Movie poster of the week

If I were in Cannes this week (if only!) the film I would be most excited to see would be Three Monkeys, the fifth film by the great Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The reviews so far have been decidedly mixed, ranging from “the first major film of the festival” to “largely commonplace, drear, and claustrophobic” (thanks Mr. Kenny) but that’s par for the course for Ceylan who has often been a great divider. Still, his aesthetic is right up my alley, (Climates was my favorite film of 06) and I’m glad to see that he hasn’t lost his penchant for roiling skies and despondent souls looking out to sea. I can’t wait.

Movie poster of the week

The early films of Wim Wenders have been notoriously hard to see in recent years, either on screen or DVD, most especially his superb road movie trilogy of Alice in the Cities (1973), Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976), all starring that hangdog icon Rüdiger Vogler. So I was happy to discover that Alice in the Cities was re-released in the UK earlier this year (with this campaign [enlarge] from AllCity, the design team behind Reprise). Here’s hoping it will find it’s way to the US soon. Meanwhile, thirty-five years after Alice, Wenders is in competition in Cannes next week with The Palermo Shooting, a film starring Milla Jovovich and Dennis Hopper, with Patti Smith and Lou Reed as “themselves.” A return to form? Doesn’t sound promising, but one can only dream.