Yesterday was the world premiere of “Arcadia Lost” in the Little Rock Film Festival. Here’s the first review:

Haley Bennett’s performance is one of the highlights of Arcadia Lost, the world premiere of which will be at 8 p.m. Friday at Riverdale Cinemas.
There was never a doubt about how Arcadia Lost would look. Few in the film industry have a reputation of excellence like Phedon Papamichael, the film’s director and cinematographer.
Papamichael picked his native Greece as the canvas on which to paint this latest masterpiece. The narrative is potent, layered with angst, discovery, tragedy and self-realization.
American teenagers Charlotte (Haley Bennett) and Sye (Carter Jenkins) are thrust together when their parents marry in Greece. After surviving a car accident, the step-siblings embark on a journey across the Greek countryside, following a drifter, Benerji (Nick Nolte), who seems at the same time wise and a little unstable.
As Charlotte discovers the power of her own sexuality, Sye becomes a disciple of Benerji’s teaching while also feeling compelled to protect Charlotte (sometimes from herself).
The kids and the camera are the stars of this film. Bennett and Jenkins both show great poise and range, and it wouldn’t be surprising if this performance launched both of their careers to greater heights.
As he did in previous works Sideways and Phenomenon, Papamichael uses the naturally beautiful backdrop as a way to help tell the story, lingering long on shots of Greece’s jagged coastline, rocky terrain and the sapphire-colored Aegean Sea.

Picturesque and cerebral, the world premiere of this film should be one of the biggest highlights of this year’s festival. The film will premiere at 8 p.m. Friday, June 4, at Riverdale Cinemas. Papamichael, screenwriter David Ariniello and producer Kelly Thomas will be on hand at the premiere.

SOURCE

This aired on the 15th on Le Grand Journal de Canal+ and fatures an interview with Haley and her castmates directly from Cannes. However it’s mostly in french and there’s no subtitles.

Supernatural teen comedy Kaboom has been named the winner of the first ever ‘Queer Palm’ at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

The Gregg Araki-directed film stars Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett, Juno Temple and Chris Zylka and features straight, gay, lesbian and bisexual sex scenes.

Akari issued a statement which read: “I was so deeply honoured and humbled when I learned Kaboom had been chosen to participate in this year’s Main Selection.

“Like the protagonist of my movie, I was a Film Studies major in college and I never even dreamed that one day a film of mine might show in the Palais where all the legendary auteurs I’ve admired and idolised over the years have screened their films. To win the festival’s first ‘Queer Palm’ award on top of all this is almost beyond belief!”

The Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau sponsored prize was awarded last night at the Cannes’ Zanzibar venue, reportedly the oldest gay bar in Europe.

SOURCE

Movieline reported that Kaboom is the lastest pick-up from Cannes. This means we’ll be seeing “Kaboom” sooner than we thought! Enjoy!

Gregg Araki’s Kaboom Latest Cannes Pick-Up: The 63rd Cannes Film Festival may be nearing its end, but IFC Films’ Croisette buying spree isn’t. The distributor today announced its acquisition of Gregg Araki’s hot-and-heavy “comical thriller” Kaboom as well as the Mexican cannibal flick We Are What We Are. Neither have release dates as of yet, though We Are will appear in theaters and on VOD under the distributor’s new IFC at Midnight platform.

SOURCE

Going into the festival there were a select few films that I had earmarked as definites for viewing: Wall Street 2 was top of the list, and closely following it was Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, a delightfully intriguing prospect for anyone familiar with Araki’s body of work.
Araki is one of those indie-darling, festival veterans who has never really cemented the promise his earlier works showed into a sustainable breakthrough into mainstream cinema, even despite great critical acclaim for Mysterious Skin, and even some of his lesser known productions. And I for one always lamented a cross-over that might bring with it more Araki films, but I seems that I grossly underestimated the director.
No-one who left the mid-afternoon screening could possibly have been left in any doubt that Araki has no intention of ever making that breakthrough, or that he positively wallows in his classification as a fringe film-maker. Kaboom was a great big two-fingered salute to anyone who thought he might be making a conscious attempt to make widely accessible films in any way, and it was a ludicrous, incredibly confusing, but wildly enjoyable offering at that.
It looks like Araki has consciously moved back to his earlier loves, wild key changes and genre-blends that can be nauseatingly difficult to balance, while the presence of James Duval- Araki’s muse of sorts- is an even more explicit inference that Araki is shifting his tone back to somewhere around his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy- comprised of Totally Fucked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997)- and that the marked difference of Mysterious Skin was merely a meander from his real artistic manifesto.

CLICK TO READ MORE

SOURCE.