TheHolyGirl Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you were looking to hire a screenwriter and a director for a big-budget alien invasion action film, whom would you pick? Five gets you ten you didn't answer "Lucrecia Martel." Martel is an Argentinian director of tiny, acclaimed independent films like La Ciénaga and The Holy Girl. She is a Pedro Almodóvar protegé who served on the Cannes jury in 2006 and returned there this year with The Woman Without a Head. And she's been tapped to write and direct El eternauta, an elaborate, effects-heavy science-fiction film (based on this comic series) that will follow "a small group of survivors battling alien invaders and their army of giant insects."

Now: filmmakers graduate from smaller to bigger films all the time. That's not remarkable. But Martel is a surprising choice for something like this because of how stubbornly small her movies have been. The Holy Girl, while quite good, was precisely the kind of slow, deliberately obscure psychosexual drama that the general public derisively associates with hoity-toity arthouse cinema. The Woman Without a Head, which I don't think anyone's seen yet, is pitched as a psychological thriller, but it's about "the psychology of a woman after she hits and kills a dog with her car." Up next: killer bugs from outer space. Outstanding!

I'm not making fun: I love when smart, ambitious filmmakers tackle genre films. Hopefully El eternauta will make it stateside.

I've been fortunate enough to have been able to go to Cannes for the past four years now, and I'm getting ready for my fifth. And, as I often say when explaining film festivals to people who've never been to one, it's not just an adventure; it's a job. Cannes is a "get-away" the same way running from a burning building is "a tour of the grounds"; there are plenty of movies, plenty of work, and the overall emotional tone of the event is a mix of exhaustion and exhilaration. The heady moments of pure movie magic come fast and furious with the muck-and-money reality of international financing and distribution happening all about you.

Going to Cannes means seeing at least 40, maybe 50 or more movies in 10 days, never mind actually thinking and writing about them; you'd think that that kind of pace would soon turn into a blur, and it does, but it's a glorious one. Here's some of my favorite movie going moments (highly subjective, of course -- I've not included last year's ridiculously strong quartet of Persepolis, No Country for Old Men, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, as they're still so fresh in my mind) from the past four years of the Cannes Film Festival; think of these as the rushed recollections of a film critic who knows exactly how lucky he's been.