Screenrush Guide to the 2012 Festival de Cannes

***FIRST REVIEWS***

The Guardian: 'a boisterous, watchable satire on reality television and real values [...] a likable film played with gusto and heart — though fundamentally a little sentimental and predictable.' ***

The Daily Telegraph: 'One thing's for sure: reality has nothing to do with it.' ****

Time Out: 'the film is seldom as funny as it probably wants to be, and drags here and there towards the end, it nevertheless has more than its fair share of strong scenes.' ***

Variety: 'There's nothing to chew on here, no commentary to set auds pondering the way reality skeins have changed perceptions of what's real. Fourteen years after "The Truman Show," viewers  --  especially the foreign-film crowd  --  will expect a genuine engagement with the phenomenon rather than gentle ribbing.' **

Jury president Nanni Moretti is good friends with fellow Italian director Matteo Garrone who follows up his last Cannes entry, the relentless Neapolitan crime saga and 2008 Grand Prix winner Gomorrah with a film that, from the outside looking in, couldn’t be more different. Reality (Il Grande Fratello) is- in the director’s own words – a simple story about a fishmonger’s son who applies to appear on the Italian version of Big Brother in the hope of escaping his hopeless circumstances and embarking on the road to fortune.

Starring a cast of unknowns (as is Garrone’s habit) Reality could be seen as something of a gamble for a film-maker whose work has inspired countless critics to wax on at length about the rich legacy of Italian neo-realism. Indeed on the day of the selection’s announcement he even told an Italian paper that he had set out with the intention of making a comedy – a genre he hasn’t tackled in over a decade – and that the piece took a darker turn as it went along, ‘but it’s not a protest film’ he insisted, ‘it’s a fairy tale’.