Cannes Capsules

It may be difficult, from the United States, to fully appreciate the stature of Diego Armando Maradona as an athlete and a world figure. The Argentine footballer who died suddenly aged 60 in Buenos Aires was, simply put, the biggest superstar to ever grace a soccer pitch.

Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life begins in a lofty mountain landscape, the majestic Alps of Upper Austria, where the townspeople of tiny alpine hamlet Sankt Radegund go about their daily farming.   The humble chores and hard, but godly, labor of the land are undertaken in a timeless fashion, communally and with almost Amish simplicity.

Ken Loach is one of the most decorated Cannes directors ever. The British helmer has won two Palmes d’Or (The Wind That Shakes the Barley in 2006 and I, Daniel Blake in 2016) and three Jury Prizes to boot.

When the lights came back up in the cavernous Grand Theatre Lumière after the world premiere of Rocketman, applause was thunderous and emotions ran high – especially in the central seats reserved for dignitaries and the film’s cast, gathered around its subjects: Bernie Taupin and Elton John. The thunder was commensurate with the spectacle which had just concluded on the GTL’s widescreen which was augmented by the unique feeling of having absorbed a biographical celebration of someone actually present right there in the theater.

You could call The Dead Don’t Die a neo-noir small town zombie comedy. The apocalypse here hits the small upstate hamlet of Centerville, an actually slightly off-center Mayberry style all-American town, inhabited by zany characters: a movie buff convenience store clerk, amiably gruff diner waitresses, a resident mumbling racist (Steve Buscemi), the motel owner and two somewhat hapless sheriff deputies (Chloë Sevigny and Adam Driver) led by nonplussed sheriff Bill Murray.