Film Review: ‘Firestarter’ remake fails to ignite

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.

Steven Tyler has been supported by fans and friends after sharing the news that he has returned to rehab. The Aerosmith singer suffered a relapse and "voluntarily" entered treatment, according to a statement from the band.MORE: Sharon Osbourne reveals daughter Aimee's brush with death after terrifying fire –'Today was beyond horrific'"We love you, and wish Steven all the support and good vibes he can get.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian brothers who have directed a series of films notable for quiet naturalism, are a prime example of how at the Cannes Film Festival, familiarity breeds not contempt but contentment.Year after year, Cannes puts the Dardennes’ films in the Main Competition; they’ve made nine features since “Rosetta” in 1999, and every one of them has vied for Cannes’ top honor, the Palme d’Or, with “Rosetta” and 2005’s “L’Enfant” winning and four others taking additional awards. The Dardennes now have a chance to make significant Cannes history by becoming the first directors to ever win the Palme for a third time.If they win for “Tori and Lokita,” which premiered in Cannes on Tuesday, they’ll also set a new record for the longest time elapsed between Cannes wins, with the 17-year gap since “L’Enfant” breaking the record of 14 years between Shohei Imamura’s wins for “The Ballad of Narayama” and The Eel.”But familiarity may also be working against the Dardennes at this point.

seeming) celebration and immersion in all things Bowie. You won’t get a biographical breakdown, except in bits and pieces and through the process of absorption rather than explanation; what you will get is an assemblage of live clips and interviews and animation and effects plucked from throughout the Bowie archives and knitted together with an extraordinarily dense and at times even assaultive sound design.In case you’ve forgotten, the last line of the chorus in the song that gives this movie its title is “freak out in a moonage daydream,” which is pretty much what this movie does.If that description scares you, then “Moonage Daydream” might not be the Bowie movie for you.

South Korea may have made big inroads on American TV recently with “Squid Game” and “Pachinko,” and the country’s intriguing film and television industry also has a stronger-than-usual presence at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “Squid Game” star Lee Jung-jae’s political thriller “Hunt” premiered as a midnight screening early in the festival; Davy Chou’s “Return to Seoul” landed a pre-Cannes deal with Sony Pictures Classics and is one of the hits of the Un Certain Regard sidebar; and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is in the main competition with “Broker,” his first film shot in South Korea in the Korean language.

PrEP or Cherry Jones, or they object to turning fellatio into physical comedy, that’s their own problem.

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.

this long in an industrial bakery watching the two managers fill out EU grant applications?Soon enough the corners come together and the shape becomes more clear as the part-Roma, part-German Matthias (Marin Grigore) returns to his native Transylvania town either to make amends with his estranged wife Ana (Macrina Barladeanu) or, failing that, to rekindle the flame with former mistress Csilla (Judith State). By way of filial duties, Matthias also has to deal with an ailing father (whose need for an MRI — RMN in Romanian — gives the film its title) and a son too shell-shocked by that unknown forest sight to speak.But the film is just as much Csilla’s story, following the native Hungarian as she carves out a comfortable middle-class existence, devoting herself to her EU-assisted startup and sacrificing whatever personal projects she might have in order to gain affluence in a post-industrial town whose long-shuttered mine has left both water source and the hearts of the men who lost their jobs poisoned for good.Even as the “who” comes sharper into focus, we still can’t quite crack the “why.” Why do we follow Matthias through a seemingly aimless series of encounters as he and his fellow townsfolk debate the finer points of Romanian history? Why do we spend so much time with Csilla as she posts a series of job listings (“Don’t mention the salary,” advises her boss) on every door in town?  And why the urgent need to underline every character’s particular ethnic background?The answer — call it a skeleton key — comes at the one-hour mark upon the arrival of three Sri Lankan migrants to fill the still-vacant posts.

After his 2017 art-world satire “The Square” scored the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund swaggers back to competition with “Triangle of Sadness,” a mixed-bag of social commentary and gross-out comedy that could only come from a filmmaker with a secured reputation and zero f—s to give. Taking aim at the 1% and shouting “Eat the rich!” with the anger of a sea storm and the subtlety of an exploding toilet, the film is both over-long and under-stuffed, but it nevertheless left Cannes’ notoriously tough crowd doubled over in laughter.Running just under two-and-a-half hours and split up into three chapters, the film lifts as much from Noam Chomsky as from John Waters as it hoses down beauty standards and luxury culture with gallons of projectile vomit.

Throughout her career, Mia Hansen-Løve has returned to a familiar milieu — the daily lives of women, drawing out a poignant beauty and humanist sense of drama in the quotidian rhythms of mothers as they go about their work, as well as their caretaking of children, parents and their own inner worlds. There’s something fascinating, and indeed feminist, about simply watching these women, played by some of Europe’s most talented actresses (Isabelle Huppert in “Things to Come,” Vicky Krieps in “Bergman Island”), simply exist in the world, maintaining the delicate balance of day-to-day harmony despite the larger ups and downs that threaten to upend everything.In “One Fine Morning,” Hansen-Løve’s latest, the woman in question is Sandra, played by Léa Seydoux, hair cropped into a pixie cut, clad in the jeans, sweatshirt and backpack befitting a young widowed mother caring for her daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins), on her own in Paris.

exercice de style as the French would put it, “EO” has plenty on its mind and nothing much to say, idling through a series of vignettes than more often not end with a punch-line of a forbidden kiss or a sudden act of violence, capturing them all with a flashy and urgent style of a music video or Super Bowl car commercial. One need not look far to see in this tale of a lonely beast of burden traipsing across the countryside a condemnation of modern Polish society, especially in sequences when the titular donkey first witnesses and then succumbs to a bout of skinhead hooligan violence, or when it clops across a forest bed we soon learn was once a Jewish burial site. At the same time, Skolimowski – who shot this project over a two-year period – seems more interested in simply making his camera swoop and soar and generally perform its series of stupid pet tricks. In many ways, this rather silly (if quite entertaining) trifle makes for a fitting entry for Cannes’ 75th edition. Skolimowski approaches the material with the hunger and zeal of a young film student, lifting a framework from Robert Bresson and filtering through references to recent festival provocateurs like Lars von Trier, Refn, and Michael Haneke.

other melancholy tale about two men forming and fostering a life-defining love at a steep elevation.Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch’s “The Eight Mountains” – which premiered in competition at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday – is more than just a Dudes Rock “Brokeback Mountain.” Still, there is something to the comparison. Not for any narrative likeness – as a story about friendship, “The Eight Mountains” explores a bond more fraternal than romantic.

wildly entertaining rock ‘n’ roll fantasia “Leto.”The two films both show that Serebrennikov has strong ideas about how to use music, but otherwise they’re worlds apart. “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” begins with Miliukova (Alyona Mikhaylova) dressed in widow’s black and trying to choose the right words for her funeral wreath; but when she arrives in the room where her husband’s corpse is laid out, Tchaikovsky (Odin Biron, full of quiet Peter Sarsgaard smarm) rouses himself, stands up and asks, “Why is the wife here? Who invited her?”The scene is enough to tell you that this will be Miliukova’s story, and that it won’t be a straight period piece, even though it re-creates 1893 St.

Originally planned to open the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year before the worsening Covid situation forced the festival to again go virtual, Oscar-winning writer-director Michel Hazanavicius made the right decision in insisting his comedy Final Cut (Coupez!), about the making of a low-budget bad zombie movie, should be presented with a full house in a theatre, thankfully not to be watched on your computer at a prestigious film festival. In holding out for the real thing he scored big as it was chosen as the opening-night out-of-competition film of the 75th Cannes Film Festival.

This review of “Lux Aeterna” was first published on May 20, 2019, after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.Cinematic provocateurs have flourished at the Cannes Film Festival for years, with everyone from Jean-Luc Godard to Lars von Trier coming to the Croisette with works designed to provoke, confront or even annoy an audience. At this year’s festival, you could say that some of the extreme sections of Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Too Old to Die Young” have been designed to test an audience’s limits and make viewers uncomfortable.But nobody does provocation these days quite like Gaspar Noe does.

“Firestarter.” Based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, this new update finds Zac Efron stepping into the role of the father of a young daughter who develops pyrokinesis.But as the moviegoing world has shifted significantly since the pandemic, “Firestarter” isn’t exactly getting the most traditional of releases. Read on for everything you need to know about how, when and where to watch the “Firestarter” remake.Both! “Firestarter” was released Friday, May 13 in theaters but is also streaming exclusively on Peacock on the same day.There are three different tiers for Peacock content – a free version, Peacock Premium with limited ads for $4.99/month and Peacock Plus with no ads and offline viewing for $9.99/month.Zac Efron stars as Andrew “Andy” McGee, the father of the gifted child; newcomer Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays the lead role of Charlene “Charlie” McGee; Sydney Lemmon is Victoria “Vicky” Tomlinson-McGee, Charlie’s mother; Kurtwood Smith plays Dr.

Director Keith Thomas’ “Firestarter” is simply a substandard movie. What more can be said that wouldn’t belabor the point? A remake of Mark L.