bloated

When so much current movie-making is risk-averse, sanitised, cinema by consensus, you have to admire a film that takes such an ambitious and unfettered approach to storytelling. You don’t, however, have to like it. I’ve watched Alejandro Iñárritu’s latest – the wildly uneven, Fellini-esque Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths – twice. That’s a little shy of six hours of my life (Iñárritu cut about 20 minutes from the film after its premiere). It’s audacious, bold film-making, a highly personal work that is…

The worker was chatting with the customer while working on the mobile. Suddenly, a blast occurred when the phone undergoes a checkup. The very next moment, flames start to come out from the device. The shopkeeper, to save himself, drops the phone on the counter and then throws the mobile out of the shop using his bare hands.Which phone was it that exploded in the hands of the shopkeeper or which brand, for that matter, is still unknown at the moment.For those who delay replacing bloated battery of cellphone, this is an…

There’s an obvious lack of creative necessity to Hollywood’s overwhelming churn of prequels, sequels, remakes, reboots and revisions, more so by the minute, as studio-owned streaming services plunder back catalogues for more ways they can exploit known properties. Upcoming TV shows based on Fatal Attraction, Alien, Grease, Mr and Mrs Smith, The Lord of the Rings and Reality Bites and films based on The Killer, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Crow, White Men Can’t Jump, Road House, Scarface and The Bodyguard are all…

Elvis arrives in Cannes late, ushered in by screaming hordes. He says: “My daddy is a good man” and “It’s gonna be OK, mama”. He sings Hound Dog on stage and all the girls turn to puddles. The festival initially wanted Baz Luhrmann’s biopic for the opening night, two Tuesdays ago, but the film is a diva and divas make us wait. Have we gobbled down enough movies and drunk too much rosé? Have we achieved a state of perfect peak excess? Only then, finally, does the King deign to show.Like Elvis, this year’s festival set out…