2015

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Cannes 2015: Nothing Catching Fire in the Home Stretch

Our guest film correspondent Séamas McSwiney is sending us special reports from the Cannes 2015 film festival.

The sun shines down on the boulevards and beaches of Cannes, though inside in the sumptuous cinemas nothing is really catching fire yet.

Heading into the home stretch, the general feeling among the critics is that this is not a classic vintage. The promises haven't been kept. At best they deliver in a minor key, like Moretti's Mia Madre, while his compatriots Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales and Paolo Sorrentino's Youth both really miss the mark leaving a whiff of overblown self-indulgence. Both seem to fall foul of the luscious Anglo-Saxon casting the producing gods offered them, maybe taking the edge off their usual artistry and originality.

In Youth (pictured above) we visit a luxurious hotel in Switzerland where the rich and famous go to reminisce in the spa and recover from their successful artistic careers. It opens on Michael Caine who plays Fred, a composer who wants to compose no more and refuses a request to conduct his work for a royal gala. He prefers to reminisce in a sometimes insightful, sometimes cod philosophical way with his old friend, Mick Boyle, a filmmaker played by Harvey Keitel.

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Cannes 2015: Does CinEsperanto Colonise Multicultural Cannes?

Our guest film correspondent Séamas McSwiney is sending us special reports from the Cannes 2015 film festival.

Let's face it, to paraphrase Cannes programmer Thierry Frémaux at this year's Cannes press conference, English has become the Esperanto that idealists dreamed of when inventing a unique universal language.

He went on to say that more films are proposed to Cannes each year in English, but most are excluded as they portray stories taking place in cultural communities for which English is not the natural language.

He was responding to a question from an Italian journalist who observed that two of the three Italian films in Competition were in English; Paolo Sorrentino's (whose The Great Beauty recently took the best foreign language Oscar) is there with Youth starring Harvey Keitel and Michael Caine, and Matteo Garrone (director of previous Cannes prize-winner Gomorrah) brings an adaptation of fantastic Neapolitan classics in Tale of Tales.

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