Cannes 2009: ADRIFT, DRAG ME TO HELL, IN THE BEGINNING

At Firstshowing.net, Alex Billington on À Deriva / Adrift (above, with Laura Neiva), screened in the Un Certain Regard sidebar:
"I think I stumbled across a big Cannes sleeper hit. From the beaches of Brazil comes Adrift, known as À Deriva in Portuguese, the third film from Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia. I’m going to say right up front — following in the footsteps of City of God director Fernando Meirelles, Dhalia is the next great Brazilian filmmaker on the verge of breaking out. Adrift is his calling card, a gorgeous family drama about a beautiful young girl and her parents. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is definitely one of the better films I’ve seen here that offers [...]

Robert Mitchum Interviewed by Roger Ebert

Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter

Via Rogerebert.com:
"He [Robert Mitchum] was my favorite movie star, and my favorite interview. He would tell you anything. He fearlessly maligned his directors, co-stars, even actors he had never worked with. ([Steve] McQueen? ‘He doesn’t bring much to the party.’) He was once called ‘the embodiment of film noir,’ and that was about right.
"In ‘From the Archives’ this week, I’m reprinting four of the seven or eight interviews I did with Mitch. The first three take place between 1969 and 1971, during and after he made Ryan’s Daughter. The fourth is at a tribute some 20 years later. You get a sense of his irreverence, his refusal to take himself seriously, [...]

STRAW DOGS III

Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs

STRAW DOGS Review: Part II
At film’s end, when Amy takes a few moments before shooting the last assailant — who is attacking David — Prince sees this as evidence of their bad marriage. In actuality, that is clearly the character fighting through her trauma while trying to act. Likewise, he takes a hard line on Venner’s supposed rape of Amy, mouthing the usual banalities and misinterpretations even though, as stated above, what takes place is clearly not rape. Much of his ‘analysis’ is of the sort where an egghead reads some deep significance into an eye gouge in a Three Stooges comedy short.
Disc Two is better. It has all the supplements, [...]