French Film Industry & Cannes Film Festival Reportedly Bracing For Avalanche Of #MeToo Accusations

Ghost story, body horror, feminist comedy and a freshly minted edition of that very French subgenre, How to Get Rid of a Troublesome Corpse: Noémie Merlant, familiar as a fine actress from Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, packs a good deal into her sophomore feature as director, The Balconettes. The message is essentially Time’s Up, maxxed out to include revenge killings; the medium is Mediterranean color. Sciamma co-wrote the script with Merlant, which may come as a surprise given that this swirl of blood and wackiness, complete with a running gag about a severed penis, is about as far from the restraint of Sciamma’s own films as could be.

Cate Blanchett blew kisses to the Cannes Film Festival audience as her new film, “Rumours,” earned a four-minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night. The crowd welcomed the film’s dark humor, laughing throughout the entirety of the late-night screening. While some of the auditorium emptied out while the credits rolled, the majority of filmgoers waited patiently to pay their respects to the film’s stars.

It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Jim Henson came up with the concept for an immersive video dome long before Sphere bubbled up in Las Vegas.

On paper, it looks mad as a loose wheel. A largely Spanish-language musical about a Mexican druglord having a sex change, featuring onetime Disney teen star Selena Gomez as a gangster’s wife: nobody could deny director and writer Jacques Audiard’s giddy determination to do something different, but how could Emilia Pérez be anything but a hot mess? But here is it is on the screen, a musical marvel. Of course it’s crazy, but Audiard has set up his impossible conjuring trick and made it work.

Stalwart Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke leads his partner and muse, Zhao Tao, on a decades-long romantic odyssey in Caught By the Tides, which tries too hard to play with time and form for the connection between its leads to be its central preoccupation.

Three years ago, Cannes audiences fell in love with Renata Reinsve, the titular star of Norwegian competition entry The Worst Person in the World. Chances are, they won’t be quite as well disposed to her character in this austere drama from fellow countryman Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, grandson of Norwegian actress Liv Ullman and Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman. Tøndel’s lineage should give you a fair idea of what’s in store here, but, surprisingly, Armand doesn’t dig especially deep into the human psyche, finally falling into a strange no man’s land between intense character drama and jet-black comedy.

For some years now, Nicolas Cage has been a genre unto himself: desperate, deranged, deliciously cheesy, with that special mastery of dialogue that moves seamlessly from a panting whisper to a bellow and back again. Put Cage’s name above the title and your film has an immediate brand that not only rides over script glitches but does a full Fast and Furious speed-jump over the top of any yawning gaps in probability.

Demi Moore is back on the red carpet in Cannes!

Selena Gomez is rocking a bold red lip for an evening out at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

When Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea) is beaten up outside the one dance club in the village where he grew up, his father takes up the cudgels, chivvying the local police chief into finding out who did it. It would be obvious enough to anyone but dad Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache) that this is a straight-up case of gay-bashing, which would seem to signal that Emanuel Parvu’s Cannes Competition title Three Kilometers to the End of the World, a slice of Romanian life, will be a worthy but familiar story of a boy’s coming out to a hostile world. Indeed, bloodied Adi with his black eyes and traumatic lesions is soon being punished, locked in his room by his parents as his desperate mother prays to the icons on the wall for guidance. We have undoubtedly been down this donkey-track before. 

Selena Gomez has touched down in France to attend the 2024 Cannes Film Festival!

The cast of Megalopolis took to the red carpet at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on Thursday (May 16) to attend the movie’s premiere.

Joe Alwyn is touching down in France to attend the 2024 Cannes Film Festival!

Rithy Panh has dedicated the lion’s share of his career to interrogating the genocidal Khmer Rouge era in his native Cambodia, and it is no trivial obsession. Panh fled Phnom Penh when he was just 11, and after his family was devastated in the Killing Fields, he escaped to a Thai refugee camp at 15. Now 60, Panh has been committed to keeping the memory of the impact of Pol Pot’s tyrannical regime alive in documentary, narrative and animated film.

“When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free,” says Cesar Catalina, the futuristic architect at the beating heart of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (to give it its full title), a mad eco-sci-fi blockbuster some 40 years in the making. Catalina says it several times, and it’s one of the more succinct aphorisms that he spouts in a script that is stuffed with seemingly random literary allusions from the likes of Petrarch, Crassus and Marcus Aurelius to Goethe, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Watching Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire and eating cheese afterwards would be the only way to replicate its fever-dream grandeur, a series of stunning images, carried along by the loosest of plots, that pontificate on the self-destructive nature of humankind, the only species capable of civilizing itself to death.

“Mommie Dearest” actress walked the red carpet at the premiere of the action film “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” starring Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy. She was joined by Laurent Bouzereau, 62, who is the director of her new documentary that is premiering at Cannes, and her son Liam Dunaway O’Neill, 43, who appears in the HBO doc.The Hollywood icon wore a black blazer over a white shirt with black pants.

As a #MeToo wave looked to rock the 77th Cannes Film Festival with rumors swirling that filmmakers with films at the event would be tagged, Thierry Frémaux emphasized his event isn’t about polemics, rather the picture that’s on the screen. If there are controversies during Cannes “we try to avoid them” he said today during an afternoon presser.

Thierry Fremaux addressed France’s #MeToo reckoning during a press conference on the eve of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Following rumors that the French outlet Mediapart is putting together a bombshell report to publish during Cannes with several new #MeToo allegations, there has been much speculation regarding how it will impact the festival.

Angelique Jackson The Olympic flame is coming to the Cannes Film Festival red carpet. The 77th edition of the Festival de Cannes will serve as a preview for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games with the premiere screening of Mickaël Gamrasni’s documentary “Olympiques! La France des Jeux” on May 21.

Good afternoon Insiders, Jesse Whittock here with you today. Cannes is nearly here, and we’ve got you covered there, along with the rest of the noise from the international film and TV worlds.