‘Ali & Ava’: Clio Barnard’s Unlikely Romance Strikes a Sweet Chord [Cannes Review]

sold his song catalogue.Jacques, who died in 2004, co-wrote seven of the nine songs on Dylan’s 1976 album “Desire,” and his widow claimed in her $7.25 million lawsuit that her husband’s estate was owed 35 percent “of the purchase price” Dylan got from buyer Universal Music Group for the seven songs.But lawyers for the “Blowin’ in the Wind” singer argued that under the 1975 contract Dylan and Jacques signed, the estate was only entitled to 35 percent in royalties — not an additional 35 percent

Sir Tom Jones has announced a new set of UK tour dates for this year in support of his recent album ‘Surrounded By Time’.The record, which came out back in April, featured covers of songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens and Bobby Cole.Jones is now set to tour in the UK in December on the ‘Surrounded By Time’ tour, which kicks off in Glasgow at The SSE Hydro on December 5.The tour will then visit Manchester and Birmingham before concluding in London on December 9 with a gig at The O2.

Chris Willman Music WriterFor those who consider themselves connoisseurs of the fluctuations in Bob Dylan’s voice, there was no doubt about it: he hasn’t sounded better in decades than he does in his new streaming special, “Shadow Kingdom,” which premiered on Veeps.com Sunday. That he had a beautiful tone to his melodious declarations, even enunciating to a shockingly clear degree, surely has something to do with a pandemic-mandated year-plus break in his usual relentless touring routine.

released his 39th studio album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” and in December 2020, he sold his entire six-decade catalog of songs to Universal Music Group in a deal thought to be the biggest of its kind.

Not even a global pandemic could stop prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, but his latest film deals with ideas and tensions that echo questions and perspectives brought to the surface by this global health crisis. Playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, “In Front of Your Face” only slowly reveals its hand.

Director Vincent Maël Cardona uses western Europe in the early-1980s as the canvas upon which he paints his layered and achingly genuine portrait of young love, familial bondage, artistic aspiration, and universal chaos. Unburdened by a firm connection to any one genre or narrative archetype, “Magnetic Beats” tells a simple story with a full arsenal of source music, thoughtful set design, and crisp acting at all levels to pull off this love letter to a particular moment in time.

It’s a good thing you can’t catch a virus from an image because if you could, just a few frames of Kirill Serebrennikov‘s fabulously yeasty, bilious, dank Competition title, “Petrov’s Flu” would bring all of Cannes‘ anti-Covid measures to naught.

Tatiana Huezo’s eye for lyrical truth has materialized in documentaries like “Tempestad” or “The Tinniest Place,” works that penetrate some of the most tenebrous corners in recent Latin American history with shimmering compassion. Her stance as an acute observer of the people that survive and persevere through tumultuous sociopolitical and economically disadvantaged contexts produces thought-provoking filmic meditations.

In “A Hero” (“Ghahreman”), Asghar Farhadi blurs the line of innocence and guilt in a fraught drama about the true weight of a good deed. During a two-day reprieve from prison, Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) and his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) discover a handbag full of golden coins.

After rolling winners with his last two indie outings, Tangerine and The Florida Project, director Sean Baker makes it a trifecta with Red Rocket, a wild ride about a big-time male porn star who returns penniless from LA to his native Texas to figure out and regain his groove. Like Baker’s previous films, this one deals with a very specific sub-culture that is used to the max to inform the often wayward characters.

When teenaged environmental activist Greta Thunberg made her now-famous speech at the UN Headquarters in 2019, she was met with equal parts admiration and derision, likely an unfavorable imbalance toward the latter. For every A-list celebrity who reposted a clip on their Instagram story, adorned with enthusiastic heart emojis, surely another handful of Internet trolls lurked in the comments and left discouraging messages.

The rise in popularity of true crime stories has seen the line between genuine investigation and lurid exploitation become increasingly blurred. With every new Netflix docu-series, podcast episode, and beach-read paperback, content creators are having to go further afield to dig up some crime forgotten to history to recast in a light that often appears oriented for entertainment first, with any richer insights an inadvertent byproduct.

Sean Baker must have a thing for donut shops, the distinctly American small businesses have now been a centerpiece of two of his more celebrated films.

What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops.

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having.

A Croatian teen comes of age in Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic’s Murina, showing in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. Executive Produced by Martin Scorsese, it stars Gracija Filipovic as Julija, who lives on a remote island with her mother Nela (Danica Curcic) and father Ante (Leon Lucev).

Premiering in competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Nanni Moretti’s wild melodrama “Three Floors” is based on a 2017 Israeli novel called “Shalosh Qomot” from writer Eshkol Nevo and begins with an undeniably tragic event. One dark night on a quiet street of Rome, a drunk driver runs over a lady crossing the road, narrowly avoids hitting a pregnant woman, then finally crashes into a building, landing straight into a family’s living room.

July 12th, 2021, Cannes – Reader, I ratatat out this missive in haste on my trusty Smith-Corona from the South of France, in the paltry hopes it may adequately convey my delight in viewing the latest cinematographic marvel from Mr. Wes Anderson, originally of Houston, Texas but more latterly resident of a nearby color-coded, symmetrical nebula almost entirely of his own design.

Chris Willman Music WriterByron Berline, a renowned fiddler who played with bluegrass greats like Bill Monroe as well as rock legends like the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, died over the weekend, according to news reports out of Oklahoma, where he owned a world-famous fiddle shop. He was 77.

Cinema’s love affair with trains goes back, of course, to the very origins of the art form, and more than a century later, the flame shows no sign of dimming. To recent examples such as “Snowpiercer” (2013), “Train to Busan” (2016), and the latest of many adaptations of “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) can now be added “Compartment no.6” (“Hytti Nro 6”) from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, premiering in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.