‘Armageddon Time’ Film Review: James Gray Looks at His Childhood Without Nostalgia

Love Island viewers are already hooked on this year's series after just one episode – and think some of the Islanders look familiar. Fans are convinced that Michael Owen's daughter Gemma, 19, is the spitting image of US singer Madison Beer and have now also had their say on 23 year old Tasha Ghouri's celebrity lookalike.

did make the movie more engaging, but this is simply as engaging as “Zero Contact” can get.What does stand out in “Zero Contact” is the score by Anders Niska and Klas Wahl, but not because it tells the story very well. Instead, it creates an incessant filter between the audience and the film, so that every moment in the narrative has to fight its way to the audience through a hazy aural mishmash of non-specific tension.

Here’s a fun bit of symmetry: Of the four French titles competing for this year’s Palme d’Or, the first to screen was “Brother and Sister” and the last was “Mother and Son.” (Presumably daughters and grandparents will get their due next year.) Of the two, “Mother and Son” director Léonor Serraille bests her colleague Arnaud Desplechin in the family-saga sweepstakes, delivering a decade-spanning immigration drama that plays on the most intimate of registers.The film closed out the Cannes competition on Friday, providing it an auspicious berth. This year’s jury will go into deliberations with actress Annabelle Lengronne fresh in mind; should the actress win, she won’t have far to travel.She isn’t entirely the lead, as the triptych follows a Franco-Ivorian family in chapters dedicated to each member.

James Argent has been seen looking slimmer than ever as he shops for cars in Essex.The Only Way Is Essex star, 34, was snapped looking at various cars and posing next to them, after the star famously lost 14 stone following gastric bypass surgery last year. James looked handsome as he posed for photos wearing a white T-shirt and casual red trousers alongside some bright white trainers. He completed his sporty look with a gold statement watch, necklace and bracelet.The former TOWIE star has been sharing his weight loss journey with fans since he started last year.

For decades, Italian filmmakers dominated Cannes.If the 1960s saw Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti reign supreme, somehow the 1970s were even richer. Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi won shared top prizes in 1972, while for two consecutive years later that decade the Taviani brothers and then Ermanno Olmi hoisted Palmes across a border that sits just 40 miles away.This year’s lone competition title from an Italian director (the only other Italian language film, “The Eight Mountains,” comes courtesy of two Belgians), Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia” will probably not break that particular drought, but the Neapolitan director can take solace in another modest honor: Telling a story about mothers and sons, about gangsters and priests, and about a peculiar kind of longing for the past in a place where little has changed for hundreds of years, “Nostalgia” is a nigh perfect candidate to wave il Tricolore.Taking a thin amount of plot and stretching it as far and wide as it can go, the film itself is far from perfect, but it does benefit from “The Traitor” star Pierfrancesco Favino’s terrific lead performance as a man who learns the hard way that there’s no going home again.After forty years abroad, Felice (Favino, of course) returns to his native Naples a stranger in a familiar land.

unleashed smoke bombs and unrolled a list of murdered women just before the world premiere of Ali Abbasi’s serial-killer drama “Holy Spider.” And if the demonstration’s cause was only too just, its context was all too uncommon, since these protesters were seemingly there to support, not oppose, Abbasi’s violent and disturbing film. To follow up his Un Certain Regard-winning “Border,” the Iran-born Denmark-based director has burrowed into a chilling bit of true-crime from his native country, reimagining the 2001 case of a religious fanatic who slaughtered 16 young women and using that premise to explore systemic misogyny writ large. He does so by turning the murder thriller upside down, telling a story where the killer’s identify is never in doubt and his intentions are always crystal clear, and where the greatest source of tension comes from wondering whether anyone in power will lift a finger to stop him. The killer in this case is middle-aged construction worker Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani).

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” is a fictionalised account of her time at Les Amandiers, a prestigious acting school in Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris. As well as drawing on her own memories of student-dom in the mid-1980s, she and her co-writers, Noémie Nvovsky and Agnes De Sacy, interviewed other people who studied alongside her, and so their tragedy-tinged comedy drama, which is in Competition at Cannes, should have all the unruly specificity of real life.

so much fun to make,” Coen said when he introduced the film before its Cannes Film Festival premiere in the Salle Bunuel on Sunday night. “I know people always say that, but in this case, it’s true.

CANNES – James Gray’s new film, “Armageddon Time,” is an autobiographical tale recounting the systematic racism he witness at the age of 12-years-old over four decades ago. His parents are played by Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong, while he’s reimagined as Paul, an artistic dreamer portrayed by Banks Repeta.

TheWrap’s review called the film one of the least nostalgic examples of a form that is almost by definition nostalgic,” and added: “Gray is hard on himself in ‘Armageddon Time’; Paul Graff, the film’s stand-in for the director as a sixth grader, is never cute, unless you want to dote on the angelic curls and ignore the purposefully stubborn personality.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentJames Gray spoke about the contemporary resonance of his Cannes competition film “Armageddon Time” at the press conference for the movie on May 20. Sitting next to Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong, Gray said he wrote the script of “Armageddon Time” before a series of events including the killing of George Floyd and said his initial idea for the film was to show “layers of white privilege” in the 1980s which still exist today.“It’s impossible to look at the world as currently constructed, at least the Western world, at least my own country, which is what I have referenced and not see white privilege as one of the guiding mechanisms that are in existence,” said Gray.Gray said people who go to the private school depicted in the film have to been seen as “having superpower privilege.” “It’s a system where the same group gets to the top, stays at the top, and they keep everybody else out.

James Gray returned to Cannes for the fifth time with what was a personal story inspired by his childhood during 1980s Queens, NY, and the premiere tonight was nothing but emotional.