HOWZAT

7 Eyes Wide Open (Dir Haim Tabakman)

A gay love story set in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community, Eyes Wide Open is one of the discoveries of the festival. First time feature director Tabakman brings compassion and restraint to a story which could have been approached in a sensational or melodramatic manner. The central performances are terrific – a tiny touch or a fleeting glance is so loaded with longing that it’s almost unbearable to watch. As the passion between the two men grows, the insular community turns on them. It’s a measured, mature piece of filmmaking.

8 Tales From The Golden Age (Dir Christian Mungiu, Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hofer, Razvan Marculescu, Constantin Popescu)

Palme D’Or winner Christian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 weeks, 2 Days) returns to Cannes with a collective movie created with four other rising Romanian directors. The film is a portmanteau of five chapters, each detailing an urban legend from the Ceausescu era of Communist rule. They are, in turn, absurd, hilarious, poignant and curiously affectionate for the ironically titled ‘golden age’. Particularly good is ‘The Legend of the Official Visit’, a catalogue of petty and occasionally surreal petty bureaucracy which culminates with a glorious punch line involving a mishap with a fairground ride.

9 Inglourious Basterds (Dir Quentin Tarantino)

This was the event film of the festival. The surprise is that it was worth the hype. Quentin Tarantino spent long years stringing this World War II revenge fantasy together and it is a thing of beauty and horror. Brad Pitt is a red-neck, half-Apache Indian mercenary who leads a band of Jewish Basterds in a guerilla campaign against20the Nazis in France. Tarantino basically rewrites history by rewriting the end of the war. But he poses the fascinating question, should cinema be allowed to fantasise about real life? Then he smashes his own argument with a wrecking-ball fairytale in which a dirty dozen B-movie characters shoot Hitler to bits and blow the Third Reich to smithereens in a small Parisian cinema. Fab, fab, fab. Revenge at its imaginative best.

10 A Town Called Panic (Dir Stephane Aubier, Vincent Patar)

An ingenious animation that, if translated and spoken in English, would be up for an Oscar. Ste[acute accent]phane Aubier and Vincent Patar inject mad life into a number of old-fashioned plastic toys. Indian, Horse, and Cowboy are basically three familiar inch-sized toy soldiers who happen to live together in the same house in a very boring model village. Their frantically uninteresting stop-motion routine is turned upside do wn when Cowboy and Indian accidentally order fifty million bricks to build a barbeque to celebrate Horse's birthday. Realising that Horse is going to be very angry indeed, they hide the bricks on top of their house, which duly sinks like a plunger into the centre of the earth. It's a fantastic piece of cinema that takes its cues from Wallace & Gromit.

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