TITANE is a blast. From the opening scene it just says: here’s what I think of your sentimentality. Euro-cinema doing what it has always done best: being high fashion, provocative, and wildly innovative — The Neon Demon, Irreversible, Enter the Void. A genre mash-up, kind of a Rosemary’s Baby (defiant homage to Polanski?) involving (uh) intimacy with a car. The script might have used a little work, but you’re continually intrigued: stunningly beautiful, ludicrously violent, unpredictable set-pieces – choreographed almost like a musical. Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.

Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.

I did not realize until seeing DUNKIRK that WWII was fought entirely by male models from the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. Nor that its commanders (like Kenneth Branagh) mostly stood around posing with binoculars, mouthing pieties through clenched jaws. Nor that this event, which in real life was about the boredom of 300,000 soldiers waiting nine days for evacuation, was instead a nonstop series of cliffhangers each a variation on the just-in-time-reprieve-from-a-rising-water-level-in-a-confined-space cliché. And that none of these squeakers contained even one ounce of drama (except stiff-upper-lip platitudes from Mark Rylance’s English everyman, and Churchill’s oddly out-of-place “we will fight them on the beaches” voice-over at the end).

Much of this film, with its mosquito-bomber action, resembles Wings minus that film’s human component. No doubt a milestone of digital spectacle (even though shot, for no reason, in 70mm), it is nevertheless a bore in less than two hours. The most unforgivable feature is a truly obnoxious wall-to-wall “sound-design” score by Hans Zimmer, basically one long factory drone gradually rising in pitch as the film wears on, making even this film’s few lines unintelligible. This recent innovation in film-music (now also de rigeur for straight dramas on cable TV) is meant to add a minimalist veneer of modern “irony,” so pervasive today that it will soon render these films as dated as Philip Glass muzak.

Good luck with that 96 Metacritic score. I’ll bet this “important” film is forgotten by Oscar time.

A film ahead of its time: I took another look at CECIL B. DEMENTED last night, a misunderstood film when it was released, still tragically neglected today. John Waters saw where movies were heading, and this futile rebellion is oddly heartbreaking in its portrayal of a gang of “cinema terrorists” who kidnap a movie star and force her to headline their radical agitprop manifesto. As they burn down a theater playing “Patch Adams (‘The Directors Cut’)” and disrupt a studio-shoot for “Forrest Gump, Part II,” their rallying cry (“Destroy Mainstream Cinema!”) could not be more resonant this summer. In its underground anger there has never been a more passionate cri de coeur of the cineaste (only Truffaut’s Day for Night compares). As we see everywhere the very real death of cinema, this film lifts the spirits.

TITANE is a blast. From the opening scene it just says: here’s what I think of your sentimentality. Euro-cinema doing what it has always done best: being high fashion, provocative, and wildly innovative — The Neon Demon, Irreversible, Enter the Void. A genre mash-up, kind of a Rosemary’s Baby (defiant homage to Polanski?) involving (uh) intimacy with a car. The script might have used a little work, but you’re continually intrigued: stunningly beautiful, ludicrously violent, unpredictable set-pieces – choreographed almost like a musical. Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.

Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.

TITANE is a blast. From the opening scene it just says: here’s what I think of your sentimentality. Euro-cinema doing what it has always done best: being high fashion, provocative, and wildly innovative — The Neon Demon, Irreversible, Enter the Void. A genre mash-up, kind of a Rosemary’s Baby (defiant homage to Polanski?) involving (uh) intimacy with a car. The script might have used a little work, but you’re continually intrigued: stunningly beautiful, ludicrously violent, unpredictable set-pieces – choreographed almost like a musical. Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.

Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.

 TITANE is a blast. From the opening scene it just says: here’s what I think of your sentimentality. Euro-cinema doing what it has always done best: being high fashion, provocative, and wildly innovative — The Neon Demon, Irreversible, Enter the Void. A genre mash-up, kind of a Rosemary’s Baby (defiant homage to Polanski?) involving (uh) intimacy with a car. The script might have used a little work, but you’re continually intrigued: stunningly beautiful, ludicrously violent, unpredictable set-pieces – choreographed almost like a musical. Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.

Awarded this year’s top prize in Cannes, it puts a dagger in the sand between two filmmaking worlds: could anyone even imagine this getting financed in the U.S., or by some corporate streamer? In this correct and mediocre age, apparently there is still a Europe.

SALTBURN is my film of the year. We’re talking cinema, baby – attitude, style, irreverence, confidence, rebellion. It’s out there. I didn’t care for Emerald Fennel’s previous effort, Promising Young Woman – but this one makes up for it. The most accomplished new European voice since Ruben Östlund.

I really hate to harp upon our wonderful critics, but they gave it only a 62 Metacritic score. Most of them saw it at Telluride, where it screened AFTER the rhapsodically received All of Us Strangers (91 score), and they seem to have expected the same boring, method-acting, “nuanced,” “character-driven” piece of politically correct gay banality (more in another post). Instead, they got an expressionist opera: Brideshead Revisited meets Idol/Euphoria and Tom Ripley (with a big dollop of Barry Lyndon). Giving away the plot would rob you of the constant unexpected twists, including the truly inspired last shot. And unlike Searchlight’s Strangers (whose theatrical potential is low to non-existent), this one at least has the feel of a possible commercial arthouse hit (to the extent that such creatures are not extinct). Here’s hoping.