So you may have heard that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have business this week at Cannes. Where does that leave Twilight Saga third wheel Taylor Lautner in the post-franchise wilderness? Good question! Because I have no idea what to make of the movie he's attached to at the Cannes Film Market.
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Here's the first trailer for Lawless, née The Wettest County in the World, a.k.a. the long-shelved Prohibition thriller featuring Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Gary Oldman and Guy Pearce dealing in all kinds of low-down bootlegging shenanigans. Violence? Check. Romance? Check. Clipped, moody dialogue courtesy of Hillcoat's Proposition screenwriter/punk prophet Nick Cave? Hell to the check. Cannes competition, here we come!
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Are the Central Park Five the next West Memphis Three? The teenagers wrongfully convicted in the vicious 1989 rape and beating of jogger Tricia Meili — and only released after the actual attacker came forward in 2002 — will be showcased in a forthcoming Ken Burns documentary entitled, appropriately enough, The Central Park Five. And while the film was funded in part by Burns's longtime patrons at PBS, the two-time Oscar nominee and four-time Emmy winner (who co-directed the project with his daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon) is taking the film to Cannes next month with the hope of finding a theatrical distributor: "We want to do it [theatrically] because the running time makes it manageable, and there's something urgent about it," he told TV Guide this week. This sounds... familiar?
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Following last week's unveiling of the Cannes Film Festival competition lineup, sidebar Critics Week today revealed its own 2012 slate. Opening the event is the world premiere of Broken, British director Rufus Norris's story of a young girl in North London whose life changes after witnessing a violent attack, co-starring Tim Roth and Cillian Murphy.
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Good news for Michael Haneke fans, which, of course, means everyone: Sony Pictures Classics has acquired North American rights to Amour, the new film by the director behind Cache, Funny Games and the Cannes-winning The White Ribbon. The brief description, as provided by SPC: "In the film, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are in their eighties. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter (Isabelle Huppert), who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has an attack. The couple's bond of love is severely tested." Fantastic. Expect Amour to premiere in competition next month at Cannes; visit Movieline on Thursday for the full lineup. [Press release]
Grainger David's The Chair is the only American filmmaker to make the shorts lineup cut for this year's upcoming Cannes Film Festival, though U.S. territory Puerto Rico also made the list for the first time with Mi Santa Mirada by Alvaro Aponte-Centeno. The Chair debuted last month at South by Southwest where it won the Short Film Jury Prize. The 12-minute film revolves around a mysterious outbreak of poisonous mold in a small town and one boy's attempt to understand his mother's death, his grandmother's obsession with a discarded recliner and the roots of this mysterious plague.
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Get ready for some twee twinkling on the Croisette -- Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is set to open the 2012 Cannes Film Festival! Last year's opener, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, went on to enjoy a rousingly successful theatrical run on its way to a Best Picture nomination; Anderson's comedy, about a pair of pre-teen lovebirds on the lam in 1960s New England, will open stateside just over a week after its May 16 Cannes debut and marks his return to live-action film after his most recent film, the Oscar-nominated Fantastic Mr. Fox.
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