Waltz Explodes at Cannes

Now that's more like it. After a typically lousy opening—allegorical disaster Blindness—the Cannes Film Festival shook things up yesterday with Waltz with Bashir, a ferocious animated documentary from Israel recounting the 1982 massacre at Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. It’s “stunning,” writes Manhola Dargis in the New York Times, “at once a furious act of conscience and a lament.”

The film follows writer-director Ari Folman as he tries to makes sense of his fractured memories by interviewing fellow war veterans. The soldier’s tales are animated, “jarring us out of our comfort zone” in a way too-familiar news footage could not, writes Wendy Ide of the UK Times. The animation drifts from hallucinatory to realistic, until it’s intercut with live footage in a breathtaking finale. (More Cannes Film Festival stories.)