1st April
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
3rd April
The Drama
Fuze
10th April
Father Mother Sister Brother
Undertone
The Stranger
You, Me and Tuscany
Thrash (Netflix)
17th April
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
Miroirs No. 3
The Wizard of the Kremlin
Kiss of the Spider Woman
22nd April
Michael
24th April
Mother Mary
Rose of Nevada
Apex (Netflix)
I have 4 kids so have already seen Mario Galaxy. Think the reviews are being unnecessarily harsh. It does exactly what it needs to, the visuals are pretty amazing - so much going on in some shots and yeah, there are definitely cynical elements to the fact it even exists, but time and love has obviously gone into it. I mean it isn’t The Godfather but I’d take it over most of the shite Illumination puts out. Then again I’ve been playing the games since 1989 and got the hundreds of little references, so maybe I’m actually the target market. A respectable 6.5/10
Would actually be quite keen to know what Peter Bradshaw thinks would make a good Mario movie. What do you even do with it, beyond what they’ve done?
Don’t know. I love a good Mario game, even worked on one years ago. But I hated the first Mario movie. It was just a witless Ip cash grab. If they can make a good film out of Lego then Mario should be easy but the first film was so lazy.
Even folks who liked the first seem down on this.Soican only imagine how bad this one is.
Finally some news on Flesh of the Gods
That didn’t last long
This is probably for the best, all told:
Has anyone seen this? Apparently it came out last month, and looks right up my street
Main competition films at Cannes this year:
Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev
The Beloved, Rodrigo Sorogoyen
The Man I Love, Ira Sachs
Fatherland, Pawel Pawlikowski
Moulin, Lazlo Nemes
Histoires de la Nuit, Lea Mysius
Fjiord, Cristian Mungiu
Notre Salut, Emmanuel Marre
Gentle Monster, Marie Kreutzer
Hope, Na Hong-Jin
Nagi Notes, Kôji Fukada
Sheep in the Box, Hirokazu Kore-eda
Garance, Jeanne Herry
The Unknown, Arthur Harari
Sudden, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
The Dreamed Adventure, Valeska Grisebach
Coward, Lukas Dhont
La Bola Negra, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi
Parallel Stories, Asghar Farhadi
Bitter Christmas, Pedro Almodóvar
A Woman’s Life, Charline Bourgeois-Taquet
A lot of big hitters here. Also, only one American film and no British films (although Michael Fassbender is in ‘Hope’). They also might add some more films.
I’m obviously not going to Cannes, but I really want to see Fatherland because I’m all in on the Pawel Pawlikowski black and white second wind and this one has people in it who are fairly well-known outside Poland. Also looking forward to people being completely unable to pronounce his name for another year. Sandra Huller’s going to have a big year. She’s already won best acting at the Berlin festival, and she’s in one of the biggest box office hits of the year, and then there’s this, and that Tom Cruise Digger film. There are probably more examples, but it’s not often that one actor gives four amazing performances in one year.
Of course I have no idea who could win anything, but from the other directors’ track records, it’s safe to expect that some of these will be really good. The Jury head is Park Chan-wook but they haven’t announced the rest of the jury yet.
They are cowards for not putting Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in the main competition but at least they are showing it. My absolute long range long shot hope that Paul Buchanan from The Blue Nile gets an Oscar nomination for score or song lives on for now.
They said they were hoping to add the James Gray film to the competition lineup as well
Loved all of the films of his I’ve seen so far. Hoping this is another banger in the vein of Drive My Car
Think most great games are not going to make great films because they’re very different mediums. Obviously you can fix that with a great adaptation but then part of the point is to lean into people loving the original IP.
I have only seen the SMB from 2023 and while I agree that it did what it needed to it was still not that fun for adults compared to the first Sonic film. I think it just felt less coherent and part of that was the weird cutting in of the songs which felt like the director had no real idea how to make the film edit work with the song.
Cinema event of the year