Cannes 2022 Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Albert Serra‘s “Pacifiction” made a splash at its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May. But after Cahiers du Cinéma crowned the film as their top one of 2022 last month, “Pacifiction” became a must-see film for American audiences.

The attitudes around remakes ebb and flow depending on what audiences see coming out of Hollywood. Some people love remakes, some people hate them, and some people see them as necessary to fund a more original project.

After making the festival circuit over the past calendar year, including a world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Riley Keough & Gina Gammell‘s feature debut “War Pony” finally eyes a US theatrical release. No word yet on when that happens, but Momentum Pictures picked up the film’s US distribution rights at SXSW 2023 in March.

Felix van Groeningen‘s last film, 2018’s “Beautiful Boy” with Steve Carrell and Timothée Chalamet, was his English-language debut. But Groeningen returns to his roots, at least artistically, for his latest.

In theory, Michelle Williams really did not need to do this. It’s just two days after she attended the 95th Academy Awards and, on her fifth nomination, sadly came up short.

Over the past decade, Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor have made some of the most mesmerizing documentary films through Harvard University‘s Sensory Ethnography Lab. Count 2012’s “Leviathan” and 2017’s “Caniba” among the duo’s best works–two films that explore the viscerality of human life in distinctly different ways.

Few filmmakers have had as idiosyncratic a career as Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski. But Skolimowski may have saved one of his best movies for a late-career highlight with “EO,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where it co-won the Jury Prize with “The Eight Mountains.” READ MORE: ‘Eo’ Review: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Reimagining Of Robert Bresson’s ‘Au Hasard Balthazar’ Has A Haunting Beauty [Cannes] Inspired by Robert Bresson‘s 1966 film “Au Hasard Balthazar,” the film follows a donkey that escapes the Polish circus to traverse the countryside on an absurd and stirring adventure.

American audiences know Lee Jung-jae as the Emmy Award-winning actor on Netflix‘s “Squid Game.” However, in his home country of South Korea, he’s arguably better known for his directing. And what a resume Jung-jae has, full of actioners, period pieces, and thrillers.

This year “All That Breathes” became the first film to win both Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize (World Cinema) and Cannes’ Documentary Prize. Directed by Shaunak Sen, the documentary follows two brothers in Delhi on their journey to protect a bird known as the black kite in an urban environment overrun with pollution and civil violence.

Last week at the Cannes Film Festival, Viggo Mortensen addressed a longstanding rumor about his “Crimes Of The Future” director David Cronenberg. The story goes that in 1999 when Cronenberg headed the Cannes Jury, he “deprived” Pedro Almodóvar‘s “All About My Mother” to award the Palme d’Or to the Dardennes‘ “Rosetta.” In an interview with Indiewire’s Eric Kohn, Mortensen called the rumor “bullshit” and claimed the Palme vote for “Rosetta” was not only the fastest one ever but also unanimous.

The 75th Cannes Film Festival is coming to a close on Saturday afternoon, and after much speculation as to what would take home the top prize, it was a familiar winner striking gold again. For the second time in five years, director Ruben Östlund won the coveted Palme d’Or for his English-language debut film, “Triangle of Sadness.” Östlund first won the prize back in 2017 for “The Square” and beat out eighteen other films to win this year’s top prize.

Though shot and set prior to the Russian invasion, by dint of being a Ukrainian picture detailing the aftermath of a woman soldier’s assault in the Donbas, “Butterfly Vision” lays claim to uniquely wretched timeliness at this year’s Cannes. What is an impressive if formally flawed first film from Maksym Nakonechnyi earns some emotional weight vis-a-vis present events: the Ukrainian flags of blue and white, flown with unsparing pride across Nakonechnyi’s images, bear the immediate frisson of beleaguered resistance, and that women Stateside presently face unprecedented threats to their bodily autonomy only compounds the miserable resonance.

Filmmakers seeking to denounce the crushing effects of capitalism often seem to rely on the excuse that if their films aren’t subtle, it’s because capitalism itself isn’t either. But such systems of exploitation probably wouldn’t still be around if, on top of having (very visible, obvious, violent) power on their side, the powers that be didn’t perniciously plant their hooks into the minds and hearts of their victims, making them do most of the work for them.

This year’s dark horse in competition at Cannes is easily “Leila’s Brothers,” Iranian writer-director Saeed Roustaee’s third feature and worthy follow-up to his intense 2019 cop thriller “Just 6.5.” With hints of “The Godfather” and Arthur Miller evident throughout, the drama is a sprawling tale exploring dysfunctional family dynamics, economic hardships, and generational wealth. READ MORE: Cannes Film Festival 2022 Preview: 25 Must-See Films To Watch “Leila’s Brothers” follows the lives of a Tehran family as they struggle to stay afloat amidst financial hardships and complicated familial relationships.

CANNES – Lukas Dhont’s second feature, “Close,” starts off where most love stories end, and, in that respect, it begins with almost euphoric joy. Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) are the best of friends.

Unlike most films and series set in Naples, “Nostalgia” really does show us the city like we’ve never seen it before: from the melancholy perspective of someone who left forty years ago. Italian director Mario Martone makes the astute and powerful decision not to make this immediately obvious, opening the film with a stunning sequence showing a man (Pierfrancesco Favino) silently arrive in and explore the city at night.

Guillermo del Toro doesn’t have a new film at the Cannes Film Festival, but the director was on the French Riviera this week as part of a symposium on the current state of cinema. And he had some choice words about movies in the age of streaming.

In the late 19th century, two French psychiatrists coined the term “folie à deux,” literally translated as madness for two, to describe what is now widely referred to as shared psychotic disorder, or when two — or more — people transmit delusional beliefs and occasional hallucinations to one another. The condition is most common in people closely related, who live in intimate proximity, and has been lengthily dissected by academics.

As countries go, Iceland is probably one of the most fast-changing in terms of its biological make up, its intense volcanic activities reshaping its surface and contours at a speed fast enough to be perceived within a single generation. Paradoxically, it is also a place where time appears to stand still, with the sun omnipresent for half the year and absent for the rest.

Based on her own time spent in the acting school Les Amandiers, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” aims to recreate a very specific time and place both in her life and in France, more than it cares to inform her audience about what, exactly, was so special about this school. Funded in the 1980s by Patrice Chéreau, a successful and daring director of theatre, opera and film, Les Amandiers did not last very long but for a few years it was considered to be one of the most exciting places in France and even Europe for young actors to develop their crafts, and for directors to find new talent.

Swedish director Ruben Östlund‘s already won one Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; in 2017 for “The Square.” And while he’s back in Cannes again this year with “Triangle Of Sadness” to try and win another, he already has his next film in mind, with Woody Harrelson set to star for him again. READ MORE: ‘Triangle Of Sadness’ Review: Ruben Östland’s Falters In This Broad Class Satire [Cannes] In an interview with Variety, Östlund gave details about the new project, including its title and premise.

Observed in isolation, detached from the body or in extreme close-ups, organs and other vital viscera resemble moist masses of soft tissue plucked from alien landscapes in the unflinchingly immersive medical documentary “De Humani Corporis Fabrica.” Alternating between footage from cameras inserted into patients for the purpose of treating ailments and grisly shots from the operating room, directors Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the team behind the striking non-fiction film on fishing “Leviathan,” apply their fascination for uncanny imagery with relativist intent to the inner workings of French hospitals and, in turn, the human body.

“Tori and Lokita” opens on a tight close-up on the teenage Lokita (Joely Mbundu) as she struggles with the questions delivered by an immigration officer. She has fabricated a story about how she found her brother, Tori (Pablo Schils) in an orphanage, but no one believes her.

A documentary with no guardrails, “The Natural History of Destruction” (“NHD”) lurches through its 105-minute runtime with no concern for its audience’s bearings or balance. Commendable in its own way, eschewing as it does the omnipresent talking head and clip art formula so pervasive on the documentary scene, it is also devoid of context and narrative challenges.

A balloon shaped like a heart flies from the open window of a taxi. It is late at night and the woman (Leila Hatami) who this gift was bestowed upon simply couldn’t care less about the useless trinket, far more interested in comparing the quality of the accompanying chocolate boxes dispensed by a handful of men who wish to have her as a Valentine.

It’s the plight of the plightless: a kid from a comfortable, upper-middle-class background wants to be some manner of artist, except that he’s (and it does seem to be a he more often than not) bereft of the experience, grit, or outsider credibility that define the role models he hopes he could one-day call influences. He ventures out into the big bad world in search of something to put a bit of hair on his creative chest, only to face the spiny question of whether this effort to get real is just class tourism, a jaunt in the gutter that one phone call to Dad could prevent.

It’s the plight of the plightless: a kid from a comfortable, upper-middle-class background wants to be some manner of artist, except that he’s (and it does seem to be a he more often than not) bereft of the experience, grit, or outsider credibility that define the role models he hopes he could one-day call influences. He ventures out into the big bad world in search of something to put a bit of hair on his creative chest, only to face the spiny question of whether this effort to get real is just class tourism, a jaunt in the gutter that one phone call to Dad could prevent.

A drastic departure from his prior films “Border” and “Shelley,” Ali Abbasi’s newest film, “Holy Spider,” draws inspiration from the 2000-2001 crimes and subsequent trial of Saeed Hanaei (played here by Mehdi Bajestani), a war veteran-turned-serial killer in the Iranian city of Mashhad who murdered 16 sex workers, claiming that he was cleansing the holy city of sinners and corruption in the name of Islam.

“Narcissists are the ones who make it…combined with talent, it’s a plus,” Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) coolly observes in the opening stages of the wickedly enjoyable “Sick of Myself.” For anyone who’s watched a partner realize their dreams, a trusted colleague get promoted, or a friend become famous, and curdled with jealousy and resentment, Kristoffer Borgli has made the film for you. The filmmaker’s tart and scabrously funny (both literally and figuratively) sophomore feature is a pointed portrait of a toxic relationship and a razor-sharp evisceration of those warped by a victim mentality.

The films of French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux are at their best when they combine his penchant for ludicrous but simple what-if scenarios, with his perceptive eye for humor in everyday life and banal interactions. He would probably hate his cinema to be pinned down in this way: though he has proven that he can subscribe to straightforward storytelling with “Deerskin” (which premieres at Cannes in 2019) and “Incredible But True” (Berlinale 2022), the French director and absurdist also enjoys leaving the demands of logical plot developments behind in favor of a freer style.

CANNES – It may seem obvious, but sometimes combining two compelling stories doesn’t lead to an overall more captivating film. That’s the primary takeaway from Gina Gammell and Riley Keough‘s somewhat messy “War Pony,” which debuted at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival this weekend.

CANNES – We are living in yet another era of European history where old battles over the borders of nation-states are being disputed. Russia has invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine after already annexing the province of Crimea less than a decade ago.

During the winter in a small town in northern Finland, you might find yourself making plans to ask questions about human existence on a Saturday night. Or perhaps you’ll stay up in bed, giggling while reading a book by Sigmund Freud.

With his classic 1990s heartthrob looks, it was only a matter of time before Paul Mescal found his way into a film set in that era. Like “Normal People,” the series that catapulted the young Irish actor to fame, Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun” has him wearing shorts, but this time with a belt and the polo shirt tucked in — a detail like many others in the film that should send a wave of recognition through audience members who grew up then.

“Bait,” British filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s breakout feature, could well be considered a horror movie. Set in a quaint little fishing enclave off the Cornish coast, where the ship decks are rickety and the townhouses’ whitewash ever-peeling, the knotty fear of loss is ever-present: of history, of possession, of tradition, of heritage, of liberty.

There’s always at least one. Just a few nights deep into this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the competition has thrown up its first wild, batshit, and occasionally beautiful curiosity.