Sofia Coppola, The Bling Ring, 2013, HD video, color, sound, 90 minutes. Nicki (Emma Watson).

SOFIA COPPOLA’S REMOTE, REPETITIVE The Bling Ring, inspired by a 2010 Vanity Fair article about a quintet of San Fernando Valley teens who broke into and robbed celebrity homes, is often as insubstantial as the reality-TV stars name-checked (and burgled) throughout. Continuing the writer-director’s favorite theme—the listlessness of the privileged—The Bling Ring centers on adolescent ennui devolving into anomie. But missing from this film are the exacting details and the perfect distillation of milieu that distinguished Coppola’s previous four (even those in which the depressive, pampered protagonists are intolerable, as in 2003’s Lost in Translation). The five felonious teens here are reduced to their cyclical actions: cooing at and pocketing ill-gotten, tacky swag, slo-mo clubbing, drug-consuming, and selfie-taking.

“I want my own lifestyle brand,” Marc (Israel Broussard), a new, pre-gay student at Indian Hills High School, tells his classmate Becca (Katie Chang) before she introduces him to the thrill of removing valuables—wallets, bags of coke—from unlocked cars. With the help of DListed and easily Googled VIP addresses, the two slip into Paris Hilton’s manor effortlessly (she keeps the key under the mat) while the heiress is away, marveling at her pet monkey, the throw pillows emblazoned with her image, and her holiest of hidey-holes, her “nightclub room.” (Coppola’s production designer took no liberties: Hilton, who was repeatedly robbed by the real-life juvie thieves, let the director film these scenes in her home.)

Marc and Becca soon team up with Chloe (Claire Julien) and Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga); the latter two are de-facto sisters under the Adderall-dispensing, homeschooling, Secret-quoting, vision-board-making care of Nicki’s mom (Leslie Mann). Nicki, an aspiring supermodel, makes the most petulant demands: “C’mon, let’s go to Paris’s. I wanna rob.” And so we return to the socialite’s lair, this time glimpsing one of her Chihuahuas and her shoes (“Her feet are so big”). Yet the thrill of being amid such gaudy opulence stirs little excitement among this covetous group. The stripling burglars’ lassitude makes a viewer appreciate even more the ecstatic inventorying of James Franco’s Alien in Spring Breakers (“I got my blue Kool-Aid, I got my fuckin’ NUN-CHUCKS….”), still the year’s definitive movie on invidious consumption.

Though slight, The Bling Ring offers further proof of Coppola’s infallible instinct for casting young actresses. Like Kirsten Dunst in The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Elle Fanning in Somewhere (2010), Watson, the biggest name among the five housebreakers, gives a fantastic performance. Watching Harry Potter’s Hermione perfect the aggressive, flat-voweled vapidity of SoCal self-redemption speak (“I think this situation was attracted into my life as an opportunity to grow. I think it’s my journey to push for peace,” Nicki says before her court date) stands as the film’s sole revelation—a rare pleasure in an apathetic project about torpid teens.

— Melissa Anderson

The Bling Ring opens in limited release June 14.

James William Guercio, Electra Glide in Blue, 1973, 35 mm, color, sound, 114 minutes.

WHEN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN wrote “Born to Run” and sang, “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes,” he might have been thinking of a then-current spate of road movies piled with unlikely co-riders and misfit loners. Two Lane Blacktop (1970), Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), Duel (made for TV, 1971), Vanishing Point (1971), The Getaway (1972), Badlands (1973), The Sugarland Express (1974), Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974): Here was a bumpy Polaroid patchwork of the American Southwest, each snapshot presenting a different tangential angle on wide open spaces and arid claustrophobia, motorized dreams of freedom pitted against a world of roadblocks, scrap yards, tumbleweeds, and dead-end streets.

James William Guercio’s 1973 picture Electra Glide in Blue was a one-shot distillation of that tendency, a drive-in art film that gave Robert Blake his best role as pint-size, overcompensating motorcycle cop John Wintergreen, stuck patrolling a seemingly endless stretch of scarcely populated Arizona asphalt. It was a weird combination that somehow clicked. Guercio was a big-shot record producer who had made his name on brassy, crowd-pleasing albums for Blood, Sweat, & Tears and Chicago—not someone you’d think of as a natural candidate for a naturalistic film director. (He had also worked on records for the Firesign Theater, a clue there may have been more to him than his hard-sell reputation.) At this point, Blake had only two serious credits—In Cold Blood from ’67 and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here from ’69—and was probably still best known for having been a child actor in the Our Gang series (1939–44).

He brought a desperate, freewheeling conviction to the material that made it believable: Like his character, he knew this might be his only shot at getting out of the also-ran division. Guercio appreciated that, and built the movie around him with a palpable faith in his star: The reciprocity shines in scenes like Wintergreen’s getting dressed up for his first day as a plainclothes officer, dancing to the rapturous doo-wop of the Marcels’ “Most of All.” Blake throughout moves between cockiness and diffidence, a driven and scared man trying to wiggle his way through a narrow opening in a tight spot: His casual eccentricity and socially awkward will to do the right thing make him an unusually persuasive Everyman.

In film noir terms, that’s a nice word for “patsy.” But part of Electra Glide in Blue’s appeal is how it sets up a classic murder mystery—a staged suicide apparently covering up another crime—only to go off the grid and wander into less familiar terrain. It might be something as small as Wintergreen trying a pickup line on a pair of tall girls beside an ice cream truck: “Did you know me and Alan Ladd were exactly the same height, right down to the quarter inch?…Didja know he was so short, they used to have to dig a ditch just for the girls to stand in to kiss him?” Or something as charged as his paranoid, Dirty Harry–manqué boss (Mitchell Ryan) taking him to meet a woman it turns out they’re both involved with, a scene that doesn’t develop into a predictable male confrontation but rather is completely dominated by Jeannine Riley, another small-timer making the most of her chance at glory, delivering an epic, scathing monologue that leaves the two men shaken and virtually speechless. Eventually, the solution to the crime turns out to be something simple and all too human, a rebuff to the logic of conspiracy.

Guercio surrounded himself with smart pros, from cinematographer Conrad Hall to character actors Royal Dano and Elisha Cook Jr. (Cook’s desert crazy is, appropriately, the metaphoric descendant of Walter Huston’s prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) The director rode in on a stagecoach’s worth of boy-genius hype, but the movie has very few ego-trip trappings—if he was determined to play the wunderkind, he would turn out to be a restrained one. (Guercio did write a pretty terrible score but employed his own music sparingly.) Using someone like Billy Green Bush, an actor who appeared in about one out of three TV shows that aired in the 1970s, he was able to defamiliarize everything about him—creating a monument to cracked instability under a seemingly straight-arrow surface. The Arizona topography is a similarly skewed composite, part Monument Valley, part cactus country. And from the looks of it, the motley motorcycle chase winds through the vicinity of Barstow or Adelanto, CA.

Electra Glide features a double ending: The first is a bizarre, deadly confrontation between Wintergreen and his partner that formally resolves the last loose end of the mystery. The second is a coda that revises (or inverts) the conclusion of Easy Rider in a tour de force reverse tracking shot that is the most sheerly pretentious and purely beautiful thing in the film, a long backward glance down the highway that turns into a visual hymn to the empty landscape. It’s a farewell to arms, dead cyclists, and all the fuel-injected fantasias of the fast-receding West.

— Howard Hampton

Electra Glide in Blue is now available on Blu-Ray from Shout!Factory.

Jonathan Glazer, Birth, 2004, 35 mm, color, sound, 100 minutes. Joseph and Anna (Danny Huston and Nicole Kidman).

A FILM AGAINST FORGETTING, Jonathan Glazer’s majestic, outlandish Birth was itself nearly confined to oblivion shortly after it was released in the fall of 2004. It never received the accolades bestowed on another highly unconventional love story that came out earlier that year, Michel Gondry’s typically whimsical, too cute Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, whose central, just-broken-up couple attempt to erase their relationship from their memory. The somber Birth, in contrast, extols the power, no matter how destabilizing, of remembering.

Fittingly, a film about the tenacity of memory begins with an indelible opening scene: a sweatsuited man, his back to us, jogging through a snow-blanketed Central Park on a gray winter afternoon. He slows down under a bridge and collapses, a shot immediately followed by a newborn, umbilical cord still attached, emerging from a birthing pool. These striking images help viewers take an enormous leap of faith—to believe that the dead adult has been reincarnated in the infant.

Ten years later, that baby, now a grave prepubescent boy named Sean (Cameron Bright), will try to stop Anna (Nicole Kidman), the widow of the runner, from remarrying by claiming that he is her husband (whose name was also Sean). The kid is an annoyance at first, for both Anna and especially her fiancé, Joseph (Danny Huston), a doggedly persistent suitor easily threatened by his beloved’s past. But Sean, who shares with Anna intimate details about her marriage, soon completely convinces, if not seduces, her.

That this ludicrous premise works so well—few films capture as powerfully the delirium of reconnecting with someone thought to be gone forever—is testament to the deep level of conviction evinced by both cast and crew. For his second feature (after 2000’s sado-Ibero gangster romp Sexy Beast), Glazer wrote the screenplay with Milo Addica (whose first script was for 2001’s Monster’s Ball) and, revealingly, Jean-Claude Carrière, whose frequent collaborations with Luis Buñuel include That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Birth itself is about an obscure object of desire, yet one presented with supreme lucidity and focus. Little is known about Anna except that she lives with her mother (Lauren Bacall, perfectly doyenne-ish) in a luxe Fifth Avenue apartment; mundane details are excised to concentrate more fully on Anna’s growing enchantment with this enigmatic little boy.

Nothing registers that spell more intensely than Kidman’s face, particularly during a minutes-long close-up at the opera as Anna begins to allow herself to believe the impossible. With the slightest calibration—a lip quiver, a blink, a head tilt—Kidman brilliantly conveys both profound reserves of grief and the first glimmers of euphoria. Birth, which is screening at MoMA as part of a series honoring the peerless cinematographer Harris Savides, who died last year, serves another commemorative purpose: It reminds us of how great the actress, whose visage and mannerisms have only hardened in the past nine years, could be.

— Melissa Anderson

Birth screens June 5 and 12 at MoMA as part of the series “Harris Savides: Visual Poet,” which runs June 5 through 21.

Abdellatif Kechiche, Blue Is the Warmest Color, 2013, 35 mm, color, sound, 179 minutes.

IN THE EYES OF MANY, Steven Spielberg’s jury did the right thing—or, rather, the correct thing—awarding the Palme d’Or to Abdellatif Kechiche’s critically lauded lesbian drama, Blue Is the Warmest Color. Spielberg, who showed his sensitivity to French current affairs by voicing support for his host country’s cultural exception policy at last Sunday’s awards ceremony, presented the Cannes film festival’s top award to Kechiche and his two stars, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, just as another horrifying antigay demonstration was wrapping up in Paris, which has this month seen hundreds of thousands of far-right and religious extremists gathering to protest the recent passage of the marriage equality law.

A Palme with symbolic weight, this was also a popular win. Kechiche’s critical supporters, especially in France, are legion, and even most of its detractors will concede that Blue is a fine showcase for two terrific young actresses: the relatively unknown Exarchopoulos as the high schooler discovering her sexuality and the increasingly poised Seydoux as the bohemian painter who initiates the younger girl into erotic pleasure and the ways of adulthood. But as a coming-out and coming-of-age narrative, Blue is so familiar as to be redundant, and Kechiche’s rather dogged, airless conception of naturalism, predicated on distended scenes and a surplus of close-ups, largely forecloses the possibility of vitality, humor, and surprise. The detailed, protracted sex scenes—I timed the longest at seven minutes, though some wishfully clocked it at twenty—were the talk of the festival, as they were meant to be, drawing feverish praise, defensive praise, and more than a few feminist disquisitions on the male gaze. Kechiche did not exactly help his cause with the last faction by saying in interviews that he cast Exarchopoulos when he took her to lunch and was struck by her “way of eating” lemon tart; the anti-Blue camp also gained some traction with a blunt post-Palme blog post by Julie Maroh, who had written the original graphic novel and termed the film’s erotic scenes “ridiculous.”

The jury saved its other top honors for two films that seemed to have amassed the least opposition in a lackluster competition. The runner-up Grand Prix went to the Coen Brothers’ atypically fond folk-scene chronicle Inside Llewyn Davis and the third-place Jury Prize to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father like Son, a typically tender domestic melodrama about the painful aftermath of a postnatal mixup. Meanwhile, in a presumed bid for nominal edginess, best director went for the second year running to a Mexican troublemaker, although on the basis of his brutalizing narco-porn entry Heli, the young Amat Escalante lacks the instinctive hell-raising smarts of last year’s winner Carlos Reygadas.

Alain Guiraudie, Stranger by the Lake, 2013, color, sound, 97 minutes.

Cannes makes no secret or apology of its attempts to build and sustain a pantheon. But the prevalence of brand names and inner-circle auteurs means less room for discovery, and the overall impression, especially acute this year, is of an aversion to risk. The recent insistence on bringing genre pictures into the fold—a tendency in the official selection as well as the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sidebars—has only exacerbated the overfamiliarity. This year that meant turning an unwarranted competition spotlight on films like Takashi Miike’s clunky policier Shield of Straw and Nicolas Winding Refn’s turgid bloodbath Only God Forgives. Amid the surfeit of dead-end genre pastiches, Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin—winner of the screenplay prize—stood out as an unusually purposeful reinvention of a time-honored form, applying the martial arts movie’s sense of aggrieved injustice to the inequities of modern-day China.

Given the lockstep predictability of the competition, the Un Certain Regard parallel section remains both essential and frustrating, a hodgepodge of work too weak, too radical, or too bereft of movie stars to earn the ceremonial pomp of a red-carpet walk. One highlight here was the overdue Cannes debut of the Philippine master Lav Diaz, whose devastating Norte, the End of History, at just over four hours, demanded of its viewers perhaps the scarcest commodity at the world’s most clamorous film festival: patience. Spiraling out from a murder that links a disgruntled would-be intellectual and a kind family man, Norte immerses itself in everyday detail and surreptitiously attains the realm of mythic tragedy. At their best, Diaz’s marathon movies reveal just how much others leave out. With its rich colors and relatively streamlined narrative—his films are typically in black-and-white and last upward of six hours—Norte may be his most resounding and accessible demonstration yet of duration as a means of complexity and depth.

Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013, HD video, color, sound, 123 minutes. Eve and Adam (Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston).

Also consigned to Un Certain Regard, Alain Guiraudie’s critical hit Stranger by the Lake—winner of a directing prize and the Queer Palm for gay-themed films—unfolds entirely in the vicinity of a nudist pickup spot that in the course of the movie becomes a crime scene. If the girl-on-girl sequences in Blue Is the Warmest Color are showstoppers by design, Guiraudie films his male characters’ hard-core dalliances, all conducted al fresco, with the same matter-of-fact sensuousness as ripples on a lake and the shifting light of dusk. A lethally precise film resting on a provocative tangle of wayward impulses—at times it suggests Cruising as directed by Hong Sang-soo—Stranger is many films in one: a minimalist thriller, a work of subcultural ethnography, and above all a tale of amour fou.

Back in the competition, two idiosyncratic bright spots emerged in the home stretch, although both—from American directors more popular abroad—divided critics and left empty-handed. In James Gray’s The Immigrant, a Polish woman’s arrival on Ellis Island in 1921 marks the start of an absorbing saga of disillusionment. The period world that Gray creates on limited means is at once vividly detailed and magically circumscribed; his taste for operatic emotion is here held in check by a withholding narrative and the characters, enigmatic yet sharply etched, are played with note-perfect ambiguity by Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard. Misleadingly branded a vampire movie, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is a wry, tender portrait of (extremely) long-term coupledom and encroaching mortality, as experienced by a pair of centuries-old bloodsuckers (Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton). The couple’s seen-it-all perspective accommodates both goofball whimsy and apocalyptic ennui. Achingly sad and ravishingly beautiful, Only Lovers Left Alive is a rare gift from our most youthful sixty-year-old filmmaker: an autumnal work that is also a rejuvenating one.

— Dennis Lim

The 66th Cannes film festival ran May 15–26, 2013.