Cannes Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

It’s safe to say that director Sean Baker‘s latest film, “Red Rocket,” is one of the most anticipated of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “The Florida Project,” Baker’s last film, premiered during the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes 2017 and quickly became one of the most talked-about films at the festival.

The Robert Bresson quote that opens the anthology film “Year of the Everlasting Storm” — “you don’t create by adding, but by taking away” — makes a tidy adage of the time-honored idea that deprivation breeds innovation.

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.

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.

In Arnaud Desplechin’s “Deception” (“Tromperie”), one character’s husband is described as “passionate about dazzling, interesting women.” In this adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name, one can’t help but wish the director shared the character’s interest.

It would be disingenuous not to begin this review by mentioning that, yes, Panah Panahi is indeed related to the titan of Iranian cinema, Jafar Panahi.

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.

“Where are you really from?” It’s an invasive question that’s awfully familiar to people of color, one that intrudes its way into our everyday lives. Though it can have innocent intentions, it’s often hostile and only works to invalidate our livelihood.

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.

What do fans of Sylvan Esso dance house remixes and Bob Dylan have in common? Almost nothing, you’d imagine, and you’d probably be right. But in Clio Barnard’s sweet, unlikely romance “Ali & Ava,” which premiered as part of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight program, the two titular characters—both from opposite musical camps—learn to find common ground in each other’s preferences and more, to share in each other’s lives.

Having been a mainstay of the Croisette for years and a Palme d’Or winner in 2015 for “Dheepan,” French filmmaker Jacques Audiard (“The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” “A Prophet,” both Cannes prize winners), is no stranger to the Cannes Film Festival. Since 2005, all of his films have debuted at Cannes save one (2018’s “The Sisters Brothers” that went to Venice).

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.

As we’ve noted in the last two weeks of this ongoing Cannes Film Festival, Léa Seydoux is the belle of the ball, and she has four films playing at Cannes, three of them in competition.

There’s a lovely wind that blows across the island of Fårö, Ingmar Bergman‘s actual home for several years, and his spiritual home for several decades. Even in the summer, when Mia Hansen-Løve‘s “Bergman Island” is set, the breeze is constant, cool and a little salt-dampened, tousling Vicky Krieps’ hair, scudding through the tufts of scraggly dune-grass and sweeping majestically across the vast empty spaces where the point of this movie is supposed to be.

Two years ago, Noémie Merlant wowed audiences with her incredible performance as the lead actress in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” The film would premiere to rapturous reviews and go on to dominate many critics’ top ten lists at the year’s end. And for Merlant, it served as a breakout performance that made film fans take notice and look out for everything she might have coming up.

The fact that cows in dairy farms usually tend to have miserable lives should be a surprise to no one in this day and age. This knowledge, however, does not take away any of the power of Andrea Arnold’s “Cow,” playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes.

Of the many films playing at Cannes which have gained in resonance since the coming of the pandemic, “Zero F*cks Given” from French duo Julie Lecoustre, and Emmanuel Marre does not represent the creepiest, most alarming kind of coincidence — that description would better fit “Benedetta” from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven, which features an actual plague, face coverings and quarantine measures.

One should perhaps not read too much into the fact that the press screening of Kornel Mundruczó‘s “Evolution” was timed to coincide with the final of the UEFA European Football Championship.

Mention of “the Berkshires” conjures images of pastoral New England abutting major cultural institutions: The Norman Rockwell Museum, Mass MoCA, Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow. Every quaint town center enjoys an abundance of good ice cream and even better coffee.

Just a few days on the heels of “Stillwater,” another American entry in the Cannes Film Festival main competition section explores the complicated relationship between a father and daughter rooted in down-home Americana and close brushes with the law. “Flag Day” marks Sean Penn’s latest directorial return to Cannes since the critically-lambasted “The Last Face” from 2016.

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.

Midway through Joanna Hogg’s seismic “The Souvenir: Part II,” a continuation to her 2019 feature begotten from personal remembrances, her fictional alter ego, Julie (Honor Swinton-Byrne), sits in a van surrounded by the team of student filmmakers helping with her thesis project. The director of photography berates them for the inconsistency of the production attributed to Julie’s scattered-brained process.

You can never really predict what François Ozon might do next. As evidenced by his wide-ranging works, from the lush historical drama “Frantz” to the lazy summer romance “Summer of 85,” the prolific director can do just about anything with the stylistic prowess to boot.

“Once upon a time,” begins any good fairy tale. Though it too begins with this simple phrase, “Mothering Sunday” is no such fairy tale.

Director Joachim Trier has developed quite a relationship with the Cannes Film Festival over the years. Two of his films, 2011’s “Oslo, August 31st” and 2015’s “Louder Than Bombs,” have premiered at the festival, and he also served as the Jury President for the 57th Independent Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2018.

Like father like son, and just like that, there’s competition in the Panahi family for the best filmmaker.

A storm rages in Amsterdam, but that doesn’t deter visitors from lining up outside of the Anne Frank House to get a glimpse of her famous diary and gaze upon the rooms she once inhabited. A home address refashioned as a must-see tourist attraction for quick photos and perhaps some short-lived introspection.

It’s been a rocky four-plus years in American foreign policy, and nowhere is this more apparent than in “Stillwater,” the new thriller-slash-family drama from “Spotlight” director Tom McCarthy, which premiered out-of-competition at Cannes.

The fact that cows in dairy farms usually tend to have miserable lives should be a surprise to no one in this day and age. This knowledge, however, does not take away any of the power of Andrea Arnold’s “Cow,” playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes.

Midway through “The Worst Person in the World,” everything stops. Everyone in the streets of Oslo is frozen in an instant.

Before Jonas Carpignano makes a movie, first, he must find it. His last two features integrated themselves into the terrain of a distinctly modern Italy and imposed a loose narrative on the real-world subcultures based there, with 2015’s “Mediterranea” joining a group of African refugees and 2017’s “A Ciambra” extending that same observant attention to a Romani enclave settled in Calabria.

Quickly becoming one of the greatest humanist filmmakers we have with the most superb eye for composition in cinema, South Korean director Kogonada delicately breaks your heart in the luminous and exquisitely crafted “After Yang.” If you have children (and or can acutely recall your childhood), you know that precise moment in time when your child starts to gently, curiously inquire about death—what happens to us when we die— and then begins to sadly grapple with the concept that all things die,

Filmmaker Justin Kurzel hit a little bit of a speed bump in his rise as a filmmaker when his first major blockbuster, “Assassin’s Creed,” failed to live up to expectations. However, the filmmaker rebounded quite well a couple of years later with “True History of the Kelly Gang,” which showed Kurzel’s true style and talent once again.

“Rehana Maryam Noor,” the second feature film from director Abdullah Mohammad Saad, the first Bangladesh film featured in Cannes, is both a dogged pursuit for justice and a sturdy character study. The titular character Dr.