Karin Badt

It begins with a shot of two men swiping up bundles of cash -- ah, Money! -- and the plot goes on from there: Im Sang-soo's The Taste of Money is the story of an extremely wealthy South Korean family and the sterile claustrophobic life they lead in their super-modern...

Everyone thinks Cannes is exciting for the movies, parties and celebrities.

That is half of it. The other half is the pleasure of being treated so wonderfully by the staff that mans the festival, from the pretty girls serving free Nescafe coffee, to the men in beige suits who check...

Everyone speaks about Nastassja Kinski's fragility.

I saw strength.

We sat together on the Terrazza Martini at Cannes, in white leather lounge chairs, and she, dressed in a gauzy gown, like the curtain fluttering next to us, spoke to me with excitement about her new project, a documentary on famed...

There were no women directors represented in this year's "Competition" at Cannes, a point that was acknowledged with misgiving by some of the attendees of the festival.

For this reason, I went to see Catherine Corsini's film Three Worlds in the "Certain Regard" category.

The story of a...

The story of a fishmonger in Naples, so taken with the possibility of being on a reality show (Big Brother) that he brings his life to ruin, Reality is about how easy it is for a human being to become consumed by artificial dreams to the point of mental illness.

It seems a small movie at first: the famed Bernardo Bertolucci's new film Me and You about a pimply alienated 14-year-old boy, who lives alone with his single mom. The boy slinks around school, hiding from others with his iPod. He disappears into his room and reads fantasy novels.

It floats like a cherry blossom in a forest, light and pretty. Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love, which premiered this week in Cannes, tells the story of a beautiful young prostitute in Tokyo and her charming rapport with an elderly prof, and the comic difficulties with her fiance which...

I never thought I would have Isabelle Huppert burn-out, considering she is a favorite actress, but Hong Sangsoo's new film In Another Country , here at Cannes, drove me to the limit. A postmodern story in which Isabelle Huppert plays three different, but similar, women who go through a similar...

Michael Haneke's new film Love [Amour] begins with the violent breaking open of an apartment -- and then we see firemen holding their noses, ostensibly from the smell of a cadaver.

After this dynamic opening, the movie turns into an intensely still drama about an elderly man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) dealing...

John Hillcoat's new film, Lawless, premiered at Cannes this week, with a star cast including Shia Labeouf, Jessica Chastain and Tom Hardy, and co-written by Nicolas Cage, the director's longtime friend and collaborator in Australia.

While not my kind of film -- a gangster Western, with heads sliced open, et...

Warning: This post contains spoilers about Moonrise Kingdom.

Eight thousand people cheered the premiere of Wes Anderson's new film, Moonrise Kingdom this week at Cannes, appreciating the imaginative journey into the world of a boy and girl who escape their alienating home environments to discover love on an island. The...

Jacques Audiard's new film Rust and Bone starts with urgent energy, conveyed with the sound of brisk footsteps, as a man moves down a sidewalk in southern France. More rushed sounds follow: the same man on a train with his son as both rip into their lunch with gusto. No...

The buzz at Cannes is that Margarethe Tiesel, the lead in Ulrich Siedl's Paradise: Love, may take the Best Actress award for her exuberant vulnerable performance as the dumpy woman who comes to Kenya to pick up beach boys, in need of sex and love.

Her most memorable scene: when...

It's a sympathetic look at how people use each other, for their own needs. Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's film Love"(the first of a trilogy Paradise) tells the story of a group of terribly unattractive dumpy blonde Austrian women on vacation on a Kenyan beach, for the main purpose of using...

Set on taking a break from the film industry in Paris, I flew off to a secluded area at the southern tip of Barbados. I discovered within a few minutes of my arrival that my hotel owner was a film director and, before I put my bags down, I'd been...

Werner Herzog's 2011 documentary, Into the Abyss was my favorite film at this year's Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. In 2001, two teenaged boys in Texas, from what seems a red-neck town (a nearby town is called "Cut and Shoot"), took a liking for a red camaro, and decided to kill the...

"When I put ice cubes in their butt, they bleat like goats, their balls swinging like church bells in an old village." Thus croons a Mexican prostitute, as she cheerfully pantomimes these sexual techniques, while sitting gaily on a cot, in Michael Glawogger's documentary Whore's Glory. One of the most...

It is not an easy film to understand, nor does one ever grasp the complete story, if there is one. But it is remarkably hypnotizing and rests in one's visual memory for a long time afterwards. French director Bruno Dumont's new film Outside Satan -- which just this month sold...

Interestingly, two of the European films featured in this year's competition of the Tokyo International Film Festival had the same message: value immigrants and people of color, as you never know what they can offer. The French offering -- Eric Toledano's Untouchable -- the film which won the festival Grand...

When Natsuki, a friend of a friend, wrote to tell me that she would host me in Tokyo and that we would "burn the night until dawn" together, I believed that she was speaking metaphorically and that after a few drinks we would be safely in bed.

Not so much.