The Cannes marketplace gets its own movie

While the handful of movies in competition for the coveted Palme d’Or might get most of the press at Cannes, it’s the festival’s less glamorous but utterly huge marketplace — “Le Marche du Film” — that causes producers and film buyers to flock to the South of France every May. And this year, it’s even getting its own movie.

Wes Anderson’s ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ earns raves at Cannes

The 65^th annual Cannes Film Festival opened on Wednesday with the premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest work “Moonrise Kingdom,” and it received raves from the notoriously fickle, and brutal, Cannes audience. Considering that Anderson is one of the most distinctive filmmakers out there, it’s surprising that “Moonrise” is his first movie to screen at Cannes.

Indie roundup interview: ‘The Sound of My Voice’ director Zal Batmanglij talks cults, indie movies and eating earthworms

“The Sound of My Voice” is a movie made for next to nothing, but it still manages to be more taut and suspenseful than most studio thrillers with 10 times its budget. A pair of Silver Lake documentary filmmakers, Peter and Lorna, who infiltrate a cult located in the basement of a suburban split level. The cult leader is Maggie, an ethereal, charismatic woman who wears a long flowing gown and who trundles around an oxygen tank. Though she claims to be from the year 2054, she’s remarkably vague about the future. Peter and Lorna initially intend of exposing her as a fraud, they get more and more swayed by this magnetic, mysterious woman.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson face off this year at the Cannes Film Festival

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson might be soul mates in the “Twilight” series and may or may not be dating in real life, but in the just-released lineup of this year’s Cannes film festival, they are competitors.

Kristen Stewart stars in Walter Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic “On the Road,” alongside Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, and Kirsten Dunst, who was named best actress at last year’s Cannes for her role in “Melancholia.” Salles is probably best known in this country for directing “The Motorcycle Diaries,” which depicted Che Guevara’s formative road trip through the hinterland of South America. “On the Road” shows Kerouac as he travels through America in the 1940s, hanging out with barely fictionalized versions of his Beat movement buddies Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Clearly, road trips are Salles’s auteurist thing.

Indie Roundup: ‘Monsieur Lazhar’

French Canadian director Phillippe Falardeau’s wintry (literally) drama, which was nominated for a best foreign-language Oscar earlier this year, is an admirably restrained movie that sucker-punches you at the end with a strong emotional wallop.

“Monsieur Lazhar” opens in a snow-covered Montreal schoolyard. Simon (Emilien Neron), a smart aleck with a shaggy haircut, enters his school ahead of his classmates and discovers his teacher dangling from a heating duct, an apparent suicide. In the chaos that follows, Simon’s friend Alice (Sophie Nelisse) also manages to sneak a peek. Their shared trauma brings the two together and then, for reasons we learn later, tears them apart. Alice talks out the suicide with startling precociousness, much to the consternation of the adults around her, while Simon folds in on himself, eaten up by guilt.

‘Damsels in Distress’ Director Whit Stillman talks about the MPAA and America’s next dance craze

It’s been 13 years since a Whit Stillman movie graced the silver screen. His explanation for his cinematic hiatus was tersely self-deprecating. “It was failure.”

Stillman got an Oscar nomination for best screenplay for his 1991 debut feature “Metropolitan.” The film is a witty, frequently hilarious, look at New York’s upper crust that was more influenced by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jane Austen than by the contemporary icons of indie cool like Martin Scorsese or Jim Jarmusch. But, being cool never seemed much of a priority for Stillman. His characters are, by and large, hyper-articulate preppies concerned with vice, virtue and beauty and who lace their conversations with references to people like 19^th French philosopher Charles Fourier.

‘Chinatown’ screenwriter Robert Towne talks about movies, history and Los Angeles

From the plaintive trumpet that opens the movie to that final killer line — “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown” — Roman Polanski’s 1974 noir is regarded by film geeks, movie critics and academics everywhere as one of the best American movies ever made. It’s one of those rare movies where every scene feels iconic. A fictionalized of some real-life shenanigans pulled by William Mulholland and others who bought the water rights of the Owens rivers out from under the local farmers to feed the burgeoning city of Los Angeles, the movie’s depiction of venality and corruption at the highest levels of power struck a nerve with when it came out in post-Watergate America and it’s been the template for virtually every noir and thriller to come out since.

Indie Roundup: ‘A Kid With a Bike’

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have won the top prize in Cannes twice — for “Rosetta” (1999) and “L’Enfant” (2005) — making them some of the most celebrated directors working today. Yet you’d be hard pressed to see their movies in this country; they tend to play for a week in New York and Los Angeles before disappearing. And that’s a shame. Their movies, usually set in the seedy underbelly of French-speaking Belgium, show an enviable economy — not a single shot is wasted — while being shot in a manner that makes you forget the movie is scripted. Like the semidocumentary feel of Daren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler”? — that was cribbed from the Dardenne brothers. Their latest movie, “A Kid With a Bike,” is a gem of a film will be, hopefully, seen by more people in the States.

‘The Deep Blue Sea’ director Terence Davies talks about working with Rachel Weisz and getting right the texture of a time

The title of Terence Davies’ latest film, “The Deep Blue Sea,” is derived from the old saying about being stuck between two ugly choices. The movie, which was adapted from the play by Terence Rattigan, focuses on Hester (Rachel Weisz), an upper-class woman in postwar London who forsakes her comfortable, cultured marriage with Sir William (Simon Russell Beale), a high-court judge, to live in sin in a rundown bedsit with R.A.F. pilot Freddie (Tom Hiddleston). While Freddie might be an unparalleled lover, his immaturity and emotional scars from the war make him a lousy, feckless partner. The situation becomes so unbearable that, in the beginning of the film, Hester tries to commit suicide. “Beware of passion, Hester,” Sir William’s snooty mother warns at one point in the movie. “It always leads to something ugly.” To which Hester quips, “What would you replace it with?” That pretty much sums up the dilemma at the heart of this drama.

Indie Roundup: ‘Sound of Noise’

Early on in Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjarne Nilsson’s debut feature, “Sound of Noise,” we see Sanna (Sanna Persson) blazing down the freeway in a beat-up van, her eyes furtively glancing at the rearview mirror like a crook speeding away from a crime. Accompanying the scene is a propulsive drum track, exactly the sort of score you’d expect in a caper drama. Then the camera pans over to reveal a guy bashing away at a drum set in the back of the van. It’s a great visual gag, and it sets up much of the subversive humor that follows. The duo’s aim, it turns out, is not precisely criminal but definitely perverse; they are creating music using the van’s gear shifts and its swerves over rumble stripes. And when a traffic cop tries to pull them over, the drummer Magnus (Magnus Borjeson), enraged that the police siren ruined his piece, chucks his drum set at the cop.