Pixar's 'Inside Out' is the standout

CANNES, France - Thank goodness for Pixar.

The reliably excellent animation studio offered one of the few high points during an otherwise ho-hum Cannes Film Festival on Monday, when the new animated feature Inside Out screened at the Grand Theatre Lumiere. Directed by Pete Docter, the bright, wildly inventive, deeply felt exploration of the complicated way feelings, memories, and dreams inform our personalities won over nearly everyone who packed the elegant main venue at the Grand Palais, bringing the crowd to cheers, tears, and more cheers during an exceptionally witty end-credit sequence.

Pixar has always held fast to Walt Disney's dictum, "For every smile, a tear." With this film, the studio demonstrates not only why that's true, but why it's crucial for emotional growth.

Inside Out, which opens June 19, was one of just a few unqualified hits in what most veterans agree is a lackluster year at Cannes. (Granted, it's early still, with such highly anticipated titles as Denis Villeneuve's Sicario and Paolo Sorrentino's Youth yet to be shown.)

Continuing a disappointing trend of late, the opening-night film was instantly forgettable - in this case, the earnest but unremarkable La Tete Haute (Standing Tall), a drama about a wayward boy and the bureaucrats who try to save him, directed by actress Emmanuelle Bercot. She appeared a few days later in Mon Roi (My King), a highly anticipated romance from the director Maiwenn, who wowed several viewers here a few years ago with her sprawling, audacious procedural, Polisse. Unfortunately, Mon Roi, which costars Vincent Cassel, didn't have nearly the rueful grit or nerve of the earlier film, hewing instead to a familiar template of longing, loss, passion, and recrimination.

Those emotions were used with finer craft and subtlety in Carol, which played to rapturous audiences when it made its debut here Saturday night. An adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt directed by Todd Haynes, the film stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as women embarking on a tentative love affair in New York in the early 1950s.

Filmed in the colors, textures, and atmospheric lyricism of an Edward Hopper painting and graced with restrained, riveting performances from its two lead actresses, Carol seduces the audience with as much quiet magnetism as the title character (Blanchett) exerts on the fledgling photographer played by Mara.

Carol has so far been one of the few films in official competition to receive resounding praise from critics. The documentary Amy, a carefully constructed, emotionally devastating documentary about the late singer Amy Winehouse, was shown out of competition, in a special midnight screening, also to nearly universal raves.

By far the most impressive film so far - in or out of competition - has been Laszlo Nemes' extraordinary feature debut, Saul Fia (Son of Saul), a drama about an Auschwitz prisoner determined to give an exterminated boy a Jewish burial.

Filmed in an extraordinary series of long, unbroken takes, carefully staged, and framed to render Nazi atrocities both obliquely and with unflinching realism, and dominated by a groundbreaking performance by Geza Rohrig, Son of Saul redefines the Holocaust-drama genre, infusing it with new urgency, visual energy, and moral meaning.

Not surprisingly, Son of Saul has become the mid-festival favorite for the coveted Palme d'Or, and, as was also expected, it was acquired - after an all-night bidding war - by Sony Pictures Classics, which will certainly give it the Oscar push it clearly deserves.