New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

New York Film Festival 2024

Opening Night Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross 2024)
Centerpiece The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar 2024)
Closing Night Blitz (Steve McQueen 2024)
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia 2024)
Anora (Sean Baker 2024)
April (Dea Kulumbegashvili 2024)
The Brutalist (Brady Corbet 2024)
By the Stream (Hong Sangsoo 2024)
Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke 2024)
Dahomey (Mati Diop 2024)
The Damned (Roberto Minervini 2024)
Eephus (Carson Lund 2024)
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes 2024)
Happyend (Neo Sora 2024)
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh 2024)
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari 2024)
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie 2024)
My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev 2024)
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor 2024)
Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader 2024)
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni 2024)
Pepe (Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias 2024)
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof 2024)
The Shrouds(David Cronenberg 2024)
Stranger Eyes (Yeo Siew Hua 2023)
Suburban Fury (Robinson Devor 2024)
Transamazonia (Pia Marais 2019)
A Traveler’s Needs(Hong Sangsoo 2024)
​​Việt and Nam (Trương Minh Quýf 2024)
Who by Fire/Comme le feu (Philippe Lesage 2024)
Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing 2024)
Youth (Homecoming)( Wang Bing 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

BIANCA DELBRAVO, DILVIN ASAAD AND SAFIRA MOSSBERG IN PARADISE IS BURNING

Warm reception at Telluride (Playlist, Gregory Elwood)

RAMELL ROSS: NICKEL BOYS (2024)

A radical reshuffling for POV emphasis

Award winning documentary filmmaker Ramell Ross has chosen to make his feature debut, an A24 film, a stylistically bold film, that radically rearranges Colman Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys on which it is based, using an evocative, poetic method reminiscent of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. The story is about an intelligent, motivated, college-age black boy inspired by Rev. King living in the Jim Crow South in 1962 who, hitching a ride unknowingly in a stolen car that gets apprehended by cops, gets sent to a brutal reformatory where many have been beaten and died and been buried on the property, disappeared. The reformatory has white and black boys, segretated and given different treatment.

This place immediately brought to mind Sugarcane, the recent documentary revealing Catholic-run Native residential schools across Canada where native people where brutalized and eliminated also (in the US too). The high profile choice of this film reminds one of two other NYFF films. Two years ago Elegance Bratton's autobiographical The Inspection, of being queer and rejected by his mother and joining the U.S. Marines: it was featured as the Closing Night Film as Nickel Boys is the Opening Night one.

Given the radical-POV-shot nature of most of Nickel Boys leads one to wonder if Ross, whose 2018 doc Hale County This Morning, This Evening was admired in New Directors/New Films, may have attended the 2015 NYFF and saw Lazlo Nemes' ,Son of Saul (presented as a NYFF Special Event), where a brief period at Auschwitz is depicted entirely through the eyes of a prisoner. Is the Nickel Academy and Auschwitz too extreme an equivalency? Maybe; but in both cases the films are shot in a way to make the terrifying experience of brutal incarceration more visceral through shooting from the POV of a prisoner. Perhaps the NYFF jury was drawn to these three films for similar reasons.

The contrast with Whitehead's book is stark, because it is strighbforward and linear, so deliberately understated it reads a bit like a Young Adult novel, until thihgs go brutally wrong. Peter Debruge in his Telluride Variety review poses the obvious question; do Ross' radical devices, as he puts it "turning a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a minimalist tone poem," not perhaps achieve identificiton at the loss of a plot you can follow - unless you've read the book before hand?

But Ross' super-empathic POV method avoids over-familiarity, because as Debruge points out citing films as diverse as Boy A, Zero for Conduct, Scum and Sleepers, brutality in boys' reformatories has been done so often for the screen it would seem clichéd to transfer Whithead's book literally to the screen, even though in novel form, the details are impactful. In the film, Ross gets around the problem of the invisibility of his main POV protagonist Elwood (Ethan Herisse) when at the Nickel Academy he befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), and we get Turner's POV too. But whether seeing actor Herisse's face conveys much additional emotional depth is uncertain, and the boy's idealism, made clear in the book's narrative, is lost also. In addition the film, as Debruge puts it, gets "lost in digressions," including flash-forwards, arthival footage of NASA missions, and later forensic excavations at Nickel Academy that revealed the many unmarked graves.

Nicke Boys, based on Colson Whithead's The Nickel Boys, 140 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, showing also at the NYFF late Sept. and Loondon BFI mid-Oct. Reviewed here as part of the NYFF. US release Oct. 25, UK Nov. 8. Metacritic rating 86%.

[Chris Knipp]

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Persian: دانه*ی انجیر معابد, romanized: Dane ye Anjir e Maabed; French: Les Graines du figuier sauvage; German: Die Saat des heiligen Feigenbaums)


MOHAMMED RASOULOF: THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (2024)

The undoing of an Iranian family

A target of Iran’s hardline conservative government for his films’ criticism of the state, director Mohammad Rasoulof fled his home country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence. The result, the searing drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig, won a Special Prize from the jury and three other awards on its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is every bit as urgent and gripping as its real-life backstory would portend: longtime government worker Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just received a major promotion to the role of judge’s investigator, to the hopeful delight of his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani); at the same moment, a series of student protests against the government have exploded in the streets, stoking the sympathies of their independent-minded daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). The growing wedge between progressive children and traditional parents intensifies through a series of unsettling events that put Iman’s future in jeopardy. Both paranoia thriller and domestic drama, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is above all an epic of anti-patriarchal political conviction. A NEON release. (Cannes)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig, 168 mins., debuted May 24, 2024 at Cannes (Special Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Award), showing at numerous other international festivals including Sydney, Locarno, Melbourne, Telluride, Torontok and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating (15 reviews): 84%.

[Chris Knipp]

ADRIEN BRODY INTHE BRUTALIST

BRADY CORBET: THE BRUTALIST (2024)

Epic postwar architectural drama with memorable performances

Reviewing Brady Crobet's second film, Vox Lux (his first was THe Childhood of a Leader), I wrote: "He's already scheduled to shoot a third film, tentatively titled The Brutalist. It is to be the thirty-year saga of a great Hungarian-born Jewish architect struggling for recognition in America. Sounds like Louis Kahn, and his could be a very good story, though his son Nathanial's memorable documentary homage My Architect will be a hard act to follow.


Numerous critics say of Thr Brutalist "They don't make 'em like this anymore." But one could see that with Childhood of a Leader Corbet was already thinking on a grand scale.

From the festival blurb:
In this epic panorama from American director Brady Corbet (whose precocious,ambitious, but incompletely rewarding directorial debut Childhood of a Leader was reviewed here in 2015), an accomplished Hungarian Jewish architect and World War II survivor named László Toth (Adrien Brody) reconstructs his life in America, reconnecting with family in Pennsylvania. While awaiting news of his wife’s relocation from Budapest, fate leads the Bauhaus-instructed genius into the orbit of the volatile Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, in an impressive performance), an obscenely wealthy captain of industry, who leads him to both professional success and personal chaos. Co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, this richly detailed recreation of postwar America is alternately hopeful and nightmarish in its portrayal of immigrant living, accruing in meaning and power as it builds to its overwhelming final passages. Interweaving a provocative tapestry of ideas around privilege, money, religious identity, architectural aesthetics, and the persistence of historical trauma, The Brutalist is an absorbing, brilliantly acted American epic that reminds us the past is always present. Also starring Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Isaach De Bankolé, Stacy Martin, and Alessandro Nivola.

The Brutalist, 3 hrs., 35 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2024, and was snapped up by A24 for distribution. Also shown at Toronto and the NYFF, where it was screneed for this review. Metacritic rating: 89% (18 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

MIGUEL GOMEZ: GRAND TOUR (2024)

A 'dreamy Asian travelogue' is poetic cinema and exoticism

In this fanciful and high-spirited cinematic expedition, the uncommonly ambitious Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (Tabu, NYFF50; Arabian Nights, NYFF53) takes a journey across East Asia, skipping through time and countries with delirious abandon to tell the tale of an unsettled couple from colonial England and the world as it both expands and closes in around them. It’s 1918, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) has escaped the clutches of beckoning marriage, leaving his bemused fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), in indefatigable pursuit. Edward gives chase from Mandalay to Bangkok to Shanghai and beyond, while Gomes responds with a splendid and enthralling series of scenes that use a magic form of cinema to situate us in these places both then and now, keeping us at a knowingly exotic traveler’s distance while also immersing us in rhythm, texture, and emotional reality. Whether black-and-white or color, zigzagging or meditative in tone, scripted or captured as documentary, Grand Tour is splendid, moving, and human-scaled. A MUBI release. (Cannes: Best Director Award)

"But for anyone feeling a pessimism creeping in like slow poison and taking the edge off any appetite for adventure, Portuguese singularity Miguel Gomes comes like a comet across the Cannes competition with “Grand Tour,” an enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with the antidote: a potent dose of wanderlust for life." - Jessica Kiang,Variety.

Grand Tour, 128 mins., debuted at Cannes, showing also at Sydney, Karlovy Vary, New Zealand, Toronto, Vancouver, and other international festivals, including the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 76%.

[Chris Knipp]

GEORGIAN DIRECTOR DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI'S APRIL

DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI: APRIL (2024)

Struggles of a beleaguered OB-GYN

Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili follows her striking debut feature Beginning (NYFF58), which told the story of a wife and mother persecuted for her religious beliefs in a provincial village, with this tenebrous, provocative drama about the precarious social position of a woman living in an isolated community. When a newborn baby dies after an otherwise routine delivery, obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) falls under suspicion for negligence, her standing in the small town further jeopardized by people’s knowledge that she also provides illegal abortion services to local women. Shot by Arseni Khachaturan (Bones and All), balancing long-take realism and nightmarish expressionism, April is a complex and disquieting depiction of a caregiver in crisis, rich with haunting, metaphorical imagery that feels emanated from its maker’s subconscious. (Venice)

April, 134 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 5, 2024, showing also at Toronto, Donostia-San Sebastian, Hamburg, and at the NYFf, where it was screened forthis review. Metacritic rating: 89% (based on 7 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

BASEL ADRA, HAMDAN BALLAL, YUVAL ABRAHAM, RACHEL SZOR: NO OTHER LAND (2024)

Nowhere to go

Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor 2024 Palestine/Norway 95 minutes Arabic, English, and Hebrew with English subtitles
Q&A with Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor in person on Sept. 29 & Oct. 1

A vérité-style documentary made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, providing an account of the systematic onslaught of destruction experienced by Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military.

No Other Land, 92 mins.,

[Chris Knipp]

KIERAN CULKIN, JESSE EISENBERG IN A REAL PAIN

JESSE EISENBERG: A REAL PAIN (2024)

Two Jewish cousins revisit their famly origins in Poland

Festival blurb;
Born weeks apart, cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) were as close as brothers growing up, yet have drifted apart due to the responsibilities and disappointments of adult life. After the death of their beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, David accompanies Benji on a trip to Poland, as a pilgrimage to both her hometown and to sites haunted by the genocide of World War II. Initially following a tour group (featuring elegantly scripted characters played with effortless nuance by such actors as Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, and Will Sharpe), the tightly wound David and the manic-neurotic Benji confront their own raw resentments and personal demons, which are further laid bare by the backdrop of an insuperable history. Anchored by spirited performances by its dynamic stars, writer-director Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is a work of compassion and maturity that alternates nimbly between anxious comedy and meditative drama. A Searchlight Pictures release. (Sundance)

A Real Pain, 90 mins., debuted at Sundance; shown also at Aspen, Zurich, BFI London, and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review for an Oct. 5, 2024 showing. Release in ten countries scheduled for early 2025; in the US, Nov. 1, 2024. Metacritic rating: 84% (based on 19 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

PAYAL KAPADIA: ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (2024)

A dreamlike Indian film that was a first at Cannes

In Competition-Grand Prix at Cannes.) India's first Cannes Competition film in 30 years, says S.M Kaufman in INDIEWIRE, 'is a sensual triumph." "Dreamlike and gentle," says Bradshaw in the GUARDIAN, finally giving a film here 5/5 stars. The film is the story of three Mumbai hospital employees in monsoon season, two nurses and a cook, all originally from small towns, two of whom are roommates, the younger one causing scandal by having in ill-concealed Muslim boyfriend, a rejection of arranged marriage. The eldest of the women is threatened with eviction due to an oversight of her late husband. Jessica Kiang in VARIETY says with just two features (this is the second, the first fiction) Kapadia "has established her rare talent for finding passages of exquisite poetry within the banal blank verse of everyday Indian life." The eldest decides to quit the hospital and go back to her home village and the other two women accompany her. DP Ranabir Das gives all sorts of light, Kiang says, a "gorgeous glamor." The portrait of the city is "unusually rich," so it's "almost a wrench" when the second half moves to the country but the new setting focuses more on the women's developed "bonds of mutual support" that burn brighter. And the Muslim boyfriend has secretly followed. Kapadia won the documentary award at Cannes in 2021 for her film in Directoers' Fortnight, A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING. Fionnuala Halligan of SCREEN DAILY, who also uses the word "gentle" as well as for the latter part "mystical," says there's "a strong romantic streak" in the depiction of Mumbai that "calls to mind Wong Kar-wai's great love affair with the city of Hong Kong." Bradshaw notes up front a "languorous eroticism" and "something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments." 114 mins. ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT jumped to the top of the Cannes SCREEN DAILY jury grid with a 3.3 rating, on a par with Sean Baker's ANORA. - From my vicarious remote Cannes coverage.

All We Imagine As LIght, 110 mins., debuted at Cannes May 23, 2024, showing afterward at many, many international festivals including the NYFF where it was screened for this review (For an oct. 7, 2024 showing). Metacritic rating: 93% (based on 12 critic reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

SEAN BAKER: ANORA (2024)

The most fun at Cannes comes to New York

VIDEO CLIP

In Competition at Cannes it won the top award, the Palme d'Or. Remember Baker scored high with his iPhone-shot TANGERINE about two "working girls" in 2015. ANORA could be seen as a much more realistic version of PRETTY WOMAN, spinning out a "whirlwind sex-work romance," says Peter Debruge in his VARIETY review, that "sparkles like the tinsel in its leading lady's hair." She's a New York stripper and he's the "reckless son of a Russian oligarch." The film that has a Safdie brothers flavor Debruge calls "compulsively entertaining, 80-proof emotional ride." Anora or "Ani" (MIkey Madison) is part Russian and speaks a bit of the language learned from her grandma, and shares a small house in Brighton Beach with her sister. It's at the Manhattan strip club, HQ, where she's an escort and lap dancer that she gets sent to the table of young big spender Ivan, aka Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), and Ivan and Ani, close in age, click at once. The next day he brings her to his nearby mansion; she negotiates for $15K up front when he wants her to stay. 138 minutes "race by" (though a few could be lost) in a "full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal," Peter Bradshaw says in his 4/5 star GUARDIAN review, A "a non-love story which finds its apex in a Las Vegas wedding chapel in the middle of the night, "slaloms downwards into the most extraordinary, cacophonous uproar of recrimination unfolding in what is more or less real time." David Rooney in HOLLYWOOD REPORTER says "Sex workers have been a big part of Baker's gallery of outsiders," and this makes ANORA "a fine addition to his terrific body of work." Ani has "a sweetness that humanizes even the most transactional situations" as well as "a defensiveness that makes her dangerous when threatened" - i.e., like when Ivan's dad sends goons to break up this mismatch, Ivan bolts, and Ani does a stand-off. Vegas is for the wedding, but they spend a lot of time at Brighten Beach-adjacent locales with Vanya and his "retinue of Russian-speaking locals," in Coney Island, "a pool hall, a video game arcade, Tatiana Grill on the boardwalk," etc. shot in 35mm with anamorphic lenses thus a messy but "satisfying watch." The leads are "terrific" (Madison) and "watchable" (Eydelshteyn) and " Baker’s film-making is muscular and fluent" (Bradshaw). In an enthusiastic Oscar Expert YouTube review Brother Bro (Mason Jaeger) calls ANORA, which he gives 9 out of 10 "the best film I've seen at Cannes" and predicts it will go on to collect many laurels in the US awards season with multiple Oscar noms including Best Actor and Best. Actress for the leads. WINNER OF THE PALME D'OR. A Neon release.

[Chris Knipp]

IMAGE FROM MINERVINI'S THE DAMNED

ROBERTO MINERVINI: THE DAMNED (2024)

The documentarian tries his hand at an atmmospheric Civil war drama

The Italian has lived in the US for two decades chhronicling marginal people. I've reviewed STOP THE POUNDING HEART (2013) and WHAT YOU GONNA DO WHEN THE WORLD'S ON FIRE? (2020) His Cannes release this year continues that process in his first period piece, set in the Civil WAr period when the U.S. Army sends a volunteer company to patrol the uncharted Western territories. See Peter Debruge's Variety review: he makes the film sound thin in story to put it mildly, but an "atmospheric and unscripted" depiction of young men in the war, mostly not in combat, and a "welcome extension" of the filmmaker's documentary work. It debuted in the 2024 Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in which it won the Best Director award.

[Chris Knipp]

MATI DIOP: DAHOMEY (2024)

David Rooney's Hollywood Reporter Berlinale review
(Feb. 18, 2024):

With her mesmerizing 2019 debut feature, the lyrical Senegalese ghost story Atlantics, as well as the nonfiction project that preceded it, A Thousand Suns, Mati Diop jumped to the forefront of diasporic Black European directors reclaiming their ancestral African roots. The director’s own path as a cultural revenant continues to be inextricably woven through her work, alongside a contemplative consideration of repatriation and reparations, in her multifaceted medium-length docu-fictional essay Dahomey.

The film is both a response to Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s 1953 inquiry into African art and colonialism, Statues Also Die, and an ongoing debate on the significance of returned artifacts and the responsibility of new generations to continue the vital work of conservation and cultural reclamation.

[Chris Knipp]

PIA MARAIS: TRANSAMAZONIA (2024)

Guy Lodge (Variety, at Locarno: "'News of the World' star Helena Zengel anchors the first film in over a decade from South African director Pia Marais, which is humidly atmospheric but narratively hard to pin down."

Premiering in Locarno’s main competition, with a New York Film Festival slot to come, this is a formally muscular and typically searching fourth feature from South African-born writer-director Marais: Her last film — 2013’s simmering character study “Layla Fourie” — may have been set in her homeland, but her career has otherwise been built on a thoroughly international perspective. Postcolonial questions of belonging and displacement play heavily into “Transamazonia,” which is at pains to avoid overly exoticizing the little-portrayed region of Brazil in which it unfolds, securing the collaboration of the Assurini people of the country’s Trocará Indigenous Territory. (They are collectively credited as associate producers.) Still, there’s an opacity to this ambitious, conscientious film’s characterization on all fronts that hinders our emotional involvement, even as it holds our interest.

[Chris Knipp]

TRUONG MINH QUȲ: VIET AND NAM (2024)

Vietnamese gay miners in love make for a "drowsily distinctive" film

So Says Jessica Kiang in herVariety review from Cannes Un Certain Regard. This sensuous but very slow depiction of two coal miners Kiang things the filmmaker may not want us to watch (though "the body-contouring properties of coal dust on sweat-slicked skin [rarely] been more sensuously explored)") so much as to "doze and dream our way in and out of it." The film may have its beauties, but seems well suited for intimate home viewing.

Festival blurb:
Two young men emerge from the stygian darkness of a cave. They are in the bowels of the earth working as coal miners, but Việt and Nam are also lovers, enjoying moments of physical embrace kept secret from the rest of the world, before one of them embarks on a dangerous emigration to another country. From this personal drama, captured with sensual detail and mesmeric eroticism, Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý digs even deeper to excavate the memories and legacies of a nation. Set at the turn of the 21st century, Trương’s film resounds with echoes of the country’s war decades earlier, as Nam’s mother takes them on a pilgrimage to try and discover where his father was killed as a soldier. Shot in a hypnotic style on 16mm film—and banned in its home country—Việt and Nam is a remarkable work of quiet expressivity about two men with unsettled pasts and indeterminate futures. A Strand Releasing release.

[Chris Knipp]

SELENA GOMEZ IN EMILIA PÉREZ

JACQUES AUDIARD: EMILIA PÉREZ (2024)

A trans musical in Spanish from Audard, and a big hit at Cannes

From Hollywood Reporter:

Jacques Audiard returned to Cannes on Saturday night to introduce the world to Emilia Perez, which received a rapturous response from the audience, who gave it a nine-minute standing ovation. After Audiard took the mic to speak in French, the standing ovation resumed for another minute or so.

The 10th film from the French auteur — his sixth film in the main competition — stars Zoe Saldaña as a frustrated lawyer, Selena Gomez as a drug lord’s wife, Édgar Ramírez as a dangerous love interest and Karla Sofía Gascón as the cartel kingpin who longs to escape a life of crime and become the woman he’s always dreamed of becoming. And surprise — it’s a musical.

A number of unfavorable or reserved reviews shows some are not so crazy about such an oddball creation, indicated by the Metacritic rating of 71%.. But the novelty, plus Selena Gomez and Édgar Ramirez make this a unique, and for some desirable bauble. The film won the Cannes Jury Prize, and the Best Actress award went jointly to the four ladies in the cast, Adriana Paz, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Zoe Saldaña.

David Rooney in HOLLYWOOD REPORTER sums up: "Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and the divine Karla Sofia Gascón light up Jacques Audiard’s fabulous queer crime musical in which a Mexican drug lord enlists the help of a lawyer to undergo gender-affirming surgery in the latest from the French director of THE BEAT MY HEART SKIPPED, A PROPHET, RUST AND BONE AND DHEEPAN. (For a few years he was my favorite French director. If that changed, it's because he's so open to change himself, genre change - which, in French, could mean sex change, so the theme of this nutty, raucous, semi-comic, half-sung, Spanish language film is a logical step.

See Peter Bradshaw's Cannes vlog where he tosses off a fluent summary of this semi-musical S.A. gangster-family film, where Bradshaw wonders if the periodic bursts into song of this film aren't maybe designed to mask how far-fetched it all is. He also shows he just got an award for promoting Arab film and is on their Cannes jury this year. Bradshaw is amazing - and seems ageless. Stephanie Bunbury, DEADLINE: "Jacques Audiard’s musical is crazy, but also a marvel." This got a nine-minute standing ovation. Bunbury sees it as "very much a winner," hinting at Palme d'Or possibilities. Debruge says in this VAIETY review that Karla Sofía Gascón "electrifies" in her lead role.) Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez also star.). Gomez wore a beautifully simple YSL gown and a $3.5 million Bulgari diamond necklace. Netflix has bought EMILIA PÉREZ for $12 million.