Word: writer-director
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...small German village two decades before Hitler took power. This is a pure art film, daunting and demanding, spare and unsparing, making no concession to the prevailing popular taste - except, perhaps, film-festival taste. It was also, as we two Cannes veterans attest, the finest work in the competition. Writer-director Michael Haneke, a personally austere gent who has won prizes here before, with The Piano Teacher (starring Huppert) and Caché, was finally forced to crack a smile as he accepted the award...
...know of to spin this sweet fantasy out into a 2½-hr., four-language epic. Receiving its world premiere on May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival, Inglourious Basterds - first word as in "glower," second as in "turds" - is an alternative history of World War II from the writer-director of Pulp Fiction, the Palme d'Or winner 15 years ago. As with all of his recent work - the two Kill Bill movies and Death Proof - Basterds draws portraits of strong women facing down evil men; and in Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent) and Third Reich screen star Bridget...
...Terence Davies has been exercising these muscles for most of his professional life. The writer-director is probably best known for his version of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth with Gillian Anderson. But that was a detour from his examination of his youth in postwar Liverpool. In a trilogy of short films in the early '80s, and in the features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1987) and The Long Day Closes (1992), he wove a tapestry of family life, of a violent father and gentle mother, an entire neighborhood that soldiered through hard times singing pop songs...
...anniversary (the company was founded by Montreal street performers in 1984), Cirque has done a show like the early ones. Kooza, from the Sanskrit word for "box," is light on elaborate production values, heavy on old-fashioned circus acts: jugglers, tumblers, contortionists, high-wire walkers... and clowns. Kooza's writer-director, David Shiner, has decades of intercontinental renown as a clown-mime; and his show throws a long spotlight on three of the breed. Nice change: they're all North Americans, and they talk - no Marcel Marceau winsomeness here. Surprise: they're fast, raucous and pretty funny...
...found the ideal listener for what it essentially a 90-minute monologue punctuated by film clips, with Tyson narrating his entire life, including the blow-by-blow commentary of his fight footage. Since his first film as screenwriter, The Gambler in 1974, and Fingers, his 1978 debut as writer-director, Toback has put churning, charismatic self-destructive characters on the screen. (He got an Oscar nomination for the life story of another scoundrel, Bugsy Siegel, in the 1991 Bugsy.) Toback has always been fascinated by the machismo of professional athletes; he wrote a tell-all memoir of his years spent...