‘Tchaikovsky’s Wife’ Director Defends Pic’s Oligarch Financier Roman Abramovich: “We Need To Lift The Sanctions” – Cannes

Not holding back. Matthew Morrison’s wife, Renee Puente, is speaking her mind after the actor was fired from So You Think You Can Dance amid allegations of “inappropriate” behavior.

EXCLUSIVE: Coda producer Pathé has concluded a raft of sales on its Cannes slate including for starry French drama Masquerade, Directors’ Fortnight entry Paris Memories and Penelope Cruz title L’Immensita.

A disabled passenger was left with no choice but to call the police after a three-and-a-half hour struggle to leave a chaos-hit airport in the early hours.

Love Island is all about gorgeous, gorgeous people trying to find love in the villa of dreams, right?Over the years, we've fallen in love with many Islanders (Chris Hughes, Ovie Soko, Tommy Fury), but the latest confirmed contestant may just trump them all.Yep, 2022 is the year we finally get to see a true ITALIAN GOD enter the villa. Say hello to Davide Sanclimenti who has already made it his mission for the whole nation to fall in love with him in a couple of months.Honestly, there must be something wrong with this man because he looks like he was carved by ANGELS.Davide will join the original Love Island 2022 line-up and will join Welsh paramedic Paige Thorne, model and dancer Tasha Ghouri and microbiologist Dami Hope.He is one of the oldest Islanders this year at 27 years old.You'll be shocked to know that he isn't a model, he's a business owner.He's from Rome, Italy and boy does he know it, "I’m going to be the Italian stallion in the Villa! "With my Italian charm, I can also be a very romantic guy.

Guy Lodge Film CriticFrench film “The Worst Ones (Les Pires)” is the surprise winner of the top prize at this year’s Un Certain Regard awards ceremony, with Italian actor-director Valeria Golino and her fellow jurors also handing prizes to Pakistani breakout “Joyland,” Romanian drama “Metronom” and “Corsage” star Vicky Krieps.

review, Nicholas Barber wrote that “Corsage” stylistically resembles the dreamy Kristen Stewart film “Spencer.” “Whenever the film seems to be settling into an atmospheric but conventionally good-looking period piece, Kreutzer throws in an amusing and jarring reminder of the modern world, as if Elisabeth were breaking out of her allotted role by time-traveling, momentarily, to the present day,” Barber wrote. “Corsage” follows Elisabeth around her 40th birthday at a time when her role in the empire is slowly becoming more performative and has to fight to maintain her public image by lacing her corset ever tighter and tighter.

CANNES, France -- Cristian Mungiu's Cannes Film Festival entry “R.M.N.” is set in an unnamed mountainous Transylvanian village in Romania, but the conflicts of ethnocentricity, racism and nationalism that permeate the multi-ethnic town could take place almost anywhere.Of all the films competing for the top Palme d'Or prize at Cannes, none may be quite as of the moment as “R.M.N." The movie, using a Romanian microcosm, captures the us-vs-them battles that have played out across Europe and beyond, wherever immigration and national identities have collided.Mungiu, the celebrated Romanian filmmaker of the landmark 2007 abortion drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," has long been accustomed to his films being written off as grim portraits of a faraway Eastern Europe. It's a caricature he rejects, especially when it comes to “R.M.N.”“Whenever journalists interpret that it’s yet again another somber painting of this country, well, it’s not about that country — or not only about that country,” Mungiu told reporters Sunday.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent“1976,” the awaited first feature of Chile’s Manuela Martelli, has closed first new major territories for sales company Luxbox before its world premiere in Directors’ Fortnight later this upcoming week.The film is produced out of Chile by writer-directors Omar Zúñiga (“The Strong Ones”) and Dominga Sotomayor (“Too Late to Die Young”) at auteur-focused Chile-based Cinestación (“Too Late to Die Young”) as well as Alejandra Garcia and Andrés Wood, another celebrated Chilean director (“Violeta Went to Heaven”) at Wood Productions. Nathalia Videla Peña and Juan Pablo Gugliotta at Argentina’s Magma Cine co-produce.“1976” is set, as its title implies, in 1976, one of the bloodiest years of Augusto Pinochet’s hugely bloody dictatorship.

EXCLUSIVE: As Roman Abramovich-backed Tchaikovsky’s Wife unspools this week at the Cannes Film Festival, the French Ministry of Economy and Finance has clarified its position regarding movies backed by sanctioned oligarchs.

Marta Balaga Ukrainian industry players gathered in Cannes are determined to show they can provide a variety of new content, as well as stories that look beyond the current Russian invasion.“I have been repeating this since 2014 — it’s a trap to be only associated with war,” says producer Julia Sinkevych, now behind Marysia Nikitiuk’s upcoming feature “Lucky Girl.”Presented at the Cannes Market as part of the Ukrainian Features Preview, it shows a successful TV star who has everything, until she is diagnosed with cancer.As noted by Ukrainian Institute’s Natalie Movshovych, several projects focus on the 1990s, including “When We Were 15” — awarded at Meeting Point Vilnius in April — “Do You Love Me?” by Tonia Noyabriova, Philip Sotnychenko’s “Lapalissade” and “Rock. Paper.

Audrey Diwan’s planned English language directing debut, the erotic tale Emmanuelle starring Lea Seydoux, has buyers buzzing as much as any Cannes Market package being shopped this week on the Croisette. But her last film Happening (which didn’t make the cut as France’s choice for Best Foreign Language Film, though many felt it would have won) might have the most lasting impact. The film is just released in the U.S. smack in the middle of revelations that the Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe V Wade.

Christopher Vourlias Despite widespread calls to boycott Russian cinema in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, the Cannes Film Festival struck an uneasy compromise by banning state delegations and Russians with ties to President Vladimir Putin while allowing individual filmmakers to attend.It’s a decision iconoclastic Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov was quick to support on the eve of the world premiere of his latest feature, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” which bows in competition on May 18.The director was a no-show at his last two Cannes premieres due in no small part to a history of provocation and dissent against the Russian government. But Serebrennikov – who after a nearly five-year legal ordeal learned on March 28 that he could leave Russia a free man – insists that the type of subversive cinema he creates should be separated from pro-Kremlin propaganda and the “paranoid ideology” of the Putin regime. “Russian culture is about the fragility of life.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaIFC Films has acquired North American rights to “R.M.N.,” the new film from acclaimed writer, director and producer Cristian Mungiu, ahead of its world premiere in Cannes this week.It’s a grand reunion for the indie studio and the director, marking their fifth distribution collaboration. IFC Films will release “R.M.N.” theatrically in 2022.

Naman Ramachandran “Le Musk,” the directorial debut of Oscar, BAFTA and Grammy winning Indian composer A.R. Rahman (“Slumdog Millionaire”), will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Market’s Cannes XR program.The 36-minute film is billed as a cinematic sensory experience incorporating virtual reality, with motion, music and scent integrated into the narrative. It follows heiress and musician Juliet Merdinian, who, 20 years since she was orphaned, seeks out the men who changed her destiny with one powerful memory — that of their scent.Rahman developed the story from an original idea by his wife Saira.