palme d'or

The Square, Diane Kruger and Joaquin Phoenix take home prizes at this year’s Cannes Film Festival

Xavier Dolan takes bronze, and Julianne Moore wins best actress for Cronenberg’s ‘Maps to the Stars’

Criticism of Kechiche’s ‘male gaze’ is overblown

And Javier Bardem has to split Best Actor—but declares his love for Penelope Cruz

The Cannes jury favours dark, challenging, transgressive fare

It’s raining again in Cannes, and the films have been as unsettled as the sky. And as moist. Earlier I blogged about clogged drains and nasty plumbing, which have surfaced as a bizarre theme in the program. I cited drain-clearing scenes in Brazil’s Linha de Passe and, by Walter Salles, and Serbis, by Filipino director Brillante Mendoza. Since then we’ve seen another plumbing incident in Gomora, a mafia movie from Italy called by Matteo Garron. And my National Post colleague Chris Knight reminded me that the incarcerated characters in Blindness spend much of their time groping around floors slick with human waste. Chris, in fact, he penned a clogged sink blog called Plumbing the Depths of World Cinema. Wish I’d thought of that.