A TikTok contretemps, and a delicious eat-the-rich satire, at Cannes
CANNES, France — The last time director George Miller brought a new movie to Cannes was in 2015, when his exhilarating "Mad Max: Fury Road" took the festival by (dust) storm. The movie played outside the main competition, as most Hollywood blockbusters at Cannes do. But as more than one onlooker observed, it felt like unjust treatment for a popular work of art that — in its beauty and kineticism, its political acuity and formal mastery — towered over most of the work vying for the Palme d'Or that year.
When a filmmaker like Miller is at the peak of powers, the distinctions that festivals like Cannes often reinforce — between high and low, art and commerce — simply collapse.
Miller's stature among world auteurs remains undimmed, even if his unusual new offering, "Three Thousand Years of Longing," which premiered out-of-competition Friday night at Cannes (and will hit U.S. theaters in storytelling, which is where its specific problems begin.
