Returning to Italy after ‘This Must Be The Place’, Sorrentino creates his own ‘Dolce Vita’, in a movie that celebrates the beauty of simplicity.

Jep is a stylish and phlegmatic 65 year-old man, charming and still loveable, a successful author of just one book, a well-known journalist and socialite. He lives in Rome, and when we say ‘lives’ we mean ‘to the fullest’. He likes to walk around his hometown with its great history, bathed in the summer sun. He comes and goes as he pleases. Sometimes he enters the wonderful houses of art buyers and opinion makers. Other times he passes his time at an old friend’s strip joint. He goes to parties that last until dawn and is the perfect host when entertaining friends at his own house, which is situated right next to the Colosseum. He’s a bon viveur, a friend of the arts and of those that create, sell or write about them.However, he’s also a man in the twilight of his life, who feels the constraint and pressure of time, and the need to assess his life’s experiences.

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With a photogenic couple as protagonists and a fertile environment as a backdrop, French director Rebecca Zlotowski presents a fatal attraction, which doesn’t deserve festival glory.

In her third full length feature ‘Grand Central’, which is participating in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ selection, the protagonist isn’t ‘man’, but the threat of his extinction. A massive nuclear power plant with two smoke stacks that tower over the summer landscape casting long shadows. Gary, a flippant adventurer with no legal papers, ready to do anything to make ends meet, finds work there. But from the start he comes face to face with two threats. On the hand, there’s his dangerous work, the factory itself and the radiation, the daily ‘fix’ as his co-workers call it, which is monitored on a daily basis so thoroughly, you know that sooner or later something will go wrong. On the other hand, there’s his beautiful neighbor and co-worker, an angelic temptress, ready to marry Tony, but also ready to experience a passionate love affair with Gary.

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Ari Folman’s (‘Waltz with Bashir’) new film opened the Directors’ Fortnight section in Cannes, putting the audience on a great little trip, creating animated question marks over everyone’s head and winning an enthusiastic standing ovation which lasted ten minutes!

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With a well-written screenplay, exceptional performances by its cast, and their customary idiosyncratic dark humor, the Coen brothers depict the penniless bohemian lives of New York’s Greenwich Village folk singers in the late 50’s, in a bittersweet comedy, which is both tender and personal, just like a folk song.

It’s the late 50’s in the Village.. Llewyn Davis is one of many folk singers trying to make his way, performing in cafes on side-streets off Washington Square. Every Sunday, guitar in tow, he goes down to cafes, and stubbornly performs his songs, inspired by the Mississippi delta and the Appalachian mountains. Post-war America is still making sense of recent history, and there’s room for introspection. The common people prefer to shake their hips to care-free rock n’ roll, or easy-to-digest pop songs. Folk’s new wave hasn’t happened yet. Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary haven’t appeared on the scene. Bob Zimmerman has yet to sit on a stool in a cafe with a guitar in hand, to take this devout, acoustic music revolution into the mainstream.

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