This is what we have all come to Cannes for: for something different, experimental, a tilting at windmills, a great big pole-vault over the barrier of normality by someone who feels that the possibilities of cinema have not been exhausted by conventional realist drama.
Sunshine takes its intelligent and honourable place in the history of grownup science fiction on the screen and on the page: a genre that seeks to break free of parochialism and think about where and why and what we are without the language of religion... I loved Sunshine for its radical proposal that humans can and will do something about a catastrophe, and that our weapons could be used up in the service of preservation.
There are some films that arrive here from the international festival circuit almost incandescent with self-importance. They hover into the cinema in a kind of floating trance at how challenging and moving they are. They are films with a profound reluctance to get over themselves. They look up at the sceptical observer with the saucer-eyed saintliness of a baby seal in culling season, or a charity mugger smilingly wishing a nice day on the retreating back of a passer-by. One such is Babel.
Thirteen years after Basic Instinct, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) is now in London, and is going out with a footballer played by Stan Collymore, of all people. On the rebound from John Motson, perhaps. It is difficult to convey just how uproariously awful this movie is, all of the time.
What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story. [...] This is early days in the festival, but Rust and Bone has to be a real contender for prizes, and, the odds will be shortening to vanishing point for Cotillard getting the best actress award.
Jonathan Coe's genial, likeable novel can only be described as a kind of lit-prog-rock concept album... Coe recreates the period with such loving accuracy that I frankly suspect him of having planted a secret microphone in the tin Oxford Mathematical Instruments box I carried around in my school days... As always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read.
