Cannes 09. Critics' Week Wrap-up.

By David Hudson on 05/23/2009

Seems a long, long time ago now that the first entry for a film screening in this year's International Critics' Week went up, the opener, "Nothing Personal"; but it was just hours ago that another went up announcing the three main award-winners: "Farewell Gary," "Lost Persons Area" and "Whisper With the Wind."

In between, there have been entries on "Ordinary People" and "Hierro," and that leaves just a handful of features to catch up with:

"Largely set amongst the majestic beauty of the high Andes in Peru, 'Altiplano' [site] is an ambitious, visually striking second feature from the filmmaking duo of Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth following their award-winning fiction debut 'Khadak' (2006)," writes Allan Hunter in Screen. In Variety, Jordan Mintzer supposes some "may appreciate this ripped-from-the-headlines tale of a Belgian doctor and his photojournalist wife caught up in a local mining incident. But all the symbolic imagery, oversaturated sound and self-serious dialogue don't help to make the story any more compelling." More from Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa.

Again, Jordan Mintzer: "A quirky film noir cum dark comedy featuring a washed-up wrestler, his hoodwinking manager and a forlorn South American town circa 1961, 'Bad Day to Go Fishing' casts its line into unusual waters but doesn't yield an entirely convincing catch. Uruguayan director Alvaro Brechner's ambitious debut is something like a retro 'The Wrestler' by way of the Coen brothers or Mexican helmer Arturo Ripstein, with sharp production values and a fair share of pulp fatalism." For Dan Fainaru in Screen, "This attempt at deadpan satire, based on a short story by Juan Carlos Onetti, lacks the necessary pace, wit or humour to sustain its lofty ambitions."

"A warm and touching family saga that elicits drama from the simplest of everyday realities, 'Huacho' is a highly promising debut from Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Fernández Almendras," writes Jordan Mintzer in Variety. "Never pandering to easy sentiments yet ultimately moving, the story follows 24 hours in the life of a provincial family coping with poverty in central Chile. Superbly lensed in sun-drenched Super 16 and edited with a structural harmony that weaves four stories into one seamless narrative, pic succeeds on a terrain previously farmed by Argentine realists Lucrecia Martel and Lisandro Alonso." Writing for Screen, Jonathan Romney finds this "an involving, quietly rewarding experience." Cineuropa has quite a collection of interviews.

"It's summer in the city, the jokes are dirty and the milieu mildly gritty in the urban, adult-skewed French animation 'Round Da Way,'" writes Leslie Felperin in Variety. "Based on a popular TV series that started in 2000 on Canal Plus and morphed into a comicbook, pic follows the adventures of various ghetto-dwellers on the make in the sexual as well as criminal sense. A fun, polished crowdpleaser that depends a lot on its target aud's knowledge of street slang, 'Round' should assemble a good-sized posse of supporters locally when it opens in mid-June this year, but may not achieve much more than cult status offshore."

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Huacho," Charivari Films, 2009]

Tags: Cannes 2009