UnCultured

MEMORY Presents Short Film Series

MEMORY in collaboration with Medium Density Fibreboard Films (MDFF) present, "Program No.1", an exclusive never before seen collection of 10 short films by emerging filmmakers from the US and Canada. This 90 minute one night only event consists of award winning films from festivals such as Cannes, Sundance, and SXSW, as well as exclusive premieres.  Three of the directors featured in the program are premiering feature films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The program will be followed by an after party for the filmmakers and audience at Studio Bar (824 Dundas St. W) and with music by Toronto party rockers ITSOWEEZE deejay collective.

Xavier Dolan's ‘Tom At The Farm’ Reviewed

Four out of the five movies written and directed by Xavier Dolan have been complete originals: noisy, brash, seriocomic relationship studies, born from the hyperactive brain of this prodigiously talented Québécois filmmaker. Tom At The Farm, which Dolan made before his recent Cannes prizewinner, Mommy, is the exception—an adaptation of a play by Michel Marc Bouchard (Lilies), who helped write the screenplay. Accordingly, it’s something of a departure for the 26-year-old festival darling; out of reverence for his text, Dolan has pulled back on the manic energy that characterizes his other features, emerging with something more measured and deliberate, a psychosexual chamber piece.

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MAMO Restaurant New York

On the other side of the Atlantic, in Antibes, France, there is a now-legendary eatery called MAMO Le Michelangelo. Opened in 1992, the upscale establishment has since become a jewel of the French Riviera, and a favored hotspot for the many celebrities who flock to the area for the Cannes Film Festival. After 23 years of European success, the restaurant set its sights on New York. This May, a South of France inspired MAMO outpost opened doors in SoHo, offering the same authentic Italian cuisine and exceptional service of its counterpart.

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Get a Closer Look at Xavier Dolan’s ‘Mommy’

“As much as I like combining drama and humor—because life is about the duality of both in all its absurdity—for the same reason I like to write a story with very realistic environments interwoven with more extravagant parentheses and segments,” Xavier Dolan once told me. “It’s important for me to have these situations where things are bigger than nature, bigger than the characters themselves, where you feel overwhelmed by life and it makes us remember how small we are and life itself in the movie reminds the characters of that.” And although Tom at the Farm still doesn’t have US distribution, yesterday, Dolan’s latest feature Mommy premiered at Cannes.

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Spring Breakers: The Sequel Is Happening

It appears when the characters in Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers kept repeating “Sprang break forever, bitches,” they weren't lying. Apparently the production company Wild Bunch is bringing a sequel to the Cannes Film Festival Market. Called Spring Breakers: The Second Coming the film will see a bunch of girls do battle with an extreme militant Christian sect that attempts to convert them. We're just the messengers, don't hurt us.

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Cannes Film Festival 2014 Poster Rolls Up

The poster is the handiwork of Hervé Chigioni and his graphic designer partner Gilles Frappier, who delved deep into the Cannes' archives and pulled out Federico Fellini’s 8½, an Official Selection-er back in 1963, and its star Mastroianni. It's none-more-Cannes, and, says its designer, its understated style is in keeping with the spirit of the event.

Lea Seydoux

Hirokazu Kore-eda's Beautiful New Film 'Like Father, Like Son' VIDEO

Known for his profoundly touching and painfully beautiful dramas of the human spirit, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest feature has been garnering praise since premiering at Cannes this past May. Winning the Jury Prize as well as a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury, Like Father, Like Son is perhaps Kore-eda’s most personal film to date and plays out like a delicate tickling of the emotional keys that possesses an impossible question almost too painful to answer. 

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First International Trailer for 'Blue Is The Warmest Color'

When I spoke to French actress Lea Seydoux back in October for her film Sister, she shared some insight into her latest project; "…the film I just finished a month ago, it was very very intense. Abdellatif Kechiche, the director, he’s a very respected French director but he fascinates people also because he’s not really connected to the world of cinema people; he’s a little bit marginal."

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Palme d’Or Winner - Blue Is the Warmest Color

She shed tears throughout much of her three-hour movie. And when she arrived on stage with her co-star Léa Seydoux, the two actresses cried some more. Adèle Exarchopoulos, the 19-year-old heroine of Abdellatif Kechiche’s sexually graphic, potently naturalistic lesbian drama La Vie d’Adèle (known in English as Blue Is the Warmest Color), was named one of the three winners of the Palme d’Or, the highest prize at the 66th Cannes Film Festival. Steven Spielberg, president of this year’s jury, announced that he and his colleagues had taken the unusual decision to honor “three artists: Adèle, Léa and Abdellatif.”

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Looking Back on Our Favorite Palme d’Or Winners of Years Past

And what makes the film so emotionally and cinematically rich is the juxtaposition between Shepard and Wenders—the German with a fantastical pastiche obsession with Americana and the rough-tongued “rock and roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth” himself, whose words are engrained in the sprawling western landscape. The two have collaborated many times since, but this holds as by far their best work—creating something that speaks to the human condition so effortlessly in a way that few films have been able to. No one does melancholic American isolation like a misanthropic German.

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Trailer for Bernardo Bertolucci's New Film 'Me & You' VIDEO

After beginning his career more than fifty years ago, Bernardo Bertolucci has been making films that are as psychologically thrilling as they are visually rich. The Italian director best known for The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor, and his most-recent sexually-charged study The Dreamers, is now back after a nine year feature hiatus with the drama Me & You. 

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Festival de Cannes 2013 Poster Released

To grace the poster for its 66th edition, the Festival de Cannes has chosen a couple who embody the spirit of cinema like no other: Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, photographed during the shooting of the aptly named A New Kind of Love, by Melville Shavelson (1963). 

For the Festival it is a chance both to pay tribute to the memory of Paul Newman, who passed away in 2008, and to mark its undying admiration for Joanne Woodward, his wife and most favoured co-star. 

They were honoured at the Festival de Cannes in 1958 – the year of their marriage – with the selection In Competition of Martin Ritt’s The Long Hot Summer, the first film in which they appeared together. The links between their story and that of the Festival continued with a series of films directed by Newman, who cast Woodward in unforgettable roles in The Effect of the Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Competition – 1973) and The Glass Menagerie (Competition – 1987).

The poster evokes a luminous and tender image of the modern couple, intertwined in perfect balance at the heart of the dizzying whirlwind that is love. The vision of these two lovers caught in a vertiginous embrace, oblivious of the world around them, invites us to experience cinema with all the passion of an everlasting desire.

The Great Gatsby Will Open the 2013 Cannes Film Festival

It's been over a decade since Baz Luhrmann premiered his orante musical tragedy Moulin Rouge as the opening feature of the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. Going on to win myriad awards, the film marks Luhrmann's latest aesthetic and emotional masterpiece, with its 2008 follow-up Australia failing to provide the same fervor and pulse that Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge were so brimming with. But after more than a few hiccups and delays, his long-awaited adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerarld's The Great Gatsby is now slated to open the 2013 Cannes Film Festival come this May.

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Watch the First U.S. Trailer for Abbas Kiarostami's 'Like Someone in Love' VIDEO

As the companion piece to Abbas Kiarostami's European drama Ceftified Copy, the internationally-acclaimed writer and director's latest work, Like Someone in Love, takes us to the other side of the world. Setting the film in Japan, Kiarostami's new drama is more enigmatic than his last—truths blooming to the surface and dissolving before our eyes.

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Beasts Of The Southern Wild Review