personnel to block the plane from leaving.

What emerges is part psychological drama, with increasingly high stakes as the hijackers become exasperated with waiting for their demands to be met and threaten to execute the remaining hostages, and part a meditation on the event as a unique media spectacle, whose power extends far beyond its historical significance. "In the memory hall," Mohaiemen says, "it is always 1977." What he's getting at seems more significant than a mere assertion of the power that memory has over us, infusing some images with uncanny permanence, while blurring others. It's rather our capacity to "write" ourselves, imaginatively speaking, into our country's respective histories, almost as if they had happened to us personally. In this sense, history is about identification, and so becomes a part of our identity.

Mohaiemen's closing point is particularly poignant. While he, like many others, was captivated by the flashy drama unfolding on the tarmac, more impactful local forces were already converging: On the same day as the plane took off with the hijackers and remaining hostages on board, the Bangladesh air force officers staged an unsuccessful coup, which later led to massive secret killings, including of air force officers. In this way, Mohaiemen says, stressing the unpredictability but also the fatefulness of history, "tourists became hostages became witnesses." In a metaphorical sense, so did he.

Migrating Forms ran from May 11—20. For more information click here.

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4000 Miles and its lead actors win Obie awards.

Abbas Kiarostami is working on Horizontal Process.

Tom Cruise attached to MGM's remake of The Magnificent Seven.

Charlie Kaufman to write and direct HBO series starring Catherine Keener.

Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained unveiled by Harvey Weinstein.

George Lucas is waging class warfare in Marin County.

The teaser for Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

Ice Choir, "Teletrips." In no way an adversarial offshoot of the Justin Vernon/Collections of Colonies of Bees collaboration Volcano Choir, Ice Choir pays tribute to Kurt Feldman's longtime infatuation with the mostly mellow, agreeably radio-ready new-wave bands of the '80s and early '90s. "Teletrips" is culled from the band's forthcoming album, Afar, and it sounds as if someone crammed Tears for Fears, Talk Talk, Simple Minds, and the like into a blender and sprinkled in generous dashes of chillwave. The result is all shimmery and excessively veneered, with soothing synths and Feldman's soft-spoken, nostalgia-inducing vocals rendering the track a successful exercise in symphonizing popular genres of the past and present. Mike LeChevallier

Four Tet, "Jupiters." Among the many things he's good at, Four Tet's Kieran Hebden has a knack for constructing songs as if they were tiny puzzles: Loops pile onto more loops, keeping listeners guessing as to how the whole thing will eventually come together. With "Jupiters," Hebden brings together the colder, formal experiments of earlier releases like Ringer with some of his more recent beat-heavy work with frequent collaborator Burial. A wobbly synth loop repeats for a few minutes, as more melodic shimmering synths build on top it, and just as the pattern begins to feel more unhinged, a heavy backbeat locks in tightly and the whole thing comes into sublime focus. Manan Desai

Fang Island, "Asunder." There's an episode of the prematurely cancelled FX series, Terriers, where the two leads begin their respective storyline in a certain mindset, one disheartened and the other upbeat, and by the conclusion of their equivalently intense ordeals, the circumstances have changed so much that they've virtually swapped moods. Fang Island's new song—which, like that episode of Terriers, is titled "Asunder"—harbors a very similar dynamic. While the guitar/drum instrumentation carries an air of wild weekender rebellion, the vocals are much restrained, almost insulated—that is, until the final 60 seconds, when everything ultimately conjoins and discharges into a dense mass of harmonically thunderous noise. But those three or so minutes that precede that eruption, wherein a steady voice is working to maintain its cool alongside such an indefatigable musical pulse, is a testament to the evolution of Fang Island's craft. ML

House Playlist is a series dedicated to highlighting our favorite new singles, leaked songs, and album tracks.

[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a House feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

Ed Howard: It isn't very fashionable to be a moralist in art these days. Films that deal with moral issues in a direct way are often tagged, rightly or not, as preachy and didactic. So in a way Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke is an anomaly, a director who unapologetically has a definite moral agenda that he's been exploring for over 20 years now, closer to 40 if one considers the TV work he made in the '70s and '80s before embarking on his feature film career in 1989. Not that Haneke himself would probably consider himself a moralist—he's consistently said that he wants his films to ask questions but not necessarily answer them—but whether his films are polemical or simply explore these issues in more ambiguous ways, there is a undoubtedly a core of forceful moral ideas about politics, media, and human relationships that runs through his entire oeuvre.

In this conversation, we'll be discussing most of Haneke's feature films, from his early "glaciation trilogy" (The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance), made in his native Austria, to his brutal thriller deconstruction Funny Games, to the films he's made in France (Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché) and his return to Austria for the harrowing parable The White Ribbon. It's a consistently provocative and challenging body of work, and consistently bleak as well, something that's only reenforced by revisiting all of the director's films in a condensed period of time. But what's not often acknowledged is the thread of hope that also runs through much of Haneke's work, because being a moralist means not only documenting the evils of the world but presenting at least a slim hopefulness that the conditions depicted in these films are not permanent.

Jason Bellamy: At least not permanent for everyone. Haneke's work does contain slight yet dazzling threads of hopefulness here and there, but for each of those threads there's at least two instances of unequivocal and irreparable carnage serving as a counterbalance. There's no bringing back the girl in Benny's Video, for example, or the boy in Funny Games, or the father in Time of the Wolf, and so on. And so in Haneke's work, hopefulness isn't evidence of progress or potential so much as it's the byproduct of endurance—it isn't a slate-cleaning sunrise so much as a (momentary?) passing of the tornado. Misery and despair so thoroughly blanket Haneke's filmography that one could argue quite plausibly that many of his stories' apparent victims wind up being victors, because the dead are spared from continuing to experience the unavoidable disasters of life.

I'm not entirely sure what my opinion was of Haneke's filmography before I began preparing for this conversation, but whatever it was I know that I vastly underestimated the suffocating bleakness of his work. That feels strange to say because I went in—having seen his three most recent films and parts of several others—fully aware that Haneke's movies start at icy and grow colder from there. Yet somehow I was still surprised at the incredible consistency in bleakness of tone and, especially among his early works, deliberateness of style. (Haneke is as singular and as consistent as Terrence Malick but from the other end of the emotional scale.) That said, readers should know that whenever this piece publishes it will be at least a week behind schedule because watching all of Haneke's films in close succession was such an emotionally trying experience for me that I often needed a few days of rest between viewings. And while I don't mean that as praise (nor as criticism, for that matter), I suspect Haneke would take it that way.

EH: Haneke certainly doesn't want his films to be easy viewing, and if we didn't find his work "emotionally trying," he'd doubtless see it as a failure. His films are all about complacency and ignorance and denial of guilt, and he clearly doesn't want his audiences to fall into those same traps with respect to his films. Interestingly, while you were surprised by just how intensely and consistently these films affected you, I shouldn't have been surprised, but was anyway. Prior to this conversation, I'd already seen all of Haneke's features, most of them years ago, and though I'd only seen one or two of these films more than once, I felt like I had a pretty good grasp on his oeuvre. But I still found myself affected and shaken up all over again, because I hadn't expected many of these films to be as bracing or as trying the second time around.

His first feature, The Seventh Continent, in particular, was a film that I'd always assumed would be a one-time-only experience, the kind of film that's harrowing for a fresh viewing but might lose its impact on repeat visits to its bleak, spartan world. So much of the film's effect rests on its unsettling and ambiguous aesthetic, which conveys the impression that something terrible is going to happen, though it's not quite clear precisely what form that horror will take. At the same time, Haneke dangles a slim hope that in retrospect is just a cruel red herring, by repeatedly hinting that the bored, alienated bourgeois family of this film will find an escape from their dehumanized existence by embarking on a trip to Australia. Of course, the film's climax depicts a very different form of escape, one that's incredibly difficult to watch.

What I found striking this time around was how much bleaker and more affecting the film is with the foreknowledge of its ending, and how rigorous its clinical dissection of modern society is. The film's basic form—the mechanical repetition of everyday tasks leading to breakdown—is borrowed from Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, though Haneke expands his thematic focus beyond the feminine domesticity of Akerman's film to a study of the family unit as a whole. Haneke is relentless: 10 minutes pass before he clearly shows anyone's face, and much of the film's action is conveyed in tight closeups of disconnected hands interacting with various consumer goods. The family is woken up in the mornings by radio news announcements about tensions and violence in the Middle East (the film is set in three consecutive years leading up to 1989, the year it was made). At one point, an old woman tells Anna (Birgit Doll) a disturbing story about her school days, about teasing a classmate so viciously that the girl peed her pants, though even so many years later, the old woman seems more annoyed that the teacher made her clean it up than she is upset for her tormented friend. The story epitomizes the pointless cruelty that so often dominates Haneke's world, but when Anna relates the story to her family later, they all simply laugh about it over the dinner table. In retrospect, the film's truly hopeless conclusion is inevitable, because these people are totally disconnected from normal emotions, unable to relate to one another's suffering or break through the barriers that separate and isolate them.

JB: That sure sounds convincing, but I think it steps too far, because, really, could the grisly conclusion of The Seventh Continent seem "inevitable" in anything but retrospect? Sure, the film is scattered with signs that these people are emotionally adrift, from the episode you mentioned involving Anna to the one in which her scientist husband, Georg (Dieter Berner), has the personal belongings of his former boss removed from his locker, presumably to avoid any personal interaction when his ex-boss comes to retrieve his things. But these are such small signs, wouldn't you agree? There's nothing exceptional about them, and thus there's no reason to expect the conclusion to be exceptionally hopeless. That's why Australia—with an assist from the movie's title—dangles out there for so long as a plausible destination for escape and rebirth, to the point that even during the movie's pivotal scene, in which Georg goes to the hardware store and loads up saws, hammers and other destructive (dismembering?) equipment, there's room to think that the Schober family might still get away in one piece, even as it becomes apparent that something or someone else surely won't.

I make that argument mainly to point me here: What defines the Schober family isn't the way they live but the way they die. These aren't "developed" characters in any respect. They are distant, unknowable shells—in life and in death. And while some of that is a product of who the characters are, and thus also the ingredients for why they do what they do, it's also a product of Haneke's cinematic approach, which, as you already pointed out, pays as much attention to truly inanimate objects as to these nearly inanimate ones. It seems to me that Haneke is in fact deliberately thwarting our ability to trace the conclusion back to any telltale signs, because as discomforting as the conclusion is on its own, it's even more disturbing if the Schobers seem relatively normal. So while it would be inaccurate to suggest that the grisly conclusion comes out of nowhere, I think the only reason their group suicide (or is it a murder-suicide?) seems retrospectively inevitable is because it also makes for the Schobers' most expressive action in the entire film. Their means of death explains their lives only because it's almost all we have to go on.

EH: It's true, the Schobers are scrupulously normal until the moment when they begin their horrible and extraordinary process of dismantling their lives, and that's probably part of the point—the film wouldn't be as bracing without the insinuation that this family is very much like any other family living in the modern world. I think you're right that Haneke doesn't want us to link the conclusion to any specific "telltale signs" but rather to think of this ending as one possible end point for the entirety of the existence depicted in the rest of the film. It's not any one thing or any one symptom that leads to this total destruction, it's everything that these people experience, everything they see in the world around them.

That includes, by necessity, the dream of escaping to Australia, which is raised as a possibility because the family see a travel agency ad for an Australian getaway outside the car wash they visit periodically throughout the film. Occasionally, Haneke inserts shots of this serene but also desolate Australian beach, as seen in the ad, with waves crashing against the rocks, the sound recalling the roar of the car wash. At one point, this insert is followed by a shot of a lamp turning on as Georg wakes up in the middle of the night, suggesting that this is his dream. Australia is the only hope provided in this film, and it's kind of a sad, slim hope when one thinks about it, because even this dream is a product of the very society that's crushing this family: even their dreams are consumerist, couched in the imagery of pre-packaged vacation bliss, and when they imagine the sound of waves, it's the sloshing water of the car wash that they actually hear.

The car wash is also evoked when the family passes the site of a horrible accident on the highway: rain streaks the windows, and lights blink through the water outside, and the car wash's roar is evoked by the mechanical grinding noises of the rescue teams sawing through the metal of a crashed car. If there's any definitive point where a break seems to have occurred for this family, it's here, though the reasons remain mysterious and unstated. The car crash scene is followed by another visit to the car wash, where Georg and Anna exchange ambiguous glances across the front seat, and their daughter Evi (Leni Tanzer) holds her mother's hand as Anna starts to sob uncontrollably. It's perhaps notable that this time, the camera doesn't follow them outside the car wash to pass the Australian travel ad, because that ad, commercial and artificial as it is, provides the only hope, and as the film's third act begins, that hope is rapidly fading away.

JB: Indeed it is. It's difficult to express just how jarring it is when Haneke shows us Georg's hand grabbing instruments of destruction off the racks in the hardware store: first an axe, then a hammer—oh, wait, not a hammer, a mallet—and then a power saw, a pair of huge scissors and a handsaw. It's dreadful (especially if you know what Haneke is capable of doing to his characters) and yet, after so much emotional monotony, there's something playful about it, too; Hitchcock would have chuckled at it, I suspect, and the footage could be inserted into any modern zombie movie without anyone noticing.

It's an atypically fast sequence—six shots in 20 seconds; Haneke's version of chaos cinema—as if Haneke wants the scene to end before we've even finished asking ourselves the question: "Whoa, what the fuck is going on!?" As soon as it was over, I remembered one of my high school English teachers who, when explaining to us how he could grade papers and watch a movie at the same time, said, "I read your papers and then when I hear a chainsaw or bedsprings, I look up." It's not that I found The Seventh Continent boring to that point, understand, but after that scene Haneke definitely had my full attention.

From there it isn't long before the Schobers start putting those tools to work, and here Haneke takes his time. For about nine straight minutes, we see only shots of the Schobers dismantling their property: pictures taken off the walls, clothes taken from closets and then ripped to pieces (again and again and again), curtains torn down, illustrations cut to shreds, magazines and records ripped, drawers emptied and furniture smashed. During this sequence we see nothing of the Schobers except their hands, which are covered in big work gloves, effectively rendering them anonymous. The sequence ends with the smashing of an aquarium and the image of several fish flopping around on the carpet, gasping their final breaths—a sign of what's to come for the Schobers.

If I had to describe the two sequences of the film that I'm confident I'll never forget, it's those two: the 20-second trip to the hardware store and the nine-minute demolition of the Schober family home. But that second sequence is one that plays much better in my memory than it did as I was watching it, because it's a tough scene to endure, less for what it shows than for how much time it spends showing it. I'm sure this won't be the last time we'll talk about Haneke drawing out scenes of discomfort in a calculated attempt to unsettle the audience, but I think this scene is worth exploring in isolation—not as part of a Haneke trend—and so I ask you this: Does Haneke strengthen his point with each passing second of the nine-minute demolition sequence, or does he smash it until we can't recognize it?

EH: I'd say in this case the duration is absolutely essential to Haneke's point. As you note, Haneke shoots this sequence with the same detachment he'd applied to the scenes of the family cooking meals or performing their morning ablutions, focusing only on hands performing mechanical tasks. That's important: throughout the film the family is defined primarily by their relationships with objects rather than with one another, and when they engage in their ritual of self-destruction, they're still interacting with objects, acting with the same mechanical precision and abstraction with which they'd lived their ordinary lives. The way Haneke films this, with the closeups of hands and the repetition, enforces the idea that the family is in the process of dying exactly as they'd lived. If the sequence weren't so long and repetitious, if it were punchier and less deliberate, there would be a risk that it could be taken as a catharsis, and Haneke clearly doesn't intend it as one: this isn't rebellion, really, it's giving up, succumbing to the numbing societal structure that had been beating this family down throughout the entirety of the film.

There's another thing to note about this sequence, and that's the shattering of the aquarium, which as you say is a pretty obvious symbol for the impending fate of the Schobers. One thing that bothers me tremendously about this sequence—beyond the obvious, that is—is the fact that these are real fish flopping around on the carpet in front of Haneke's camera, and they really died for the sake of those shots. Again, this won't be the last time we'll deal with the real deaths of real animals in Haneke's cinema—it's a common trope in his work—but it's worth noting here just because it's the first time it's come up. As a moral principle, I think the deaths of real animals for the sake of a film are unforgivable and indefensible. Moreover, such moments inevitably shatter the illusion of the fictional narrative, working against the filmmaker's point because as a viewer, at that moment, I'm not immersed in this family's destruction of their belongings and themselves, I'm distracted by the filmmaker's destruction of these living creatures.

JB: Yeah, in the case of the fish I was less distracted (although I was similarly taken out of the scene), because at least I could tell myself that it was possible Haneke let them gasp for a while before throwing them in a tank. (His other animal executions leave no room for such illusions.) But while I think you've made a sound argument for the architecture of that destruction sequence, I have to admit that I find its length distracting, even for a Haneke film. Somewhere during the 90-or-so seconds in which Haneke shows us a pair of hands cutting up one clothing item after another, I couldn't help but think: How does Haneke think I don't get this already? How many times does he need to underline it? Do I really need 90 seconds of shirt-cutting? Wouldn't 30 seconds have been enough?

This is a pesky topic to discuss, because Haneke clearly has his own rhythms, and I don't mean to imply that filmmakers can't indulge themselves—hell, I'm the guy who loves the creation sequence in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Likewise, just as I don't think there's anything inherently "better" about the efficiency of Haneke's economical shot structure (relative to other filmmakers, his camera is predominantly fixed and his takes are long), I also don't mean to imply that there's anything inherently "better" about efficiency of duration—sometimes there's flavor in the fat. Still, sometimes I get the sense that Haneke becomes less interested in provoking the audience as a means to an end than in provoking the audience as an end unto itself. Put another way, at some point I feel that Haneke is less interested in conveying the Schobers' pain than in inflicting some on me in the audience.

His next film, Benny's Video, happens to combine both of the elements we've just discussed: The movie opens with some home-video-type footage of a pig being marched outside, held by its tail at one end and a rope in its mouth at the other, and then shot in the head. As soon as the scene ends, the footage is rewound and played again in slow motion. Later in the film, we'll see this footage again, twice more, once at regular speed and once in slow motion. The execution of the pig is a crucial element of the story, no question, and by playing the footage multiple times Haneke suggests the fascination of the main character, Arno Frisch's Benny, and perhaps also Benny's desensitization to the slaughter. But, truthfully, those feel like ancillary outcomes. I can't shake the notion that more than anything, Haneke just wants to disturb me.

"Words must be spoken. We must say them all. And there are so many." Within the storyline of You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, this sentiment refers to words of mourning, a eulogy spoken over lost love. (Indicating, at least in this regard, Alain Resnais's latest and reportedly last film makes for strange bedfellows alongside Michael Haneke's Amour.) Within the wider context of the film, these words might just as easily refer to the two Jean Anouilh plays on which it's based. More intriguing to consider after the fact than it's to actually sit through, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet is, at bottom, excessively wordy and a bit of a drag. Luckily, the film is enlivened somewhat by inventive mise-en- scène, as well as some lissome camerawork. The staging is so endlessly, even incestuously, self-referential as to earn the epithet mise-en-abyme, a term derived from what happens when you place two mirrors opposite each other, producing an infinite reflection, as in the famous hallway shot from Welles's Citizen Kane.

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet opens in a playful enough mode, with mock-dramatic music and pieces of classical art superimposed over a dry ice-shrouded stage. The film introduces its repertory cast (a veritable who's who of contemporary French cinema) by name as each receives identical phone calls reporting the death of legendary, entirely fictional, playwright Antoine d'Anthac. The great man's dying request: assemble at his remote mountain chateau for the reading of his will, which further stipulates the viewing of some test footage for a new production of d'Anthac's Eurydice. Actors in twos and threes arrive at the chateau, framed in identical shots, with identical gusts of wind blowing the same leaves around, set to the same mock-ominous musical cue. The screen that hides the movie screen reproduces the establishing shot of the chateau. The assembled actors watch the actors on film acting the play they've previously acted for d'Anthac. Over the course of the film, these repetitions becomes the play of difference and similitude, as three generations of actors assume various roles, playing to the on-screen troupe and each other, each rendition alike and yet not the same. In other words, to paraphrase Heraclitus, "You can't step into the same role twice."

For the first 15 minutes or so, you're lulled into expecting another freewheeling cinematic lark like Wild Grass, which, whatever its other faults, never committed the capital sin of taking itself too seriously. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, conversely, casts a funereal pall with its earnestly intentioned performance of Anouilh's Eurydice. (If the audience isn't subjected to the entire play, it sure enough feels like it.) The kind of affected, willfully artificial artwork that was all the rage back in the 1940s, Eurydice now just seems stilted and protracted, which doesn't bode well for You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet's long-term vitality. Ultimately, it isn't hard to see the appeal of this material for Resnais, especially since You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet will stand as his curtain call. Near its own terminus, the film lays bare its raison d'être: The simulacrum of a stage death strengthens the bonds of solidarity among Antoine's friends, in stark preparation for an all-too-real event. As the old folios used to put it: exeunt omnia.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

Sylvain George is the modern era's poet of revolt. Judging from the recent double screening at the Migrating Forms festival at Anthology Film Archives, which featured George's L'Impossible and his latest, May They Rest in Revolt, he strikes a Byronic figure—none the least because his work is heavily literary. L'Impossible, for one, is organized into chapters and peppered with text. The quotes, from Dostoevsky to Walter Benjamin, could seem ponderous, had George not matched them with his passionate, yet at times startlingly precise, visuals.

George proclaims film as artifice from the start. Its quality is deliberately manipulated or even degraded: the screen goes white at times; the colors are bleached out or suddenly switch from blank and white to color, including splotches of red. The visuals signal discontinuity and disruption, rather than an attempt at a finished product. The same happens with sound: parts of the film are silent; others are marked by abrupt bleeps or snippets of words and music. On one hand, the film's brilliance lies in offering itself up as a document, a vivid slice of reality, and on the other calling our attention to it being a film, and so an artistic creation.

In the earlier part of L'Impossible, devoted to clandestine immigrants from Africa and the Middle East taking momentary refuge in the French port of Calais, the disruptions underscore the immigrants' isolation and the degradation of their living conditions. The silences deny the viewer a facile entrance into the men's world—their lips move, but with no sound—emphasizing their symbolic muteness. In contrast, in the film's second part, showing young Parisian protesters occupying public statues and the city hall, the students are highly voluble. They expect their voices to be heard—or rather, they assert their right to be heard, whereas the illegal and the undocumented, haunted by both the specters of wars and hunted down by the police, can evoke no rights of citizenry.

While L'Impossible can be visually ravishing, its ideological underpinnings remain muddled; the two "revolts," one of the refugees and the other of the young Frenchmen, are not parallel or alike. The Parisians may scribble slogans demanding equality and justice for all, but their ideas are generalist, bordering on banality. To this, the physical and psychological debasement experienced by the illegal migrants offers a sharp contrast. Drawing these two groups together, George risks vagueness, conflating issues that are similar only as much as they both show instances of human anger and despair.

Where L'Impossible introduces a potent story, but falters a bit in delivering it, May They Rest in Revolt shows George successfully combining radical visual poetics and politics. In some ways, the new work is more traditional: George returns to Calais, following homeless illegal immigrants who congregate in a tent city known as the Jungle. George's camera captures the men's routines, from showering by the canals to self-mutilation with razors and hot nails to destroy finger pads and evade being fingerprinted. The film's narrative arc is provided by its subject matter: George enters the tent city before anyone else, but soon the area draws the attention of local activists who attempt to prevent the police from evicting and deporting the immigrants. Camera crews arrive on the scene, turning the personal narratives that George has followed into a contested media event—however briefly.

If the story is remarkable, allowing the male migrants—many of them refugees from places like Nigeria, the Congo, and Afghanistan—to speak in their own voices, the story's delivery is more so. To communicate the migrants' condition, this time not only physical, but also existential, George slows down time in some scenes of his black-and-white picture, blurring the image, or stop-freezes it; in others, he speeds it up. The film mirrors the way in which the men have been forced to live: condemned to numbing idleness, without work or purpose, or in anxious flight, pursued by the police and stalking the next opportunity to cross the border. Real time, in this sense, doesn't exist for those who live on the margins.

Borders, limitations, and fences are common motifs in George's work. The camera, as if following the men's gaze, is constantly alert to how cities and landscapes are sectioned off and protected—in this case, to keep out the unwanted. Counterbalancing the symbolism of the fence is the image of an open road. The men are migrants in the deepest sense: They are passing through. For most, disillusioned with the treatment they receive in France and in Italy, England is the promised land. London is a hypnotic chant, the journey framed by the port, the border, and the train tracks. While motion is survival, in George's visual dictionary the tracks come from nowhere and, for most, end at the starting point, or worse. To stress this, George uses a female voice repeating the name of a migrant who, as we learn in L'Impossible, had been murdered by the mafia when he couldn't pay 600 euros for his passage to England. The female voice is like a siren in the story of the world's most famous migrant, Odysseus, re-contextualizing the political story of illegal immigration as a universal tale of human aspirations, homelessness, and misery.

While some of the film's imagery, particularly the barbwire, may be too blatant, evoking misplaced associations with concentration camps or with the gulag as one migrant calls Europe, George's visual eloquence and experimentation advance the visual-anthropological impulses of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, with poeticized yet vigilant observation—an ethos that George has summarized in an interview with CinemaScope: "The goal is to present evidence at the scene of filming, where the question of how things correspond, communicate, and relate is revealed."

Migrating Forms runs from May 11—20. For more information click here.

Robin Gibb, one of the three singing brothers of the Bee Gees, the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group whose chirping falsettos and hook-laden hits like "Jive Talkin'" and "You Should Be Dancing" shot them to worldwide fame in the 1970s, died on Sunday in London.

Adele won a lot of Billboard Music Awards.

Related: the the best (and worst) moments from the show.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky reviews Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.

Palme d'Or diversity debate rumbles on with new petition.

Jack White attempts a new world record.

The watercooler is in the cloud, says Matt Zoller Seitz.

Phil Coldiron on Jean-Luc Godard's introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television.

Michael Woods's top 10 books on film.

Aaron Cutler interviews Ben Rivers, director of Two Years at Sea.

A hint of what a James Bond movie made by the director of American Beauty will look like:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

About halfway through Michael Haneke's Amour, septuagenarian Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) describes the deteriorating health of his ailing wife, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), in terms that convey a bone-chilling, because universal, relevance: "Things will go downhill, then it'll all be over." Welcome to your future, everyone. What's most surprising of all, then, is that, despite its death-haunted demeanor and foregone conclusion (revealed in the very first scene), this is easily Haneke's most humane film. Grounded by heartbreakingly poignant performances from two of French cinema's most iconic actors, Amour contains none of the moralistic finger-wagging and gratuitous sadism that so many critics have found off-putting in the director's work. (Though I must admit that I am, by and large, an admirer of his films.) Confined almost entirely to Georges and Anne's apartment, Amour attends the escalating consequences when Anne suffers a stroke that paralyzes half her body. Haneke handles the material with his usual clinical detachment and precision, the camera (like Georges) observing dispassionately, but never exploitatively, while nurses bath Anne and change her diapers. The only tonal misstep, and it's a rather slight one at that, occurs with two scenes involving a pigeon that invades their apartment (shades of Reality's cricket!). These scenes objectify the film's themes of entrapment and release a trifle too handily.

Amour begins with a literal bang as authorities bust open the front door of a Parisian flat that's been sealed shut with duct tape. Inside, they discover Anne's body arranged in state on the bed, flowers strewn all about her, while nearby a curtain flaps at an open window. Cut to a luxury theater where an audience (much like the one that viewed it at Cannes) awaits the start of the show. As classical piano music begins to play, the camera holds on the audience. Spectatorship, being forced to watch from a remove while uncontrollable events transpire, is one of Amour's subterranean themes, finding its reflection in a story Georges tells Anne at a decisive moment in the film: As a child he spent time at a summer camp that he detested and, as a result, he got sick with diphtheria. When his mother came to visit him in the hospital, she was quarantined at a safe distance behind the plate glass. Haneke seems to suggest that, ultimately, there's precious little we can do to ease our loved ones' suffering short of freeing them from their pain altogether.

Far better than the heavy-handed animal symbolism is a pair of dream sequences that convey a certain affective charge without getting too insistent about things. The terrifically ambivalent ending, too, gives viewers something to chew on, without necessarily scratching their heads in bafflement, as many did at the end of Caché. Although the show clearly belongs to Trintignant and Riva, Isabelle Huppert (a frequent Haneke collaborator) lends able support as Eva, the couple's daughter, and Certified Copy's William Shimell has, in effect, a cameo as her husband. Early in the film, before the onset of Anne's illness, Georges regales her with another emblematic story, this one about seeing a movie as a small boy that had a profound emotional impact on him. That impact, however, only really hit home later, when he was telling the plotline to someone who hadn't seen it. Emotion, Georges implies, whether love or pain, is stronger upon recollection, the effect not unlike turning the pages of a long-neglected photo album, evidence of a long life glimpsed near its end.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was a controlled descent into the inferno of illegal abortion and the network of bureaucratic corruption late in the Ceaușescu regime. Beyond the Hills's basic story carries these themes forward, yet represents a significant weakening of narrative focus. Stylistically, Mungiu's preference for long takes and rugged handheld camerawork remains intact, it's just that the slender facts in this particular case (since it's yet another film "based on true events") can't even begin to withstand the mammoth weight of a 150-minute running time.

Beyond the Hills examines the plight of two young women, Alina (Cristina Flutur) and Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), who withstood physical and sexual abuse together in an orphanage until one went off to work in Germany, now reunited in the remote Orthodox monastery where the other now resides, until long-harbored secrets explode into hysteria and accusations of satanic possession. Stated baldly thus, the film generically resembles a number of other nunsploitation titles ranging from Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Mother Joan of the Angels to Ken Russell's The Devils—not to mention more recent fare like The Exorcism of Emily Rose. So the burden is on the filmmaker to bring something new to the table.

True, there are fascinating glimpses into the Soviet-style bureaucratization of the Orthodox religion (including the film's best scene, wherein the other girls indoctrinate Alina into the 436 sins recognized by their dogma) and the collapse of any distinction between science and religion (the doctor who washes his hands of Alina's malady, sending her back to the tender mercies of monastery life). In no way, however, can these miniscule morsels of insight begin to compensate for Mungiu's otherwise empty plate, what with the endless shots of little to nothing happening, and the pointlessly protracted performance of the exorcism rite. Maybe my favorite moment occurred when Voichita put out the light in her room and the screen stayed dark for what felt like several minutes. If that's all Mungiu has to say with this bloated white elephant of a film, maybe the screen should've stayed that way from the get-go.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

Lawless cements the mainstreaming of an original. Compare director John Hillcoat's latest to the standard set by The Proposition, an uncompromisingly bleak and ultraviolent outback western: Both films were written by musician Nick Cave, and both films tell a tale of one violent family pitted against the forces of institutional corruption as well as each other. In the balance, Lawless winds up feeling, well, toothless.

Based on true events that occurred in Franklin County, Virginia, in the 1930s, Lawless is a period crime film along the lines of Michael Mann's superior Public Enemies, a film that actually does tweak the legends it depicts, rather than just mealy mouth some random dialogue meant to give that impression. Moonshine bootleggers the Bondurant brothers have encouraged the legend that they are invincible. A war is brewing that will put that legend to the test—a war between a local politicians who wants to rationalize and organize the illegal distilleries of the region and the Bondurants, who want no part of it, rugged individualists to the bitter end that they are.

So far, so standard: There's precious little in Lawless's narrative arc that will remain memorable 10 minutes after you walk out of the theater. The designated expendable character gets croaked. The Big Bad gets his in the end. The theme of violent propensities, introduced in a flashback prologue wherein youngest brother Jack can't bring himself to shoot a pig, finds its "proper" resolution when Jack shoots down the man who shot his brothers. Where, you have to wonder, is the critical edge, that essential distance between the violent act and its ugly consequences? A film like A History of Violence insists on keeping it front and center, even as it feeds the viewer all the graphic kills any self-respecting gorehound could ask for. Instead, Lawless wallows unthinkingly in its bloodshed, offering in its defense only the pat, tagline-ready quote: "Violence isn't what separates men. It's how far you're willing to go."

Still, Lawless isn't entirely without its pleasures. Benoit Delhomme's cinematography is strikingly captures kudzu-strangled woods and sudden snowfalls, and the period detail is always impressively rendered. The soundtrack brings the Americana. Ralph Stanley's gravelly presence on an a cappella track conjures up O Brother, Where Are Thou? in more ways than one, but a twangy cover of the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat" is a nice touch. Performances run the gamut. Tom Hardy, with his sub-vocal grunts, glowers his way through the role of eldest brother Forrest, while Shia LaBoeuf is in full-on Witwitky mode again as youngest brother Jack, getting his face bashed in and fumbling around like an idiot until his redemptive final act of violence. Guy Pearce fares better as Charley Rakes, an anal-retentive villain straight out of Dick Tracy. Jessica Chastain feels wasted in the role of Maggie, a dancehall girl who fled big-city violence for the supposed tranquility of the rural South. Boy, did she ever settle on the wrong spot!

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

Matteo Garrone follows up the visually compelling, structurally scattered Gomorrah with a more contained treatise on surveillance as transcendence and entertainment. Opening with an incredible god's-eye view of a hazy, lazy Naples, which the camera slowly moves across until it finally peers down on an incongruous sight: a gold-encrusted, horse-drawn carriage clopping along the congested city streets (a nod to Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach?). Extended, vertiginously choreographed tracking shots—employing Steadicam and bravura crane shots alike—define Garrone's visual style on this one. Servants in 18th-century livery open massive wrought-iron gates for the carriage at its destination, a wonderland wedding hosted by recent Big Brother winner Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante), a reptilian smooth operator whose insipid mantra, "Never give up!," will inspire some truly unintended consequences when Neapolitian fishmonger Luciano (Aniello Arena) adopts it a trifle too literally.

Introduced at the wedding sporting drag-queen attire and a blue fright wig, Luciano also defines himself as a performer, only one lacking an audience. He seems mesmerized by Enzo, as though he can't quite reconcile the presence in his real life of a figure so often glimpsed at on television. In Orwell's 1984, television functioned as both transmitter and receiver, a kind of two-way mirror between observer and observed, and could never be switched off upon pain of punishment. What Orwell never realized was that actively promoting that link as a two-way street, taking ordinary citizens and putting them on that screen, would effectively relieve the citizenry of the very desire to shut the thing down. Welcome to Big Brother.

Luciano's family encourages him to audition for the new season of the show, and the prospect of eventual fame and fortune, as well as the tension brought on by waiting for his "invitation" to the House, triggers an adverse reaction in Luciano, goading him on to increasingly erratic and irrational behavior. When his assistant, Michele (Nando Paone), suggests that God, too, is heavy into surveillance, Luciano embarks on misguided acts of charity like giving away most of his family's belongings to the neighborhood's homeless outcasts. Ostensibly a comedy, Reality abounds in moments of darkly ironic humor like a scene in which a cricket (by Jiminy!) invades the household, forcing Luciano to flee its multifaceted gaze, the purest example of the film's understated absurdism.

Garrone ends the film on a wonderfully ambiguous note: Travelling to Rome under the guise of attending a religious candlelight vigil (shown as a dazzling crane shot from behind the pope, out over the crowd, with the Coliseum standing watch in the background), Luciano instead sneaks away to invade the Big Brother house, staring through the two-way mirrors at its occupants as though they were deep-sea creatures in an aquarium. The final shot ascends back into the heavens, closing the circle and yet concluding nothing, accompanied by the sound of quiet, demented laughter.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

For 10 years, comic-book superheroes have permeated popular movies. After the mega-success of Spider-Man in 2002, costumed white fellas saving the world became multiplex staples. Once all the iconic heroes were accounted for, studios found continued success with second-tier characters, from the previously obscure (Iron Man) to the uncomfortably jingoistic (Captain America: The First Avenger). The circuit escalated into the late 2000s, spawning remakes, reboots, sequels, and prequels with a frequency that only the most ardent fans could keep up with. A few X-Men spinoffs, a Superman hybrid, and two Hulk films later, we now arrive at a moment of superhero saturation, wherein each new release affirms the general consensus that these films represent a creatively dry enterprise.

Critics get a bad wrap for being "out of touch" with the masses, but Tomatometer listings indicate that critics have been surprisingly forgiving of superhero fare. While there will always be a contingent that remains vocally negative to the idea of such absurd tales taking up a huge portion of the market, the superhero story is by no means an unworthy concept. Film is a medium defined by its paradoxical disposition as "commercial art" and houses some of most beautiful and absurd visions—unbound from logic or reality. Regarding superhero films, the problem isn't the concept, but the execution. With the possible exception of Jon Favreau's Iron Man, many superhero movies are neutered by increasing pressures to both please fans while remaining digestible for the broadest base of viewers. As a result they don't feel like real movies. More often they come across as massively budgeted visual companions to comic books, loaded with referential bits to the Marvel lexicon, but with a corporate stamp, lacking in imagination and relevance.

Thus, what better way to signify the death knell of the comic-book film adaptation than a "super"-sequel connecting the mythologies of other superhero films? The movie is The Avengers, a long-in-development project that culminates plot threads and characters from a handful of earlier Marvel films. Given that the likes of Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America each featured extensive in-film and post-credit teasers for The Avengers, record-setting box office numbers were a forgone conclusion. Yet despite appearing as the terminal symbol of Hollywood's evaporated originality, The Avengers is a genuinely compelling film. Unlike its recent brethren, it doesn't get by on fights and tights alone. It's instead a more virtuoso piece with a foundation of crisp writing and characterization. Credit that to writer-director Joss Whedon, who remains faithful to the established universe but recognizes and corrects what didn't work about the previous movies. In addition to providing The Avengers with a sound structure, Whedon supplies it with thematic layers—touching on the fears, concerns, and broader sensibilities of contemporary society—while also implicitly acknowledging its intrinsically absurd nature.

But let's start with the upfront details. The film's most obvious quality is its efficiency. From a narrative standpoint, The Avengers is a clinic in compact screenwriting. Whedon establishes the stakes in the sluggishly expository opening scenes, but then starts turning the cogs toward the eventual convergence of the heroes. Whedon's precision at assembling the likes of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is evidenced by the handful of memorable physical and verbal confrontations between them. Of course, it helps when you have actors like Ruffalo and Downey Jr. on board. Ruffalo is especially good as the tortured Bruce Banner; that this is his first foray with the character adds to his quietly engaging performance.

Seeing such titan-sized egos repel off of one another is great fun (especially in a forest-set three-way standoff between Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America), but this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Whedon's television work. One of his great strengths as a storyteller is how he augments conflict with humor, which shines through in his dialogue. Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly thrived on these qualities. Like these, The Avengers also maintains a pointed narrative focus that relies on how the disparate pieces fit together as part of a larger mosaic rather than on any one component.

The tradeoff comes with a story that can best be described as conventional. The plot involves a power-hungry villain named Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who wields a mysterious substance that grants him command over an alien army that threatens to invade and pillage Earth. In response, S.H.I.E.L.D. (a secret government military agency, in case you haven't been following) enlists the world's top superheroes to stop Loki and his minions.

As you might guess, just about every plot turn is recycled from other fantasy or superhero stories. This may in part explain why critics offered such muted praise of the film. Despite a 93% standing on Rotten Tomatoes, there's an air of contempt toward the film among much of the critical elite, as if begrudgingly acknowledging that Whedon has made all the right moves with a tired foundation. This is broadly true. But it's worth noting that Whedon, to his credit, never pretends that the story arc is particularly significant. He instead supports it from the bottom up, with solid structuring and careful characterization. For example, despite a weak plot, Whedon gets all the mileage he needs out of Hiddleston's exceptional performance. He bellows phrases like "Kneel before me!" about as convincingly as an actor can, and his demonic smile works to great effect when beaming through that metal-horned helmet of his.

Another notable aspect of the film is how it assimilates a range of tonal and stylistic tropes of popular cinema. Whedon's visual approach borrows from the likes of Michael Bay and Christopher Nolan without outright mimicking them. Some of the low-angle shots of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, stiff as ever) and slow-motion shots of destruction are Bay-esque, while the general movement of the action invokes Nolan's quicker, and quickly cut, no-nonsense approach. There's also a wonderful Spielbergian moment during the finale when the camera zooms across the city in a single shot to show what each of the heroes are up to.

The drawback of emulating and enmeshing a variety of noted styles so effectively is that the movie lacks a strong authorial voice of its own. Fortunately, given the ground the film has to cover, Whedon's pastiche aesthetic detracts little from the proceedings and actually may constitute a unique contribution to the blockbuster lexicon due to its restraint.

Its low-key methods notwithstanding, The Avengers isn't short on big moments. (The slow reveal of the lumbering techno-vessel emerging from the ocean to float invisibly in the sky especially stands out.) But for being such a behemoth, and despite having all the ingredients of over-stuffed, overdone, and over-stimulating contemporary blockbusters, it operates nimbly and purposefully. In this regard, The Avengers recalls James Cameron's Aliens—perhaps the best example of no-frills action filmmaking—in its steadiness and attention paid to rhythmic narrative pacing. Consider the scene in which Loki launches an assault on the Avengers' base. As the sequence unfolds, every character has a specific function, which the film's editing depicts clearly and evenly. All the while, Whedon creates tension by funneling the action through the dynamics of the characters' relationships. It's a bit mechanical, but nonetheless it's played to exciting effect. This is a credit to both the writing the understated visual approach, which evens out the inherent epic-ness of the film's premise.

The Avengers also has a rich, if not subtle, thematic backbone that suggests real-world events. The inevitable third-act demolition of Manhattan contains images that strike an uncomfortable chord in the wake of 9/11. There's nothing particularly horrifying about the visions of alien creatures pouring out of a black hole suspended over the city, and yet the images of fleeing crowds and streets full of dusty rubble invoke the specter of 9/11. These images tie into the film's larger concern with the nuanced implications of ensuring safety in an increasingly dangerous world. For example, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s shadowy dealings suggest an underlying corruption that makes for an effective contrast to the squabbling among the Avengers themselves. That the heroes are enlisted by and answer to S.H.I.E.L.D. adds to the murkiness the film associates with representing a powerful force for good. "You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers," Loki tells one of the Avengers.

Real-world parallels abound in The Avengers, a departure from the patterns of previous Marvel movies (the X-Men movies being a notable exception). On the other hand, another major comic-book franchise—Nolan's Batman series—has dealt with similar themes head-on. Though Whedon's aesthetic appears to have been influenced by Nolan, it turns out this also extends to the thematic texture of The Avengers. Its preoccupation with post-9/11 relations notably conjures The Dark Knight, such as how Loki channels the Joker in key respects. Both villains are interested in power for its own sake and espouse a cynical view of the human race. Loki is more interested in subjugation than chaos, but his philosophical underpinnings and casual sadism are similar to those of the Joker. These motifs constitute the dark core of Nolan's less formally accomplished Batman movies, whereas Whedon juxtaposes them with a simpler idea of heroism that grows out of necessity from the tumultuous relationships of the protagonists. The overt message about putting ego aside and working together is straightforward, but it takes on added significance with the additional themes regarding S.H.I.E.L.D. and Loki's quest for power.

Laced together with the sharp dialogue and economical aesthetic, the thematic center is one of many details that The Avengers showcases as part of its brisk, lively aura. This is both an accurate description of both its strengths and weaknesses, however. Whedon's impressively smooth orchestration of an array of constituents amounts to a self-consciously ephemeral experience. This is most apparent during the action-heavy third act, which churns out one cartoonish chase sequence after another. All the dramatic energy mustered in these moments comes from how the characters collaborate to defeat Loki's army rather than from the action itself. These sequences therefore evoke the limitations of this storytelling mode. Although the film's limitations become more apparent toward the conclusion, it doesn't take away from the film's many accomplishments. Rather, it places them in perspective.

Joss Whedon's task with this film isn't to subvert this style of visual storytelling, but to point out how fun it's supposed to be and so often isn't. In this sense, The Avengers is an unqualified success. (Ironically, despite the Whedon's revitalizing of the superhero film, the high profit margin of The Avengers will likely bequeath another decade's worth of underwhelming comic-book films to which his rendition is an antidote.) Whedon deserves credit for his skillful integration of a wide range of aesthetic and thematic elements into a slick commercial package. The Avengers represents a pristine iteration of the superhero film. In addition, it's an amalgam of the transient pleasures of modern blockbuster mythmaking. Unfortunately, the proficiency with which it operates also highlights the restricted potential of the modern blockbuster (which would probably require a total overhaul to yield another genuinely great spectacle). Nevertheless, even though the days of great big-budget filmmaking may well have run their course, The Avengers is an agile tribute to the passing pleasures that the best of it produces. It may be inconsequential, but, boy, does it hum.

Ted Pigeon is author of the blog The Cinematic Art. He also contributed to the recently published book, Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, Vol. 2.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner sequel becomes official.

Related, and a bit belated: Scott breaks his silence on his complex 3D space odyssey Prometheus.

Facebook IPO rises 11% at open.

Chloë Sevigny cried every day she had to wear a fake penis.

The music industry remembers the Queen of Disco.

U.K. library acquired key early gospel for $14 million.

J. Ho reviews the "not-so-great" The Dictator.

Please cast Kristen Wiig.

Does fear of eating human finger parts lessen your enjoyment of Arby's roast beef?

Iran threatens to sue Google Maps.

The case NME v. Morrisey, a.k.a. patron saint of gay Los Angeles Mexicans, is set for July.

Also, this:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

"Love has no limits." Considering the source, a Kenyan "beach boy" (native love object) who's milking his European sugar mama for all she's worth, that's a rather specious claim. In Paradise: Love, the first film in a projected trilogy by Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl, love is bounded on all sides by greed, lust, and dissimulation. Only with Seidl, exploitation is a two-way street. Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is a middle-aged hausfrau on holiday in sun-drenched Africa. Ostensibly resort-bound, Teresa has come to Kenya with more in mind than palm wine and tuk-tuk rides. During the bus ride to their accommodations, a native guide drills vacationers on the necessary vocabulary: "Jambo!" the rows of pasty tourists dutifully repeat. "Hakuna matata means 'no problem.' Here Africa, no problem!" You can't help but imagine the insistent recurrence of this mantra was intended by Seidl as a thumb in the eye to Disney's The Lion King and its pandering cultural politics.

Pre-vacation scenes introduce Teresa as a controlling neat-freak, disconnected from her texting-crazed daughter and even more anal-retentive sister. The opening "Seidl tableau" (a self-applied epithet) depicts her standing in the midst of a garish, neon-lit bumper car ride where all the drivers are mentally handicapped. As their driving grows increasingly frenzied and aggressive, Teresa cautions them, "Don't get too wild." It's the perfect encapsulation of the rest of the film. The largest of many ironies shot throughout is that, though Teresa herself has come to Africa as a sort of German Gone Wild, she takes a patronizing, hectoring tone with the men she attempts to initiate into her very specific and highly detailed erotic needs. Like most travelers lured by prefab exoticism, Teresa really just wants to surround herself with compatriots, and so a gaggle of Austrian women at the resort pass their days tittering at the natives' pidgin German, claiming to be unable to tell them apart other than by their cock size, and glibly nicknaming their barman "Uncle Ben." Their nights, however, are otherwise occupied.

After several thwarted attempts to find the right beach boy, Teresa takes up with Munga (Peter Kuzunga), a dreadlocked lothario who fends off the advances of over-eager bauble peddlers under the guise of sympathetic understanding. Munga preaches love unlimited and guides Teresa around indigenous neighborhoods, pointing out ubiquitous poverty and inequity all the better to guilt-trip Teresa into payment. True to that old saw, a fool and her money are soon parted, but not before the devoutly wished consummation. Shown sprawled post-coitus under Munga's mosquito netting like the Venus of Willendorf, Teresa amuses herself by taking souvenir snapshots of Munga's schlong while he sleeps.

Not one to be daunted by their relationship's eventual failure, Teresa perseveres, if you want to call it that, going on apace to other flings. Happiness, though, can't be bought, no matter how high the price. The finale reduces Teresa's series of transactions to its lowest-common denominator as the German women buy her a beach boy, Moussa, for her birthday. "He's all yours from head to cock!" one of the women crows. His prick wrapped in pink ribbon, Moussa prances around doing a "native dance." As if this weren't contemptible enough, the women turn getting him hard into a little game, but when none of them can manage it, despite some rather graphically depicted foreplay, they give Moussa the boot. Beneath even the bottom of that particular barrel comes Teresa's final encounter with Josphat, none other than "Uncle Ben" himself, who's similarly dismissed because he finds the prospect of cunnilingus distasteful.

Though these brief encounters become a trifle repetitive, Seidl uses them to emphasize various aspects of the hypocrisy and prejudice he so ruthlessly, yet justifiably, lays bare. Despite accusations of empty provocation often leveled against Seidl, there's more going on here than just shock tactics. The mix of actors and nonprofessionals, the improvisatory nature of the script, the location setting, all lend an aura of documentary veracity, however illusory, to the proceedings. In fact, Seidl's early films were all documentaries, albeit ones that, like Seidl admirer Werner Herzog's, contain almost equal measures fiction and nonfiction. Furthermore, Teresa's character is drawn with some nuance. Though, truth be told, hers is the only character that's treated as more than a caricature. And then there are Paradise: Love's many technical virtues. The cinematography, by longtime Seidl collaborator Wolfgang Thaler, in tandem with Ed Lachman, is particularly fine. Witness the film's stunning final shot is a gorgeous composition in depth: Three beach boys turn cartwheels in the foreground, while Teresa desultorily wanders along in the middle ground, and in the background, like some Impressionist seascape, untenanted boats drift under lowering skies.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

The deaths of celebrities don't usually knock the wind out of my sails. Sure, Michael Jackson's untimely passing felt so much a natural piece of his Greek tragedy of a life that it took my breath away, but when I learned of Donna Summer's death at 63 to cancer yesterday, the sinking feeling that accompanied the news exceeded any similar experience I've had since Robert Altman passed away. While I can't say I ever took Altman's work for granted, especially given the remarkable 11th-hour upswing his career took with his last string of films, Summer's death instantly forced me to consider just how much I've underrated the place her music has had in my life.

She made it so easy to do. Though she was the incontestable Queen of Disco, her demeanor was always markedly at odds with that moniker. The throne simply didn't seem to suit her, and I could never really tell whether it was because she transcended disco or because, as I continued to burrow into the rich history of the genre, disco was far too big a territory to be served by the monarchy. Whereas disco, at least the above-ground disco that was Summer's stock in trade, came to represent the hedonism of the Greatest Generation' presumably not-so-great descendants, the tackiness of the ennui era, and the perpetual search for Mr. Goodbar, Summer herself was a bashful-seeming, church-trained goody two shoes. Yes, her big break came from a long series of faked orgasms ("Love to Love You Baby"), but as a kindred prude, I buy her story that she was doing them as a piss take. There's a dash of contempt in her moans. That she reprised them in her massive cover of Barry Manilow's "Could It Be Magic" seems both a capitulation to her blossoming potential to be marketed and a reluctant acquiescence to the discomfort of pleasure. (More on that particular track in a moment.)

Then there's the question of authorship, which has always dogged Summer as rockists across the board sought to rectify their love for her formidable collection of hits (and concept albums like Once Upon a Time and I Remember Yesterday) against the critical establishment's long-standing bias against musical acts who don't write and produce their own material. In other words, subscribing to the cult of Giorgio Moroder has given far too many people a convenient out. (That Summer's name often appeared alongside Moroder and Pete Bellotte in the songwriting credits more often than not apparently meant nothing to them.) Moroder's relationship with Summer was admittedly as symbiotic as Janet Jackson's with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and Missy Elliott's with Timbaland, but take another listen to "State of Independence," "This Time I Know It's For Real," or even "I'm a Fire" (from her last album, Crayons) and tell me you can't hear an artist capable of putting her own imprint on radically diverse forms.

As the world party dims all the lights, I can remember that when Slant was in the thick of crafting its 100 Greatest Dance Songs (c. early 2006), YouTube was really starting to take off. It was through that bit of circumstance that I've forever linked the site I've since visited nearly every day with Donna Summer. Suddenly, it seemed there was a gold mine repository at my fingertips for vintage video clips of live disco performances, which made up for their poor video quality with the notion that the VHS (Beta?) tapes they came from were well-worn and well-loved. One of my very favorite clips was a concert performance of "I Remember Yesterday," another arguably German song carried to loopy heights through harnessing an antiquated rhythmic pulse, and a song whose prominence in the soundtrack of my life (the song = 10th grade) has always been a source of regrettable embarrassment.

The song is always goofy as all hell. But the video… Here Donna can be found twirling a cane, sticking her pooch out in some sort of sad-sack guess as to how dancing to a doo-wop disco throwback should look, using the cane as some sort of trombone/clarinet hybrid (that still comes out "doot doot"), bugging her eyes out in stern appreciation of corn camp like some schoolmarmish part-time music teacher leading sugar-laced kids through a calypso unit. All the while, the backup dancers do the windshield wipe. But at least the singing is live. It sounds a lot better when she puts some brass into it. Her poltergeist vocals on the studio version—which, though I never had the balls to play it on my disco-only college radio show, I'm now man enough to admit is one of my three favorite Donna Summer songs ever—always seemed sort of inadequate for the barrage of banjos and spoons Moroder threw into the mix, in their own way as densely layered and punishing as his programming on the album-capping "I Feel Love." But seeing and hearing her perform this song live is like watching someone stick their tongue simultaneously in both cheeks. In case you wanted further proof that disco knew its camp potential, watch Summer demonstrate how "we both looked around the room." Then swoon to the most gratuitous and satisfying middle-eight key change ever. (I always wanted to arrange this for my high school jazz band. As one of the alto saxes, I would've choreographed it so we'd stand up from our chairs at this point.) And then note that empty drum set behind them. And then mourn the lack of a hardwood floor panel and a pair of tap shoes. And then watch Summer struggle to figure out exactly where "on the one" would be on this bitch and stop mourning that lack.

I can no longer find the YouTube clip that fascinated me back in 2006 of Summer performing "The Hostage," her pre-"Love to Love You Baby" track about a woman's husband being kidnapped that was a minor hit in Europe—though not the U.S., which would explain why, despite having more greatest-hits compilations than Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder combined, it hasn't shown up on a single one. (Except for this one, an identical copy of which was pressed by Holland's Groovy Records, and I know that because I snatched the vinyl from my aunt years ago.) Well, because of that and also because the song is an incredible effing downer: "Well, they finally found my husband a few days later...Yes. The funeral's tomorrow." Since then, another clip from Dutch TV has surfaced, and it's a brilliant study in cognitive dissonance. The staging completely undercuts the song's telephone interludes and turns that ridiculous all-is-full-of-bleak epilogue, which took its nihilistic cue from every American movie made between 1968 and 1976, into a punchline.

During the turbulent, half-year gestation of Slant's dance list, I think I fought for no song's inclusion more virulently than "Could It Be Magic." Sending decidedly mixed signals, when the original list of 100 was set in stone and each participant was asked to come up with a list of three "honorable mentions" that we wished could've made the real list, I opted not to mention Summer's cover of the Manilow's song, itself a rework of a Chopin piano prelude. My line of reasoning was that, by that point, Summer was already well enough represented on the main list. (With three songs, she tied Madonna for the most overall mentions.) Though I had bigger fish to fry, like pointing out the lack of deep house on the feature presentation, maybe this was yet another in a string of moments I could cite in my life where my weak soul just couldn't admit to loving Summer that much. If that's the case, I atone completely.

Now that the list is almost as old as dance music itself (or at least reminds me of that time in your life when your parents realize you're over half their current age and will always be henceforth), I can admit that I unabashedly dig this tossed-off cover as much as I dig "I Feel Love," though in saying that I admit to having off-kilter Donna Summer tastes—rarely looking for some "Hot Stuff" baby this evening. Maybe it's the galloping tempo, maybe it's the fact that the Summer-Moroder-Bellotte sound hadn't quite hardened into the impenetrability they reached a couple albums down the road (the percussive kick is more organically propulsive than metronomic), or maybe it's the melodramatic heft of Chopin's original chord progressions and the fact that what once was funereal is now treated as an erotic rush. Or maybe I dig that Summer unashamedly rehashes the bridge-orgasm interlude that made her famous, only this time she can't claim it to be a recording-session lark that somehow ended up on the finished product. (The dirty secret about prudes, as Rose Nylund could tell you, is that deep down we're always looking for, but rarely finding, the moment to break our ever-elongating streak.) Or maybe it's the fact that the bridge that accompanies Summer's moany plea to "come into my life" is tormentedly gorgeous, and used to great effect during one of Looking for Mr. Goodbar's depressing sex scenes. Or maybe I'm just tickled by the mental image of Barry Manilow sending Summer whirling like a cyclone in her mind.

"I Remember Yesterday, "The Hostage," and "Could It Be Magic" are the most potent sort of camp, the kind that's apparently presented with grave sincerity. Pondering that, the contradictions of Summer as the Queen of Disco make so damned much sense.

Rest in peace high up where the stallion meets the sun.

Darezhan Omirbaev's Student attempts to do for Crime and Punishment what his earlier film Chouga did for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, transposing Dostoyevsky's novel about a philosophically motivated murderer to modern-day Kazakhstan and keying in on the tale's unforgiving economic backdrop. The film opens in meta mode on a film set with the image of a clapperboard and an off-screen voice calling scene and take, but self-reflexivity isn't a technique Omirbaev will use again until the film's final shot of a minor character staring accusatorily out at the audience, which feels little more than cheap and rather obvious. And it's only there at the onset because the director wants to shoehorn in a conversation about the use value of modern cinema. Since Omirbaev favors irony of the heaviest-handed kind, he has the film-within-the-film's director argue for cinema's validity as mere entertainment, a stance clearly at loggerheads with what Omirbaev really wants to argue.

Hewing close in event, if not in spirit, to Dostoyevsky's novel, to the extent that not a single thing that happens on screen will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the novel, Omirbaev rather perfunctorily goads the nameless student into action with a lecture on modern capitalism. The power suit-clad professor argues in favor of social Darwinism of the crudest "dog eat dog" sort. Not one to forego an easy jab, Omirbaev cuts to the student's landlady watching a nature documentary in which several lions take down a giraffe. Likewise, during the killing of the store owner, the TV shows an interview with a witness to the JFK assassination, who reports Kennedy's remark, "Now they're really going to love me in Dallas," not to mention the peace symbol-emblazoned hoodie the student acquires after the killing. Elsewhere, oligarchs in big black SUVs serve as risibly villainous foils: One such Master of the Universe peevishly beats a donkey to death with a golf club, admittedly an incident taken from the book, but dropped into the film's narrative flow with zero preparation and even less follow-up.

Because Omirbaev doesn't flesh out any of the quasi-philosophical discussion, like the scene where a fellow student reads aloud about "postmodern uselessness," the subtext simply lays there inert, neither hefty enough to stimulate speculation on the audience's part, nor wafer-thin enough to dismiss as mere window dressing. Furthermore, the lack of a cinematic analogue for the policeman who pursues the student killer further saps the narrative pacing. Given the film's static shots and somnambulistic pacing, it could have used some. Granted, the obvious precursor here is Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. But whereas Bresson broke the world and humankind down into shards of perceived experience, only to recast them in what Paul Schrader termed "transcendental style," Omirbaev adopts rigorous montage as nothing more than a fashion, and narrative ambiguity becomes a ploy just to leave shit unexplained.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

The Queen of Disco is dead.

Richard Corliss updates TIME's All-TIME 100 list of the greatest films made since 1923...the beginning of TIME. (Click here for Corliss's largely cringe-worthy selections for the 10 greatest movies of the millennium, thus far.)

Matt Zoller Seitz on the substance of Wes Anderson's style.

Marion Cottilard knows how to pick them.

It's official: whites account for under half of births in U.S.

Sam Adams interviews Eva Marie Saint.

Fez delights in difficulty.

Bollywood turns 100.

Wes Anderson halfway done with his next screenplay.

The paralyzed can now move robots with their minds.

One of the last independent alternative stations in the U.S. sells out to Clear Channel.

Aaron Cutler on the parallel histories of Caroline Martel's Industry/Cinema.

Richard Brody discusses F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.

This:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

Moonrise Kingdom's opening scenes are vintage Wes Anderson. A series of pans and lateral tracks explores the Bishop household in studied tableaux, each isolated member of the family captured in their native habitat, while on a 45rpm record a disembodied voice guides listeners through the works of Benjamin Britten. Likewise, there's a narrator (Bob Balaban) to guide us through Anderson's film, in just one of many recursively referential—and, at times, painfully self-aware—touches. Examples could be further multiplied, but let's stick with the Britten: Not only does his music recur in the epilogue that effectively bookends the film, but Britten's opera Noye's Fludde, itself based on a medieval mystery play (see the Chinese puzzle box pattern emerge?), serves as an objective correlative for the acts of God or nature that dominate the second half. As the recorded voice intones late in the film, "Britten has taken the orchestra apart and now puts it back together again." Much the same could be said for Anderson's direction and script work with co-writer Roman Coppola.

Moonrise Kingdom is therefore an unabashed continuation and, what's more, intensification of the rigorous aesthetic preoccupations and occasionally precious thematic concerns that have long marked Anderson's films. Since, time and again, adolescent precocity has been his narrative meat and potatoes, he can be given a certain amount of latitude for such indulgences as his obsession with handwritten notes and other kinds of communiqués. Another mainstay, exacting period detail (let alone the sheer density of compositional elements), is certainly never less than faultless. The film's visual and sonic textures are often mesmerizing: Hitting a Kubrickian note with the precision of his shot compositions and motivated camerawork, Robert Yeoman's cinematography isn't afraid to come off the dolly and go handheld for woodland chase scenes. Framing and expressionist light-and-shadow play bring poignancy to a bedtime (separate beds, naturally) tête-à-tête between Walt Bishop (Anderson axiom Bill Murray) and his megaphone-happy wife Laura (Frances McDormand).

Set in 1965 on New Penzance Island and its environs, with (as quasi-Biblical backdrop) a natural catastrophe on the horizon that our helpful narrator clues us into only minutes into the film, Moonrise Kingdom is, at bottom, a preteen love story centered on fugitive Khaki Scout Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and fantasy-novel enthusiast Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). The two meet cute in flashback when Sam goes commando behind the scenes at a local production of Britten's aforementioned opera. Like one of Suzy's beloved novels, often read aloud to increase the film's textural density, the story is bicameral: Its first half chronicles the lovers on the run and the motley crew of adults sworn to track them down, among them local police captain Sharp (Bruce Willis in Breakfast of Champions flyaway-hair mode). Anderson commendably pulls few punches handling the sensual and sexual nature of adolescent onset, craftily using the insertion of a fishhook earring into a hitherto untouched earlobe to suggest so much more. These scenes possess a freewheeling earnest not dissimilar to the '60s period-contemporary filmmakers of the French New Wave. (Consider this a tween Pierrot le Fou.)

Captured and returned to alleged status quo at the end of the first half, the second details various rescue operations, emotional as well as literal, on the part of the chastened, hence wiser, adults. Faces new to Anderson films (Willis, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton) as well as familiar ones (Jason Schwartzman has an amusing cameo as scout camp chaplain) are always a pleasure to behold, even while mood and morale darken, and the promised flood descends on the region. Registering the key change, Anderson employs Hank Williams songs like "Kaw-Liga" and "Cold, Cold Heart" throughout the film's midsection, evocative lovelorn laments as well as thematic cues. When the waters finally do sweep away the Fort Lebanon Scout camp, the inundation immediately brings to mind the conclusion of the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, another programmatic, problematic, yet affectionate, homage to times past and passed.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16—27. For more information click here.

With Cannes underway, reactions to opening selection Moonrise Kingdom are trickling in. Time Out London also has an interview with Wes Anderson.

Will Smith supports President Obama's "bravery."

Check out this toxic Kansas town and its last remaining residents.

Nick Stahl is missing.

Isabelle Huppert joins the cast of David Gordon Green's Suspiria remake.

Is Internet Doomsday real?

An infographic on how a book is born.

Chris Christie on VP: "I Got This". Gulp.

As part of the blogathon "For the Love of Film III", The Self-Styled Siren writes a love letter to Alfred Hitchcock's indispensable Lifeboat.

Lady Gaga has another meat dress.

The Guardian calls Cannes "a banquet of art and trash."

Below, the trailer for Michel Gondry's new film, The We and the I:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.