Inglourious Basterds
Starring Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Til Schweiger, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Mike Myers, Cloris Leachman, and Samuel L. Jackson
Critics attending the Cannes Film Festival are mostly expressing disappointment over Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. An unsigned review on the Hollywood Reporter website says, "The film is by no means terrible -- its running time of two hours and 32 minutes races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing." The British trade publication Screen Daily says that it "offers considerable challenges to the attention span of mainstream audiences." Sukhdev Sandhu concludes in the London Telegraph: "Cannes normally adores Tarantino (he won the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction), but this time? It's not so much inglorious as undistinguished." But several critics take a machine gun to it. Peter Bradshaw in Britain's Guardian newspaper calls it a "catastrophe" and goes on: "It isn't funny; it isn't exciting; it isn't a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn. It isn't emotionally involving or deliciously ironic or a brilliant tissue of trash-pop references. Nothing like that." 153 mins. RATING: R for strong graphic violence, language and brief sexuality.
Julie & Julia
Starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina, and Linda Emond
Based on two true stories, Julie & Julia intertwines the lives of two women who, though separated by time and space, are both at loose ends...until they discover that with the right combination of passion, fearlessness and butter, anything is possible. 123 mins. RATING: PG-13 for brief strong language and some sensuality
500 Days of Summer
Starring Zooey Deschanel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Clark Gregg, Minka Kelly, Rachel Boston, Matthew Gray Gublert, and Chloe Moretz
This is a story of boy meets girl, begins the wry, probing narrator of 500 Days of Summer, and with that the film takes off at breakneck speed into a funny, true to life and unique dissection of the unruly and unpredictable year-and-a-half of one young man’s no-holds-barred love affair. 95 mins. RATING: PG-13 for sexual material and language.
Time Traveler's Wife
Starring Rachel McAdams, Eric Bana, Arliss Howard, and Ron Livingston
If there's one film here to avoid, this is it. Reviews have been, well, not go good. Clare has been in love with Henry her entire life. She believes they are destined to be together, even though she never knows when they will be separated: Henry is a time traveler--cursed with a rare genetic anomaly that causes him to live his life on a shifting timeline, skipping back and forth through the years with no control. Despite the fact that Henry's travels force them apart with no warning, and never knowing when they will be reunited, Clare desperately tries to build a life with her one true love. 107 mins. RATING: PG-13 for thematic elements, brief disturbing images, nudity and sexuality.