UPDATE: Here's the trailer in Quicktime quality.

Of all the films I'm looking forward to this fall, Blindness ranks fairly high up there. Canadian distributor Alliance has just made available a full trailer that proves to be fairly intriguing, as an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) and his seemingly immune wife (Julianne Moore) cope with an inexplicable epidemic of sight loss.

I'm a sucker for most anything vaguely apocalyptic, and while this very well could turn out to be akin to watching the first act of Children of Men through a milk-filled mask (which I've done, mind you), the prestige behind the project* says otherwise. We have acclaimed screenwriter Don McKellar adapting Nobel-Laureate José Saramago's novel, with Academy Award nominee Fernando Meirelles directing a cast that also includes Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga, and Sandra Oh.

I must say, going off that taste and last spring's teaser, I still like the look, sound, and feel of this one, especially Moore's little retort (you know the one), and that's not to mention that any trailer which employs John Murphy's underrated score from last year's Sunshine to set a rightfully ominous tone is always fine by me. We'll get to see (sorry) what trials and tribulations await the world on September 19th.

*Not to mention Rocchi's review of the film from its Cannes world premiere.

Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) has added an educational element to their Cannes booty. Previously they picked up Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's drama Lorna's Silence, Norwegian director Bent Hamer's comedy/drama O'Horten, and animated Israeli doc Waltz with Bashir. (Eric Kohn explained why the latter deal was an especially good match of film with distributor.)

Variety reports that SPC's latest deal is their acquisition of US distribution rights for Laurent Cantet's The Class, which won the most coveted prize at Cannes, the Palme d'Or. The film was inspired by Francois Begaudeau's book based on his experiences teaching class in a rough section of Paris. The French-language title, Entre les Murs literally means "between the walls" or "inside the walls," which may give a further hint as to its concerns. (Thanks to commenter Céline for the linguistic assist.)

Things weren't so peaceful in the movie buff land when word got out a few weeks ago that Werner Herzog plans to remake Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage in the lead role. Even noted trash auteur Abel Ferrara publicly complained about having his work redone. Bad Lieutenant isn't anybody's idea of a good time: Harvey Keitel puts on a freakishly raunchy performance. Still, it definitely sounds like Herzog's pumped about the gig. Defamer cornered the director in New York today for a few questions about the project, and the responses are kind of amazing. Herzog tends to do a great job of explaining himself, no matter what crazy scheme he has cooked up, but the best part of this interview arrives when the guy claims utter cluelessness about Ferrara's work. Way to stick it to the source material.

To hear Herzog tell it, his version of Bad Lieutenant isn't a remake, although he wouldn't know, since it sounds like hasn't actually seen the original. However, he says that Cage's character's name and the plot are entirely new. Herzog apparently liked the "very, very dark story," written by William M. Finkelstein, and he can't wait to work with Cage (given Herzog's notorious appreciation of Anna Nicole Smith, this last bit actually makes sense). Hearing about Ferrara's discontent, Herzog just eggs him on: "Let him fight the windmills, like Don Quixote." It's a feud made in heaven, almost too good to be true. You might just call it ecstatic truth.

Top: Early poster art for the new 'Bad Lieutenant,' snapped at the Cannes Film Festival last month.

What were the surprises at this year's Cannes Film Festival? Does the showcasing of films like Waltz with Bashir and Che at the world's premier film festival mean that traditional film making has been replaced by a new wave of technology and technique? Which factor had more to do with the lower-than-expected number of sales at this year's Cannes Festival -- weak films, or the weak dollar? Is there a subtle subtext to the past few years at Cannes, and what were the films that got away this year? Joining us this week to talk about all these topics and more is Glenn Kenny, the former film critic for Premiere who's now blogging independently at Some Came Running. Cinematical's podcast is now available through iTunes; you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:



As ever, you can download the entire podcast right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

Among the handful of titles Sony Pictures Classics snatched up for American distribution at the conclusion of the Cannes Film Festival, the animated Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir makes the most sense. While Tyson certainly has potential to alter the public perception of the country's infamous boxer, and Lorna's Silence has appeal for crime fans and art house aficionados alike, both movies could perform well regardless of which distributor picked them up (more or less). Bashir, on the other hand, has SPC written all over it: Relentlessly downbeat and frequently unsettling, Bashir is director Ari Folman's account of his 1982 experience in the Israeli military during the infamous massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The animated approach sometimes has a gimmicky feel to it, but that's probably the point; Folman's memories are so foggy that his reconstructions of them seem plausibly unrealistic.

Bashir isn't easy to get into, but you could say that about Thomas Pynchon, too. What we have here is an animated movie for grown-ups, which puts it squarely in SPC's line of expertise. The company has guided many mature animated films to audiences in a manner unparalleled by their colleagues. Last year, talented SPC co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard commandeered the releases of the outlandish anime Paprika and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and the latter film very nearly won an Oscar. Remember The Triplets of Belleville? That was them, too. These people know their stuff. Listen up, guys: I hear Bill Plympton's new movie is quite good.

I'm home from the Cannes Film Festival now, after nearly two weeks of great movies, interesting interviews, and lots of conversation with many very smart film folks over dinner, drinks at the La Petit Majestic, or lingering cups of cafe au lait at cutesy cafes. This was my first year at Cannes, and I think it's now my second favorite film festival (I don't think any fest will ever take first place over Telluride in my little film-geek heart).

Your first time at Cannes can be overwhelming; there's much to learn and assimilate, and you have to do it pretty quickly. I had to get by on my shockingly limited knowledge of the French language, since I took German in high school (hey, I hung with the punk crowd, and we weren't going to take French with all the preppies). Fortunately, I had James Rocchi there to guide me and act as my interpreter; he jokes about his French being poor, but I assure you, he does quite well.

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Can a love story for the geriatric set be as engaging as an affair romp about sexy young people? It certainly can, at least in Andreas Dresen's brave, remarkable Wolke 9 (Cloud Nine), a tale about an older woman who has an affair and falls in love with an even older man. The film opens as Inge (Ursula Werner), a seamstress, delivers a pair of pants to Karl (Hosrt Westphal). He tries on the pants, she makes an adjustment, and next thing you know, the two of them are rolling around on the floor in the throes of torrid passion.

Inge returns to her husband, Werner (Horst Rehberg), and tries to slip back into her day-to-day existence, but she can't get Karl out of her head, nor can he just forget about her. As the two continue their affair, Inge struggles with her feelings of betraying her husband of 30 years, but can't let go of the joy she finds in her relationship with the charming and affable Karl.

In James Gray's Two Lovers, Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) is torn between two women, each of whom is right for him, and wrong for him, in different ways. When we meet Leonard, he's jumping into the river in a suicide attempt; he changes his mind at the last minute, struggling to the surface and gasping for air.

It's a scene that tells us much of what we need to know about Leonard: This is a man torn between the desire to end the pain in his life, and the equally strong desire to fight against it. Leonard, we come to learn, was engaged to be married, but when he and his fiancee both tested positive for the gene that carries Tay-Sachs syndrome, her family called off the engagement and she disappeared. Leonard's mother, Ruth (Isabella Rossellini), hovers protectively over her only child, trying to help him move on, while at the same time clinging to him with a fierceness that may not be in his best interest.

Director Kelly Reichardt's much-anticipated follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2006 fest circuit hit, Old Joy, continues to show Reichardt's remarkable gift for classically simple, deeply engaging storytelling. Wendy and Lucy is the story of Wendy (Michelle Williams), a down-on-her-luck girl who's hoping to turn things around for herself with a summer job at a fishing cannery in Alaska.

Wendy's making the trek from Indiana to Alaska in her beat-up Honda, accompanied only by her dog, Lucy, and about $600 to make the entire trip. When her car breaks down in a small Oregon town, Wendy is forced to make a series of increasingly difficult choices, and to rely upon the kindness (or not) of strangers to resolve her plight.

At the Cannes Film Festival, you can enjoy more foreign cinema in a span of 72 hours than most people do all year. And watching that much foreign cinema in that short a time, you simultaneously recognize the seemingly contradictory ideas that while other nations and cultures have their own histories, concerns, traditions and values, it is also true that, as Depeche Mode remind us, people are people. Laurent Cantet's The Class, playing in competition this year, is a terrific example of that phenomenon in action.

Chronicling a year in the life of a junior high school class in a rougher section of Paris, there's something undeniably French about the film: the cultural challenges, the uneasy-yet-unescapable mix of cultures and races in the classroom, the plot's turn on a subtler point of formal French grammar. But at the same time, these kids and their teacher (Francois Begaudeau) are going through a series of challenges and opportunities that will be familiar to anyone who's ever gone to school: The tedium of work, the charged-yet-collegial relationship between student and teacher, the subdivisions in the halls.

Earlier today, Laurent Cantent's The Class became the first French film in 20 years to win the Palme d'Or, the top prize at the 2008 Festival de Cannes. Coincidentally, we have James' review of The Class scheduled to run in just a little while; in it, he says of the film: "The Class may very well wind up taking home a nod or two from the jury here in Cannes; rest assured, if that happens, it'll represent more than just sympathy votes for a local favorite."

The grand prize went to Gomorra, which James called "a sweeping, stirring drama that has the shoot-and-loot tension of the best crime cinema but also has the scope and serious intent of great drama." Special Prize went to Catherine Deneuve (A Christmas Tale) and Clint Eastwood (Changeling); the latter of which was a favorite heading into the awards (as was Waltz with Bashir, which, surprisingly, did not take home one of the top awards). Jury Prize went to Il Divo, while Nuri Bilge Ceylan took Best Director for Three Monkeys. Additionally, Benicio del Toro won Best Actor for his performance in Soderbergh's Che, Sandra Corveloni took Best Actress for Linha de passe, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won Best Screenplay for Lorna's Silence.

For reviews of most of these films, head on over to Cinematical's official Festival de Cannes hub. We'll be rounding out this year's coverage over the next few days.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film Three Monkeys, playing in competition at Cannes, uses the metaphor of the proverbial three monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) to explore ideas about errors of judgment that blow up into unexpected consequences. The film's opening shot is a man driving a lonely road at night. Half-asleep at the wheel, he runs over a pedestrian in the road. Shortly after, another car drives up, sees the body on the road, but drives on, pausing only to take the license number of the car that hit him.

The hit-and-run driver, as it turns out, is a politician in the midst of a re-election battle. He calls his driver, Eyup (Yavuz Bingol) and convinces him to take the fall for the accident, with the promise of a hefty payday after he finishes a nine-month stint in prison for his boss's crime.

During the roundtable interviews for Synecdoche, NY today, actor Tom Noonan, who plays one of the "wild things" in Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book, Where the Wild Things Are, chatted with us a bit about the film.

Noonan confirmed that the film was not shot using motion capture, but is "mostly live action -- they shot us (the actors) in a room, they video-taped us doing the parts, and then they trained acrobats and dancers and had them imitate our gestures, then put them in the costumes and had our voices coming out."

After a somnolent week in which it appeared that IFC Films was the only US distributor making deals at Cannes, Sony Pictures Classics sprang into action and snapped up two pictures, with a third possibly on the way. According to Anne Thompson of Variety, Sony Classics has acquired North American rights to the latest film by French filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Lorna's Silence, as well as Norwegian director Bent Hamer's comedy/drama O'Horten, and are also in talks to pick up James Toback's documentary Tyson.

Cinematical's James Rocchi felt "in tune" with Lorna's Silence, which he says has provoked polarized reactions in Cannes; he concluded: "It's a strong film from strong filmmakers." The titular character is an Albanian woman living in Belgium who has entered into a marriage of convenience that turns out to be a complicated, life and death affair.

Sergey Dvortsevoy's Tulpan won the Un Certain Regard category at the Cannes Film Festival tonight, with Tokyo Sonata taking the Jury Prize. Well, darn ... it figures that one of the few films we didn't manage to catch at the fest ended up winning the category.

The film is a Kahzakstanian tale of a young man who must marry before he can become a shepherd, but the only prospect he has is Tulpan, the daughter of another shepherding family, who doesn't like him because his ears are too big.