Cannes Film Festival keeps on chugging, with Kevin Costner’s Horizon and body horror movie The Substance getting splashy premieres.
It was a big day at Cannes, where two of the most divisive movies of the festival both screened to wildly different reactions, plus A24 picks up a movie by a Cannes darling.
Kevin Costner’s sprawling western “Horizon” premiered at the festival, the imagined first part of a four-part epic (its subtitle, appropriately, is “An American Saga”), and received a response just as grand as the movie’s huge cast and gargantuan runtime: a 13-minute standing ovation that left the director and star visibly moved. “I’m sorry you had to clap that long,” Costner said, choking back tears. “Such good people. Such a good moment. Not just for me, but for the actors who came with me, the people who believed in me. It’s a funny business and I’m so glad I found it. There’s no place like here. I’ll never forget this. Neither will my children. It’s not mine anymore, it’s yours.” He also promised three more installments in the franchise; there was a trailer for Part 2 that played at the end of the screening.
And there were some who gladly backed up this big-hearted response. TCM host Dave Karger said on X (formerly Twitter) “’sprawling’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. Kevin Costner introduces a head-spinning number of characters and interests us in them all. This first chapter is beautiful and ambitious.” The critical response, however, was significantly more tepid.
Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson compared “Horizon” (unfavorably) to an episode of television. “Despite the first chapter’s three-hour runtime, we haven’t been given space to get interested in what’s being teased,” Lawson wrote. “The writing and direction is so erratic and confused that it’s near impossible to figure out who several characters are, let alone what they are seeking to accomplish.” Gregory Ellwood at The Playlist agreed, saying that there were “few fleeting moments of genuine tension.” Robert Daniels, writing for RogerEbert.
