News Analysis India

Tag: Cannes 2023

  • Britain’s Molly Manning Walker wins Cannes newcomer prize for ‘How to Have Sex’

    By AFP

    CANNES: British director Molly Manning Walker won the coveted Un Certain Regard newcomer prize at Cannes on Friday for her much-praised feature debut “How to Have Sex”.

    “This film was the most magical moment of my life,” the 29-year-old Londoner said after receiving the prize, which she dedicated to “all those who have been sexually assaulted”.

    The film follows three best friends getting drunk in Crete, with one of the girls, Tara, on a mission to lose her virginity — but things soon go wrong.

    All the stereotypes of Brits abroad feature in the film but Manning Walker also sought to break them by digging deeper into the thorny issues of rape and consent.

    It caused a storm at this year’s festival and drew rave reviews.

    Variety found it “chillingly dark”, The Guardian admired its “complex chemistry” and The Hollywood Reporter dubbed it a “hidden gem”.

    ALSO READ | 

    Drawing from her own experience, Manning Walker speaking to AFP earlier during the festival, said she was inspired by “the best times of my life”, but also the sexual assault she suffered at 16 — and wanted to show it all without judgement.

    Shot in a fly-on-the-wall style, she resisted showing graphic assault scenes.

    “I think we as women know that experience way too much — we don’t need to be re-traumatised,” she said.

    Instead, she focused on her characters’ emotional experiences.

    “Everything was from her eyeline and everything was on her face and reading her emotion,” she said.

    Manning Walker is one of an emerging crop of exciting British woman directors alongside the likes of Charlotte Wells whose “Aftersun” was last year’s unexpected breakout at Cannes, earning an Oscar nomination for star Paul Mescal.

    Before directing she was a cinematographer for nearly a decade and shot films for other young British talents including Charlotte Regan’s “Scrapper” that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance film festival this year.

    She has also made music videos and adverts, as well as two short films including “Good Thanks, You?” that screened at Cannes in 2020.

    CANNES: British director Molly Manning Walker won the coveted Un Certain Regard newcomer prize at Cannes on Friday for her much-praised feature debut “How to Have Sex”.

    “This film was the most magical moment of my life,” the 29-year-old Londoner said after receiving the prize, which she dedicated to “all those who have been sexually assaulted”.

    The film follows three best friends getting drunk in Crete, with one of the girls, Tara, on a mission to lose her virginity — but things soon go wrong.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    All the stereotypes of Brits abroad feature in the film but Manning Walker also sought to break them by digging deeper into the thorny issues of rape and consent.

    It caused a storm at this year’s festival and drew rave reviews.

    Variety found it “chillingly dark”, The Guardian admired its “complex chemistry” and The Hollywood Reporter dubbed it a “hidden gem”.

    ALSO READ | 

    Turkey’s Merve Dizdar wins best actress at Cannes for ‘About Dry Grasses’
    The real winner at Cannes was actress Sandra Hueller
    ‘Protests over pension reforms in France repressed in shocking way’: ‘Palme’ winner Justine Triet
     Japan’s Koji Yakusho wins best actor at Cannes for ‘Perfect Days’, an ode to a toilet cleaner
    Drawing from her own experience, Manning Walker speaking to AFP earlier during the festival, said she was inspired by “the best times of my life”, but also the sexual assault she suffered at 16 — and wanted to show it all without judgement.

    Shot in a fly-on-the-wall style, she resisted showing graphic assault scenes.

    “I think we as women know that experience way too much — we don’t need to be re-traumatised,” she said.

    Instead, she focused on her characters’ emotional experiences.

    “Everything was from her eyeline and everything was on her face and reading her emotion,” she said.

    Manning Walker is one of an emerging crop of exciting British woman directors alongside the likes of Charlotte Wells whose “Aftersun” was last year’s unexpected breakout at Cannes, earning an Oscar nomination for star Paul Mescal.

    Before directing she was a cinematographer for nearly a decade and shot films for other young British talents including Charlotte Regan’s “Scrapper” that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance film festival this year.

    She has also made music videos and adverts, as well as two short films including “Good Thanks, You?” that screened at Cannes in 2020.

  • Japan’s Koji Yakusho wins best actor at Cannes for ‘Perfect Days’, an ode to a toilet cleaner

    By AFP

    CANNES: Japan’s Koji Yakusho won best actor at Cannes on Saturday for “Perfect Days” by German director Wim Wenders, a touching tale about a Tokyo toilet cleaner.

    “I want to specifically thank Wim Wenders… who truly created a magnificent character,” he said as he received the award.

    Yakusho, 67, appears in most scenes of “Perfect Days” as a mysterious, bookish man without friends, content to spend his spare time reading, watering his plants, taking photos and listening to songs on his car stereo.

    Director Wim Wenders, left, and Koji Yakusho pose at the photo call for the film ‘Perfect Days’ at the 76th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 26, 2023. (AP)

    The versatile actor’s roles in over four decades of movie-making have ranged from warlords and gangsters to killers and cops — and now an everyman who keeps the public washrooms of Tokyo pristine.

    He has also crossed over to Hollywood for “Memoirs of a Geisha” in 2005 and “Babel” a year later.

    “Wim had given me very little information… There was a lot of mystery. Even today, it’s a character I know almost nothing about,” he said of his role, which involved almost no dialogue.

    Koji Yakusho (AP)

    “It was the first time I shot like that, over a very short period, without rehearsal,” he said about working with one of the giants of European cinema.

    Germany’s Wenders, 77, won the top prize Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984 for “Paris, Texas”.

    Born in 1956 in Isahaya, Nagasaki prefecture, Yakusho first worked as a town hall employee before turning to acting in 1979, after following up on an ad in a newspaper.

    Out of 800 candidates he was one of four selected, “and today I am the only one to be an actor”, he told French media in 2003.

    His first big role that helped propel his career was in the popular hit “Tampopo” (1985) about the hunt for a noodle soup recipe.

    Since then among his notable films have been “The Eel”, winner of the Palme in 1997, and “The Third Murder” in 2017.

    In 2009 he made his first and only feature “Toad’s Oil” in which he also played the lead role.

    Asked what keeps him going in the trade, he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019: “I always think I haven’t got it quite right, but in the next film I’ll finally nail it. I guess that’s the drug of this business for me, which has kept me going for 40 years.”

    ALSO READ | 

    Turkey’s Merve Dizdar wins best actress at Cannes for ‘About Dry Grasses’

    The real winner at Cannes was actress Sandra Hueller

    ‘Protests over pension reforms in France repressed in shocking way’: ‘Palme’ winner Justine Triet

    CANNES: Japan’s Koji Yakusho won best actor at Cannes on Saturday for “Perfect Days” by German director Wim Wenders, a touching tale about a Tokyo toilet cleaner.

    “I want to specifically thank Wim Wenders… who truly created a magnificent character,” he said as he received the award.

    Yakusho, 67, appears in most scenes of “Perfect Days” as a mysterious, bookish man without friends, content to spend his spare time reading, watering his plants, taking photos and listening to songs on his car stereo.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    Director Wim Wenders, left, and Koji Yakusho pose at the photo call for the film ‘Perfect Days’ at the 76th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 26, 2023. (AP)

    The versatile actor’s roles in over four decades of movie-making have ranged from warlords and gangsters to killers and cops — and now an everyman who keeps the public washrooms of Tokyo pristine.

    He has also crossed over to Hollywood for “Memoirs of a Geisha” in 2005 and “Babel” a year later.

    “Wim had given me very little information… There was a lot of mystery. Even today, it’s a character I know almost nothing about,” he said of his role, which involved almost no dialogue.

    Koji Yakusho (AP)

    “It was the first time I shot like that, over a very short period, without rehearsal,” he said about working with one of the giants of European cinema.

    Germany’s Wenders, 77, won the top prize Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984 for “Paris, Texas”.

    Born in 1956 in Isahaya, Nagasaki prefecture, Yakusho first worked as a town hall employee before turning to acting in 1979, after following up on an ad in a newspaper.

    Out of 800 candidates he was one of four selected, “and today I am the only one to be an actor”, he told French media in 2003.

    His first big role that helped propel his career was in the popular hit “Tampopo” (1985) about the hunt for a noodle soup recipe.

    Since then among his notable films have been “The Eel”, winner of the Palme in 1997, and “The Third Murder” in 2017.

    In 2009 he made his first and only feature “Toad’s Oil” in which he also played the lead role.

    Asked what keeps him going in the trade, he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019: “I always think I haven’t got it quite right, but in the next film I’ll finally nail it. I guess that’s the drug of this business for me, which has kept me going for 40 years.”

    ALSO READ | 

    Turkey’s Merve Dizdar wins best actress at Cannes for ‘About Dry Grasses’

    The real winner at Cannes was actress Sandra Hueller

    ‘Protests over pension reforms in France repressed in shocking way’: ‘Palme’ winner Justine Triet

  • The real winner at Cannes was actress Sandra Hueller

    By AFP

    CANNES: She may not have won an award, but many will agree that the big winner at Cannes this year was German actress Sandra Hueller, who starred in the festival’s top two films.

    Hueller confirmed her reputation as one of Europe’s most versatile and fearless actresses as she gave a gripping performance in courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall”, which won the top prize Palme d’Or for French director Justine Triet on Saturday.

    She also starred in Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” by Britain’s Jonathan Glazer, which won the runner-up Grand Prix.

    “I think about human beings as vessels for all sorts of feelings and emotions… it’s just a question of how to channel that and show that,” Hueller told reporters.

    Triet praised Hueller, telling AFP: “Everything that comes out of her is 100 percent strong. Due to her theatre training, she has a completely different way of working. When she arrives, she has already been working for months on the film so her first takes are very strong,” she said.

    “She is an actress who has a real point of view on her character, there is a real exchange.”

    Sandra Huller, left, and director Justine Triet at the photo call for the film ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ at the 76th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 22, 2023. (AP)

    ‘A responsibility’Born on April 30, 1978, in East Germany, Hueller trained in theatre in Berlin after the end of the Cold War.

    She gained international acclaim for “Requiem” (2006), playing a woman with epilepsy in a religious community that believes she is possessed, which won her the best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival.

    Her lead role in black comedy “Toni Erdmann” (2016) confirmed her status as a star of the festival circuit, showing she had comic timing to match her dramatic chops.

    Many felt “Toni Erdmann” was robbed of the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, but that was more that compensated in 2023.

    Her performance in “The Zone of Interest” was particularly disturbing as she took on the role of Hedwig Hoess, wife of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Hoess.

    She told reporters in Cannes that she “felt a responsibility as a German” to play the role.

    “There was no real way to do it right,” she said. “It was never about being good at something or doing something extraordinary. It was so little to do with acting, but with presence, with listening, being respectful for those around us.”

    Sandra Huller poses for photographers upon arrival at the awards ceremony during the 76th international film festival, Cannes, May 27, 2023. (AP)

    Both films at the festival showcase Hueller’s “flinty intelligence, her emotional ferocity and her utter fearlessness,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, calling her the “queen of Cannes”.

    Hueller said the two directors were “completely different” in their approach.

    “But both are so focused on what they do,” she added. “Some directors are a bit manipulative… don’t give you all the information you need for a character, but with these two everything was on the table — what they wanted to achieve, what they wanted to tell.”

    Also known for her stage work, Hueller has collaborated frequently with renowned theatre director Thomas Ostermeier, trying her hand at everything from Shakespeare to avant-garde experimentalism.

    ALSO READ | 

    Japan’s Koji Yakusho wins best actor at Cannes for ‘Perfect Days’, an ode to a toilet cleaner

    Turkey’s Merve Dizdar wins best actress at Cannes for ‘About Dry Grasses’

    CANNES: She may not have won an award, but many will agree that the big winner at Cannes this year was German actress Sandra Hueller, who starred in the festival’s top two films.

    Hueller confirmed her reputation as one of Europe’s most versatile and fearless actresses as she gave a gripping performance in courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall”, which won the top prize Palme d’Or for French director Justine Triet on Saturday.

    She also starred in Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” by Britain’s Jonathan Glazer, which won the runner-up Grand Prix.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    “I think about human beings as vessels for all sorts of feelings and emotions… it’s just a question of how to channel that and show that,” Hueller told reporters.

    Triet praised Hueller, telling AFP: “Everything that comes out of her is 100 percent strong. Due to her theatre training, she has a completely different way of working. When she arrives, she has already been working for months on the film so her first takes are very strong,” she said.

    “She is an actress who has a real point of view on her character, there is a real exchange.”

    Sandra Huller, left, and director Justine Triet at the photo call for the film ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ at the 76th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, May 22, 2023. (AP)

    ‘A responsibility’
    Born on April 30, 1978, in East Germany, Hueller trained in theatre in Berlin after the end of the Cold War.

    She gained international acclaim for “Requiem” (2006), playing a woman with epilepsy in a religious community that believes she is possessed, which won her the best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival.

    Her lead role in black comedy “Toni Erdmann” (2016) confirmed her status as a star of the festival circuit, showing she had comic timing to match her dramatic chops.

    Many felt “Toni Erdmann” was robbed of the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, but that was more that compensated in 2023.

    Her performance in “The Zone of Interest” was particularly disturbing as she took on the role of Hedwig Hoess, wife of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Hoess.

    She told reporters in Cannes that she “felt a responsibility as a German” to play the role.

    “There was no real way to do it right,” she said. “It was never about being good at something or doing something extraordinary. It was so little to do with acting, but with presence, with listening, being respectful for those around us.”

    Sandra Huller poses for photographers upon arrival at the awards ceremony during the 76th international film festival, Cannes, May 27, 2023. (AP)

    Both films at the festival showcase Hueller’s “flinty intelligence, her emotional ferocity and her utter fearlessness,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, calling her the “queen of Cannes”.

    Hueller said the two directors were “completely different” in their approach.

    “But both are so focused on what they do,” she added. “Some directors are a bit manipulative… don’t give you all the information you need for a character, but with these two everything was on the table — what they wanted to achieve, what they wanted to tell.”

    Also known for her stage work, Hueller has collaborated frequently with renowned theatre director Thomas Ostermeier, trying her hand at everything from Shakespeare to avant-garde experimentalism.

    ALSO READ | 

    Japan’s Koji Yakusho wins best actor at Cannes for ‘Perfect Days’, an ode to a toilet cleaner

    Turkey’s Merve Dizdar wins best actress at Cannes for ‘About Dry Grasses’

  • ‘Protests over pension reforms in France repressed in shocking way’: ‘Palme’ winner Justine Triet

    The French director's debut “Age of Panic” was set around the presidential elections in France in 2012 and caused a sensation when it premiered at Cannes the following year. CANNES: French director Justine Triet hit a stridently militant note in her acceptance speech for the Palme d’Or on Saturday. Triet became the third woman to win the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday with her gripping and icy “Anatomy of a Fall”.

    “The country suffered from historic protests over the reform of the pension system. These protests were denied… repressed in a shocking way,” she said.

    She also criticised the “commercialisation of culture” by President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

    Her speech provoked a swift response from Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak, who said she was “gobsmacked” by Triet’s “unfair” comments.

    Victory for the tense courtroom drama about a writer accused of her husband’s murder capped a strong year for women directors at the French Riviera festival.

    “I have always made films about women and here, I went even further in the idea of showing a woman character who is not easy to understand in the first instance,” Triet told AFP ahead of Cannes.

    The 44-year-old follows two previous women winners of the prestigious Palme d’Or — Jane Campion for “The Piano” (1993) and Julia Ducournau for “Titane” (2021).

    Born on July 17, 1978, Triet grew up in Paris and studied arts in the French capital.

    “My mother had a fairly complex life, worked and raised three children, two of whom were not her own. My father was very absent”, she told AFP.

    She ditched her studies after a few years to devote herself to film and made her first documentary in 2007 about student protests that were taking place at the time.

    “Anatomy of a Fall” is her fourth feature.

    Le discours engagé de Justine Triet, réalisatrice de “Anatomie d’une chute”, au moment de recevoir la Palme d’Or de ce 76ème @Festival_Cannes.#Cannes2023 pic.twitter.com/yEQXaCIlrX
    — france.tv cinéma (@francetvcinema) May 27, 2023

    Her debut “Age of Panic” was set around the presidential elections in France in 2012 and caused a sensation when it premiered at Cannes the following year.

    Her next movie, the romcom “In Bed With Victoria” (2016) was nominated for multiple Cesars, France’s equivalent of the Oscars.

    Absolutely incredible moment when Jane Fonda, having awarded Justine Triet the Palme d’Or, rushes after her to hand her the traditional scroll that all winners receive, and, when Triet doesn’t hear her, simply… lobs it right at her. Weeping https://t.co/B7BFAP0jpJ
    — Caspar Salmon (@CasparSalmon) May 27, 2023

    Triet co-wrote her Palme-winning film with her partner Arthur Harari, an actor and director.

    “For a very long time when I watched films, I took myself for the boy, I identified with the male role”, she said, referring to the lack of options for women in the industry when she was young.

    “Anatomy of a Fall” features a show-stopping performance from German actress Sandra Hueller.

    Hueller also had a brief and comical role in Triet’s previous movie “Sibyl”, which competed at Cannes in 2019.

    “Everything that comes out of her is 100 percent strong,” Triet said of Hueller, who also starred in the runner-up at this year’s Cannes, Grand Prix-winner “The Zone of Interest”.

    “She is an actress who has a real point of view on her character, there is a real exchange.”

  • Wes Anderson on his new ’50s-set film ‘Asteroid City,’ AI and all those TikTok videos

    By Associated Press

    CANNES: When Wes Anderson comes down from Paris for the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France, he and his actors don’t stay in one of Cannes’ luxury hotels but more than an hour down the coast and well outside the frenzy of the festival.

    “When we arrived here yesterday, we arrived at a calm, peaceful hotel,” Anderson said in an interview. “We’re one hour away, but it’s a total normal life.”

    Normal life can mean something different in a Wes Anderson film, and that may be doubly so in his latest, “Asteroid City.” It’s among Anderson’s most charmingly chock-full creations, a much-layered, ’50s-set fusion of science fiction, midcentury theater and about a hundred other influences ranging from Looney Tunes to “Bad Day at Black Rock.”

    “Asteroid City,” which Focus Features will release June 16, premiered Tuesday in Cannes. Anderson and his starry cast — including Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Margot Robbie, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright and Adrien Brody — arrived all together in a coach bus.

    The film, which Anderson wrote with Roman Coppola, takes place in a Southwest desert town where a group of characters, some of them nursing an unspoken grief, gather for various reasons, be it a stargazing convention or a broken-down car. But even that story is part of Russian Doll fiction. It’s a play being performed — which, itself, is being filmed for a TV broadcast.

    This image released by Focus Features shows writer-director Wes Anderson on the set of ‘Asteroid City.’ (Photo | AP)

    All of which is to say “Asteroid City” is going to give all those Tik Tok videos made in Anderson’s distinct, diorama style fresh fodder for new social-media replicas, both human-made and AI-crafted.

    Anderson spoke about those Tik Toks in an interview the day before “Asteroid City” debuted in Cannes, as well as other questions of style and inspiration in “Asteroid City,” a sun-dried and melancholic work of vintage Anderson density.

    “I do feel like this might be a movie that benefits from being seen twice,” Anderson said. “Brian De Palma liked it the first time and had a much bigger reaction on the second time. But what can you say? You can’t make a movie and say, ‘I think it’s best everyone sees it twice.’”

    AP: It’s quite a treat to read in the movie’s opening credits “Jeff Goldblum as the alien,” before you even know there’s an alien. That seems to announce something.

    ANDERSON: We naturally were debating whether this is necessary in the opening credits. I said, “You know, it’s a good thing.” It’s a little foreshadowing. In our story, it’s not an expansive role. But part of what the movie is to me and to Roman, it has something to do with actors and this strange thing that they do. What does it mean when you give a performance? If somebody has probably written something and then you study it and learn and you have an interpretation. But essentially you take yourself and put it in the movie. And then you take a bunch of people taking themselves and putting themselves in the movie. They have their faces and their voices, and they’re more complex than anything than even the AI is going to come up with. The AI has to know them to invent them. They do all these emotional things that are usually a mystery to me. I usually stand back and watch and it’s always quite moving.

    AP: The alien may signal doom for the characters of “Asteroid City,” and there are atomic bomb tests in the area. Is this your version of an apocalyptic movie?

    ANDERSON: The apocalyptic stuff was all there. There probably were no aliens, but there certainly was a strong interest in them. There certainly were atom bombs going off. And there had just been I think we can say the worst war in the history of mankind. There’s a certain point where I remember saying to Roman: “I think not only is one of these men suffering some kind of post-traumatic stress that he’s totally unaware of, but he’s sharing it with his family in a way that’s going to end up with Woodstock. But also: They should all be armed. So everybody’s got a pistol.”

    AP: Since maybe “Grand Budapest Hotel,” you seem to be adding more and more frames within frames for Russian doll movies of one layer after another. Your first movies, “Bottle Rocket” and “Rushmore” are starting to seem almost realistic by comparison. Do you think your films are getting more elaborate as you get older?

    ANDERSON: Ultimately, every time I make a movie, I’m just trying to figure out what I want to do and then figure out how to make it such that we do what I want. It’s usually an emotional choice and it’s usually quite mysterious to me how they end up with how end up. The most improvisation aspect of making a movie to me is writing it. I have a tendency to obsess over the stage directions, which are not in the movie. With “Grand Budapest” we had multiple layers to it, and “French Dispatch” certainly had that. This one is really split in two but there’s more complex layers. We know the main movie is the play. But we also have a behind-the-scenes making of the play. We also have a guy telling us that this is a television broadcast of a hypothetical play that doesn’t actually exist. It’s not my intention to make it complicated. It’s just me doing what I want.

    AP: Have you seen all the TikTok videos that have been made in your style? They’re everywhere.

    ANDERSON: No, I haven’t seen it. I’ve never seen any TikTok, actually. I’ve not seen the ones related to me or the ones not related to me. And I’ve not seen any of the AI-type stuff related to me.

    AP: You could look at it as a new generation discovering your films.

    ANDERSON: The only reason I don’t look at the stuff is because it probably takes the things that I do the same again and again. We’re forced to accept when I make a movie, it’s got to be made by me. But what I will say is anytime anyone’s responding with enthusiasm to these movies I’ve made over these many years, that’s a nice, lucky thing. So I’m happy to have it. But I have a feeling I would just feel like: Gosh, is that what I’m doing? So I protect myself.

    AP: People sometimes miss in your films that the characters operating in such precise worlds are deeply flawed and comic. The ornate tableaux may be exact but the people are all imperfect.

    ANDERSON: That’s what I would aspire to, anyway. In the end, it’s a lot more important to me what it’s about. I spend a lot more time writing the movie than doing anything to do with making it. It’s the actors who are the center of it all to me. You can’t simulate them. Or maybe you can. If you look at the AI, maybe I’ll see that you can.

    AP: In “Asteroid City,” you combined an interest in really disparate ideas — the ’50s theater of Sam Shepard with the automat. How does a combination like that happen?

    ANDERSON: We had an idea that we wanted to do a ‘50s setting and it’s got these two sides. One is New York theater. There’s a picture of Paul Newman sitting with a T-shirt on and a foot on the chair in the Actors Studio. It was about that world of summer stock, behind the scenes of that, and these towns that were built and never moved into. That becomes the East Coast and the West Coat and the theater and the cinema. There’s a series of dichotomies. And one of the central things was we wanted to make a character for Jason Schwartzman that was different from what he’s done before. The things that go into making a movie, it eventually becomes too much to even pin down. So many things get added into the mix, which I like. And part of what the movie is about is what you can’t control in life. In a way, the invention of a movie is one of those things.

    CANNES: When Wes Anderson comes down from Paris for the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France, he and his actors don’t stay in one of Cannes’ luxury hotels but more than an hour down the coast and well outside the frenzy of the festival.

    “When we arrived here yesterday, we arrived at a calm, peaceful hotel,” Anderson said in an interview. “We’re one hour away, but it’s a total normal life.”

    Normal life can mean something different in a Wes Anderson film, and that may be doubly so in his latest, “Asteroid City.” It’s among Anderson’s most charmingly chock-full creations, a much-layered, ’50s-set fusion of science fiction, midcentury theater and about a hundred other influences ranging from Looney Tunes to “Bad Day at Black Rock.”googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    “Asteroid City,” which Focus Features will release June 16, premiered Tuesday in Cannes. Anderson and his starry cast — including Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Margot Robbie, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright and Adrien Brody — arrived all together in a coach bus.

    The film, which Anderson wrote with Roman Coppola, takes place in a Southwest desert town where a group of characters, some of them nursing an unspoken grief, gather for various reasons, be it a stargazing convention or a broken-down car. But even that story is part of Russian Doll fiction. It’s a play being performed — which, itself, is being filmed for a TV broadcast.

    This image released by Focus Features shows writer-director Wes Anderson on the set of ‘Asteroid City.’ (Photo | AP)

    All of which is to say “Asteroid City” is going to give all those Tik Tok videos made in Anderson’s distinct, diorama style fresh fodder for new social-media replicas, both human-made and AI-crafted.

    Anderson spoke about those Tik Toks in an interview the day before “Asteroid City” debuted in Cannes, as well as other questions of style and inspiration in “Asteroid City,” a sun-dried and melancholic work of vintage Anderson density.

    “I do feel like this might be a movie that benefits from being seen twice,” Anderson said. “Brian De Palma liked it the first time and had a much bigger reaction on the second time. But what can you say? You can’t make a movie and say, ‘I think it’s best everyone sees it twice.’”

    AP: It’s quite a treat to read in the movie’s opening credits “Jeff Goldblum as the alien,” before you even know there’s an alien. That seems to announce something.

    ANDERSON: We naturally were debating whether this is necessary in the opening credits. I said, “You know, it’s a good thing.” It’s a little foreshadowing. In our story, it’s not an expansive role. But part of what the movie is to me and to Roman, it has something to do with actors and this strange thing that they do. What does it mean when you give a performance? If somebody has probably written something and then you study it and learn and you have an interpretation. But essentially you take yourself and put it in the movie. And then you take a bunch of people taking themselves and putting themselves in the movie. They have their faces and their voices, and they’re more complex than anything than even the AI is going to come up with. The AI has to know them to invent them. They do all these emotional things that are usually a mystery to me. I usually stand back and watch and it’s always quite moving.

    AP: The alien may signal doom for the characters of “Asteroid City,” and there are atomic bomb tests in the area. Is this your version of an apocalyptic movie?

    ANDERSON: The apocalyptic stuff was all there. There probably were no aliens, but there certainly was a strong interest in them. There certainly were atom bombs going off. And there had just been I think we can say the worst war in the history of mankind. There’s a certain point where I remember saying to Roman: “I think not only is one of these men suffering some kind of post-traumatic stress that he’s totally unaware of, but he’s sharing it with his family in a way that’s going to end up with Woodstock. But also: They should all be armed. So everybody’s got a pistol.”

    AP: Since maybe “Grand Budapest Hotel,” you seem to be adding more and more frames within frames for Russian doll movies of one layer after another. Your first movies, “Bottle Rocket” and “Rushmore” are starting to seem almost realistic by comparison. Do you think your films are getting more elaborate as you get older?

    ANDERSON: Ultimately, every time I make a movie, I’m just trying to figure out what I want to do and then figure out how to make it such that we do what I want. It’s usually an emotional choice and it’s usually quite mysterious to me how they end up with how end up. The most improvisation aspect of making a movie to me is writing it. I have a tendency to obsess over the stage directions, which are not in the movie. With “Grand Budapest” we had multiple layers to it, and “French Dispatch” certainly had that. This one is really split in two but there’s more complex layers. We know the main movie is the play. But we also have a behind-the-scenes making of the play. We also have a guy telling us that this is a television broadcast of a hypothetical play that doesn’t actually exist. It’s not my intention to make it complicated. It’s just me doing what I want.

    AP: Have you seen all the TikTok videos that have been made in your style? They’re everywhere.

    ANDERSON: No, I haven’t seen it. I’ve never seen any TikTok, actually. I’ve not seen the ones related to me or the ones not related to me. And I’ve not seen any of the AI-type stuff related to me.

    AP: You could look at it as a new generation discovering your films.

    ANDERSON: The only reason I don’t look at the stuff is because it probably takes the things that I do the same again and again. We’re forced to accept when I make a movie, it’s got to be made by me. But what I will say is anytime anyone’s responding with enthusiasm to these movies I’ve made over these many years, that’s a nice, lucky thing. So I’m happy to have it. But I have a feeling I would just feel like: Gosh, is that what I’m doing? So I protect myself.

    AP: People sometimes miss in your films that the characters operating in such precise worlds are deeply flawed and comic. The ornate tableaux may be exact but the people are all imperfect.

    ANDERSON: That’s what I would aspire to, anyway. In the end, it’s a lot more important to me what it’s about. I spend a lot more time writing the movie than doing anything to do with making it. It’s the actors who are the center of it all to me. You can’t simulate them. Or maybe you can. If you look at the AI, maybe I’ll see that you can.

    AP: In “Asteroid City,” you combined an interest in really disparate ideas — the ’50s theater of Sam Shepard with the automat. How does a combination like that happen?

    ANDERSON: We had an idea that we wanted to do a ‘50s setting and it’s got these two sides. One is New York theater. There’s a picture of Paul Newman sitting with a T-shirt on and a foot on the chair in the Actors Studio. It was about that world of summer stock, behind the scenes of that, and these towns that were built and never moved into. That becomes the East Coast and the West Coat and the theater and the cinema. There’s a series of dichotomies. And one of the central things was we wanted to make a character for Jason Schwartzman that was different from what he’s done before. The things that go into making a movie, it eventually becomes too much to even pin down. So many things get added into the mix, which I like. And part of what the movie is about is what you can’t control in life. In a way, the invention of a movie is one of those things.

  • Cannes 2023: Alicia Vikander on playing Catherine Parr in Henry VIII drama ‘Firebrand’

    By Associated Press

    CANNES — It’s widely known that Henry VIII, the Tudor king, had a particularly grim batting average when it came to matrimony.

    His litany of wives, of course, is the subject of the current Broadway show, “Six,” and many other productions. The wives’ succession of fates — two beheadings and three other deaths — has long loomed in the historical imagination.

    The new film “Firebrand,” which premiered over the weekend at the Cannes Film Festival, takes a different approach to a much-dramatized chapter of 16th-century British history. The film, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, stars Alicia Vikander as Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry and the only one to outlive him.

    “Catherine Parr, out of all of the six wives I probably knew the least of,” Vikander said in an interview on a Cannes hotel terrace. “And it seemed like that was the general feel from everybody that I talked to. The one woman who survived was the least interesting to know about.”

    “Firebrand,” adapted from Elizabeth Freemantle’s novel “The Queen’s Gambit,” has all the accoutrement of a lush period drama (Jude Law grandly co-stars as Henry), but it’s animated by a twist in perspective and a feminist spirit. “History tells us a few things, mostly about men and war,” a title card announces at the movie’s beginning.

    The film follows Parr as she negotiates a coarse, abusive husband while trying to have some role in shaping national affairs. She’s friends with the controversial Protestant preacher Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a relationship that poses grave danger to Parr if found out. Meanwhile, some members of the king’s court, including the bishop Stephen Gardiner (Simon Russell Beale), conspire to have Parr follow in the footsteps of Henry’s prior wives.

    For Vikander, the preternaturally poised 34-year-old Swedish actor, investigating Parr was full of discovery. Parr penned several books in her life and spoke openly about Protestantism, the Reformation and then-controversial English translations of the Bible. That led to accusations of heresy and increasing distrust from Henry.

    “The first Wikipedia search I did when I was sent the script, I saw that she was the first queen who’s ever been published under her own name in British history,” said Vikander. “I thought: That’s really a huge feat to do that with the kind of views that she’s tackling whilst being married to a man known to be the most terrifying and dangerous man with quite different beliefs.”

    “I thought: When did I read a text that’s older than 100 years from a woman?” added Vikander.

    Alicia Vikander, left, and Jude Law at the 76th international film festival, Cannes, southern France (Photo | AP)

    Vikander has often been at home in costume dramas. She starred in “A Royal Affair” and “Anna Karenina” before winning an Oscar for her performance in 2015’s “The Danish Girl.” But some of her best performances — the robot android of “Ex Machina,” the miniseries “Irma Vep” — have been more contemporary.

    “Firebrand,” which doesn’t yet have a release date, speaks to both past and present. To stretch the point, the film ultimately relies on some speculative fiction to imagine what might have happened behind closed doors.

    “Jude and I said even if we sat with 20 history books in front of us, they all have the same pillars of points and have different ways of interpreting what’s in between,” says Vikander. “That’s what we were doing, too, with artistic choices we made.”

    Shot on location at Haddon Hall, Vikander and Law had dressing rooms in the castle cellar. The clothes, too, were transportive.

    “Between takes sitting with the other women, in those costumes you don’t sit up straight. We were all lying on the floor in those corsets,” said Vikander. “It gave me a real image. This is what it was like.”

    CANNES — It’s widely known that Henry VIII, the Tudor king, had a particularly grim batting average when it came to matrimony.

    His litany of wives, of course, is the subject of the current Broadway show, “Six,” and many other productions. The wives’ succession of fates — two beheadings and three other deaths — has long loomed in the historical imagination.

    The new film “Firebrand,” which premiered over the weekend at the Cannes Film Festival, takes a different approach to a much-dramatized chapter of 16th-century British history. The film, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, stars Alicia Vikander as Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry and the only one to outlive him.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    “Catherine Parr, out of all of the six wives I probably knew the least of,” Vikander said in an interview on a Cannes hotel terrace. “And it seemed like that was the general feel from everybody that I talked to. The one woman who survived was the least interesting to know about.”

    “Firebrand,” adapted from Elizabeth Freemantle’s novel “The Queen’s Gambit,” has all the accoutrement of a lush period drama (Jude Law grandly co-stars as Henry), but it’s animated by a twist in perspective and a feminist spirit. “History tells us a few things, mostly about men and war,” a title card announces at the movie’s beginning.

    The film follows Parr as she negotiates a coarse, abusive husband while trying to have some role in shaping national affairs. She’s friends with the controversial Protestant preacher Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a relationship that poses grave danger to Parr if found out. Meanwhile, some members of the king’s court, including the bishop Stephen Gardiner (Simon Russell Beale), conspire to have Parr follow in the footsteps of Henry’s prior wives.

    For Vikander, the preternaturally poised 34-year-old Swedish actor, investigating Parr was full of discovery. Parr penned several books in her life and spoke openly about Protestantism, the Reformation and then-controversial English translations of the Bible. That led to accusations of heresy and increasing distrust from Henry.

    “The first Wikipedia search I did when I was sent the script, I saw that she was the first queen who’s ever been published under her own name in British history,” said Vikander. “I thought: That’s really a huge feat to do that with the kind of views that she’s tackling whilst being married to a man known to be the most terrifying and dangerous man with quite different beliefs.”

    “I thought: When did I read a text that’s older than 100 years from a woman?” added Vikander.

    Alicia Vikander, left, and Jude Law at the 76th international film festival, Cannes, southern France (Photo | AP)

    Vikander has often been at home in costume dramas. She starred in “A Royal Affair” and “Anna Karenina” before winning an Oscar for her performance in 2015’s “The Danish Girl.” But some of her best performances — the robot android of “Ex Machina,” the miniseries “Irma Vep” — have been more contemporary.

    “Firebrand,” which doesn’t yet have a release date, speaks to both past and present. To stretch the point, the film ultimately relies on some speculative fiction to imagine what might have happened behind closed doors.

    “Jude and I said even if we sat with 20 history books in front of us, they all have the same pillars of points and have different ways of interpreting what’s in between,” says Vikander. “That’s what we were doing, too, with artistic choices we made.”

    Shot on location at Haddon Hall, Vikander and Law had dressing rooms in the castle cellar. The clothes, too, were transportive.

    “Between takes sitting with the other women, in those costumes you don’t sit up straight. We were all lying on the floor in those corsets,” said Vikander. “It gave me a real image. This is what it was like.”

  • Cannes 2023: ‘In the Rearview’ spotlights Ukrainians escaping war & Polish efforts to help them

    By Associated Press

    WARSAW: When Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela first began evacuating Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war on their country, he wasn’t intending to make a film. He was one of the many Poles extending humanitarian aid to neighbors under attack, and had turned down an offer to film a television investigation there.

    But the reflections of the people he was transporting to safety in his van were so poignant that soon he began filming them. He asked a friend who is a director of photography to help him film — and drive — and directed his camera squarely back at his passengers as they traversed their war-scarred land.

    The result is “In the Rearview,” a documentary film being shown at the Cannes film festival in France as part of a parallel program devoted to independent cinema. It is not in competition.

    A Polish-French co-production, it takes place almost entirely in Hamela’s van, with the camera capturing the harrowed passengers, one group after another in countless journeys made between March and November of 2022.

    The result is a composite portrait of men, women and children traversing a devastated landscape of bombed-out buildings and past checkpoints with dangerous detours caused by mines and collapsed bridges and roads.

    The 84-minute film shows a little girl so traumatized that she stopped speaking. There is a Congolese woman who was so badly injured that she has undergone 18 operations since Hamela evacuated her. A mother with two kids who pass by the Dnieper River; believing it to be the sea, the kids ask their mother if she will take them there after the war.

    “The way we set up the film was to see the reflection of the war in these very small details of ordinary life and the life that we all have,” Hamela told The Associated Press in an interview in Warsaw before he flew to Cannes.

    There is also some humor, with one woman commenting ironically that she had always wanted to travel. A woman escaping with her cat saying it needed a bathroom break.

    The crew of the documentary ‘In the Rearview’, Maciek Hamela, from left, Kseniia Marchenko, Larysa Sosnovtseva, Yura Dunay, and Anna Palenchuk stand on a rug damaged by a bomb in the town of Lukashivka in Ukraine on the Boulevard de la Croisette during the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, Sunday, May 21, 2023. (Photo | AP)

    In order not to exploit the people he was helping, Hamela told them a camera was in a car before he picked them up. And they only signed forms giving him permission to use the footage after they had arrived safely at their destinations so they would never feel that was a condition for his help.

    “In the Rearview” also documents one of the many Polish efforts to help Ukraine. When Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, there was a massive grassroots effort to help across Poland, with regular people taking time off work to travel to the border with Ukraine to distribute food. Some picked up strangers and took them to shelters or even into their own homes.

    Hamela began on day one to raise money for the Ukrainian army. By day three he had bought a van to transport Ukrainians from the Polish border and convinced his father to open his beloved summer home to strangers.

    Soon Hamela heard from a friend of people in eastern Ukraine needing to be rescued, and he began driving to the front lines of the war to pick them up. Some emerged from basements where they had been sheltering in terror.

    When the war began, Hamela had been working on a documentary about a crisis at Poland’s border with Belarus. Large numbers of migrants from the Middle East and Africa had been trying to cross that border in 2021. Poland and other European Union countries viewed that as an effort organized by Russia’s ally Belarus to destabilize Poland and other EU countries.

    Poland reacted by building a wall to stop the migrants, resulting in some dying in the forests and bogs of the area.

    The war in Ukraine led Hamela to drop that project, which was to have focused on the indifference in some Polish border communities to the plights of the migrants and refugees.

    Having observed both crises up close, he sees a connection.

    “This is my personal take on this, but I really think it was meant to antagonize Poles against all refugees in preparation for the war with Ukraine,” he said.

    Hamela, who is now 40, was also active in supporting Ukrainians involved in the pro-democracy Maidan Revolution of 2014, which led to Russia’s initial incursions into Ukraine.

    He says the world shown in his documentary could hardly be further from the glamorous world of Cannes, and he hopes it will remind people of how high the stakes are in Ukraine.

    “We’re trying to use this coverage to remind everybody that the war is still going on and lives need saving. And Ukraine is not going to win it without our help,” he said. “So that’s the ultimate task with this film.”

    WARSAW: When Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela first began evacuating Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war on their country, he wasn’t intending to make a film. He was one of the many Poles extending humanitarian aid to neighbors under attack, and had turned down an offer to film a television investigation there.

    But the reflections of the people he was transporting to safety in his van were so poignant that soon he began filming them. He asked a friend who is a director of photography to help him film — and drive — and directed his camera squarely back at his passengers as they traversed their war-scarred land.

    The result is “In the Rearview,” a documentary film being shown at the Cannes film festival in France as part of a parallel program devoted to independent cinema. It is not in competition.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    A Polish-French co-production, it takes place almost entirely in Hamela’s van, with the camera capturing the harrowed passengers, one group after another in countless journeys made between March and November of 2022.

    The result is a composite portrait of men, women and children traversing a devastated landscape of bombed-out buildings and past checkpoints with dangerous detours caused by mines and collapsed bridges and roads.

    The 84-minute film shows a little girl so traumatized that she stopped speaking. There is a Congolese woman who was so badly injured that she has undergone 18 operations since Hamela evacuated her. A mother with two kids who pass by the Dnieper River; believing it to be the sea, the kids ask their mother if she will take them there after the war.

    “The way we set up the film was to see the reflection of the war in these very small details of ordinary life and the life that we all have,” Hamela told The Associated Press in an interview in Warsaw before he flew to Cannes.

    There is also some humor, with one woman commenting ironically that she had always wanted to travel. A woman escaping with her cat saying it needed a bathroom break.

    The crew of the documentary ‘In the Rearview’, Maciek Hamela, from left, Kseniia Marchenko, Larysa Sosnovtseva, Yura Dunay, and Anna Palenchuk stand on a rug damaged by a bomb in the town of Lukashivka in Ukraine on the Boulevard de la Croisette during the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, Sunday, May 21, 2023. (Photo | AP)

    In order not to exploit the people he was helping, Hamela told them a camera was in a car before he picked them up. And they only signed forms giving him permission to use the footage after they had arrived safely at their destinations so they would never feel that was a condition for his help.

    “In the Rearview” also documents one of the many Polish efforts to help Ukraine. When Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, there was a massive grassroots effort to help across Poland, with regular people taking time off work to travel to the border with Ukraine to distribute food. Some picked up strangers and took them to shelters or even into their own homes.

    Hamela began on day one to raise money for the Ukrainian army. By day three he had bought a van to transport Ukrainians from the Polish border and convinced his father to open his beloved summer home to strangers.

    Soon Hamela heard from a friend of people in eastern Ukraine needing to be rescued, and he began driving to the front lines of the war to pick them up. Some emerged from basements where they had been sheltering in terror.

    When the war began, Hamela had been working on a documentary about a crisis at Poland’s border with Belarus. Large numbers of migrants from the Middle East and Africa had been trying to cross that border in 2021. Poland and other European Union countries viewed that as an effort organized by Russia’s ally Belarus to destabilize Poland and other EU countries.

    Poland reacted by building a wall to stop the migrants, resulting in some dying in the forests and bogs of the area.

    The war in Ukraine led Hamela to drop that project, which was to have focused on the indifference in some Polish border communities to the plights of the migrants and refugees.

    Having observed both crises up close, he sees a connection.

    “This is my personal take on this, but I really think it was meant to antagonize Poles against all refugees in preparation for the war with Ukraine,” he said.

    Hamela, who is now 40, was also active in supporting Ukrainians involved in the pro-democracy Maidan Revolution of 2014, which led to Russia’s initial incursions into Ukraine.

    He says the world shown in his documentary could hardly be further from the glamorous world of Cannes, and he hopes it will remind people of how high the stakes are in Ukraine.

    “We’re trying to use this coverage to remind everybody that the war is still going on and lives need saving. And Ukraine is not going to win it without our help,” he said. “So that’s the ultimate task with this film.”

  • Martin Scorsese debuts ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ in Cannes to thunderous applause

    By Associated Press

    CANNES: Martin Scorsese unveiled “Killers of the Flower Moon” at Cannes on Saturday, debuting a sweeping American epic about greed and exploitation on the bloody plains of an Osage Nation reservation in 1920s Oklahoma.

    Scorsese’s latest — starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro — is one of his most ambitious. Adapting David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller, it stretches nearly three and a half hours and cost Apple $200 million to make.

    Nothing has been more anticipated at this year’s Cannes Film Festival than “Killers of the Flower Moon” — a historical epic, a bitter crime film and a Great Plains Western — which appeared to meet those expectations. It drew a lengthy standing ovation and repeated cheers for Scorsese, 80, who premiered his first film at Cannes since 1985’s “After Hours.”

    “We shot this a couple of years ago in Oklahoma. It’s taken its time to come around but Apple did so great by us,” Scorsese said, addressing the crowd after the screening. “There was lots of grass. I’m a New Yorker.”

    The red carpet drew a wide spectrum of stars. Along with the film’s expansive cast, attendees included Apple CEO Tim Cook, as well as actors Cate Blanchett, Salma Hayek, Paul Dano and Isabelle Huppert.

    William Belleau, from left, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tantoo Cardinal, director Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Cara Jade Myers, Lily Gladstone, and Jillian Dion at the premiere of the film ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ at Cannes. (Photo | AP)

    Though Grann’s book affords many possible inroads to the story, Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth center their story on Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio, in his seventh collaboration with Scorsese), a WWI veteran who falls for Mollie Brown (Gladstone), the member of a wealthy Osage family.

    Since finding oil reserves on their land, the Osage were then the richest people per capita in the country. But that wealth is closely controlled by appointed white guardians. A series of murders prompts increased panic among the Osage, who are preyed on by a host of greedy killers.

    Though Grann’s book devoted many pages to the connections between the cases and the birth of the FBI, less time is spent in Scorsese’s film on the murder investigations. (Jesse Plemons plays an agent from the just-formed Bureau.) Instead, “Killers of the Flower Moon” captures the manipulation and murders of Native American people through the dynamics in Ernest and Mollie’s relationship.

    “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is playing out of competition in Cannes, opens in U.S. theaters on Oct. 6.

    CANNES: Martin Scorsese unveiled “Killers of the Flower Moon” at Cannes on Saturday, debuting a sweeping American epic about greed and exploitation on the bloody plains of an Osage Nation reservation in 1920s Oklahoma.

    Scorsese’s latest — starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro — is one of his most ambitious. Adapting David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller, it stretches nearly three and a half hours and cost Apple $200 million to make.

    Nothing has been more anticipated at this year’s Cannes Film Festival than “Killers of the Flower Moon” — a historical epic, a bitter crime film and a Great Plains Western — which appeared to meet those expectations. It drew a lengthy standing ovation and repeated cheers for Scorsese, 80, who premiered his first film at Cannes since 1985’s “After Hours.”googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    “We shot this a couple of years ago in Oklahoma. It’s taken its time to come around but Apple did so great by us,” Scorsese said, addressing the crowd after the screening. “There was lots of grass. I’m a New Yorker.”

    The red carpet drew a wide spectrum of stars. Along with the film’s expansive cast, attendees included Apple CEO Tim Cook, as well as actors Cate Blanchett, Salma Hayek, Paul Dano and Isabelle Huppert.

    William Belleau, from left, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tantoo Cardinal, director Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Cara Jade Myers, Lily Gladstone, and Jillian Dion at the premiere of the film ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ at Cannes. (Photo | AP)

    Though Grann’s book affords many possible inroads to the story, Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth center their story on Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio, in his seventh collaboration with Scorsese), a WWI veteran who falls for Mollie Brown (Gladstone), the member of a wealthy Osage family.

    Since finding oil reserves on their land, the Osage were then the richest people per capita in the country. But that wealth is closely controlled by appointed white guardians. A series of murders prompts increased panic among the Osage, who are preyed on by a host of greedy killers.

    Though Grann’s book devoted many pages to the connections between the cases and the birth of the FBI, less time is spent in Scorsese’s film on the murder investigations. (Jesse Plemons plays an agent from the just-formed Bureau.) Instead, “Killers of the Flower Moon” captures the manipulation and murders of Native American people through the dynamics in Ernest and Mollie’s relationship.

    “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is playing out of competition in Cannes, opens in U.S. theaters on Oct. 6.

  • Sean Penn’s ‘Black Flies’ shocks Cannes with graphic imagery

    By IANS

    LOS ANGELES: ‘Black Flies’, the Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan film about emergency medical first responders, smacked the Cannes Film Festival in the face with a brutal world premiere.

    Splattered brains, dead dogs, an addict giving birth with a needle dangling from her arm – these and a litany of other horrors confronted Penn and Sheridan, who play veteran and rookie paramedics, respectively, at the New York Fire Department, reports ‘Variety’.

    Interestingly enough, the black-tie screening at the Grand Palais enjoyed the dose of reality, giving the film a five-minute standing ovation.

    “We carry the misery,” a weary Penn tells Sheridan in the film of their chosen profession. That’s an understatement, as chaos unfolds neighbourhood by neighbourhood in a portrait of an unforgiving city.

    As per ‘Variety’, ‘Black Flies’ stars Sheridan as Ollie Cross, a young paramedic in New York City who is mentored by Penn’s more-experienced EMT. The two are forced to face extreme violence during their shifts, from blood-soaked gunshot wounds to disturbing scenes of domestic violence and life-threatening pregnancies, forcing Ollie to confront his beliefs about life and death.

    Legendary boxer Mike Tyson also stars in the film as Chief Burroughs, Sheridan and Penn’s superior officer.

    LOS ANGELES: ‘Black Flies’, the Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan film about emergency medical first responders, smacked the Cannes Film Festival in the face with a brutal world premiere.

    Splattered brains, dead dogs, an addict giving birth with a needle dangling from her arm – these and a litany of other horrors confronted Penn and Sheridan, who play veteran and rookie paramedics, respectively, at the New York Fire Department, reports ‘Variety’.

    Interestingly enough, the black-tie screening at the Grand Palais enjoyed the dose of reality, giving the film a five-minute standing ovation.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    “We carry the misery,” a weary Penn tells Sheridan in the film of their chosen profession. That’s an understatement, as chaos unfolds neighbourhood by neighbourhood in a portrait of an unforgiving city.

    As per ‘Variety’, ‘Black Flies’ stars Sheridan as Ollie Cross, a young paramedic in New York City who is mentored by Penn’s more-experienced EMT. The two are forced to face extreme violence during their shifts, from blood-soaked gunshot wounds to disturbing scenes of domestic violence and life-threatening pregnancies, forcing Ollie to confront his beliefs about life and death.

    Legendary boxer Mike Tyson also stars in the film as Chief Burroughs, Sheridan and Penn’s superior officer.

  • Cannes: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Monster’ with a big heart

    By AFP

    CANNES: Japan’s Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda unveiled his new movie “Monster” (“Kaibutsu”) at Cannes on Wednesday, a heartwarming tale despite its ominous title.

    Treating issues including bullying and domestic abuse, “Monster” bears many hallmarks of Kore-eda’s tender cinema about tough lives and unconventional families that already won him the top prize in Cannes in 2018 for “Shoplifters”.

    “Monster” begins as a disquieting tale of teacher-pupil harassment with a clear baddie, but judgements are swiftly revised as the film switches points of view.

    “I wanted the spectator to be able to search in the same way the characters were doing in the film,” the 60-year-old director told AFP about the movie’s central mystery: who is the monster?

    Shameful systemBut while Kore-eda’s characters emerge with their humanity intact, Japan’s education system does not come off so well.

    “When an institution puts protecting itself at the very top of its priorities… then ‘what really happened is not important’,” said Kore-eda, quoting a line from the film.

    The phrase, he said, “is relevant not only for Japan’s education system but also the majority of collective institutions that have a tendency to want to protect themselves at the cost of many other things”.

    Kore-eda’s film comes just a year after his last one, “Broker”, premiered in competition at Cannes and scooped the best actor prize for Song Kang-ho, the South Korean star best-known for the multi-Oscar winning “Parasite”.

    In a break from his usual working method, Kore-eda did not pen the script for “Monster” himself, but turned to screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto.

    “As it’s not me who wrote it, I can say without a second thought that I think it’s really a very good screenplay!” he joked about the intricate, multiple viewpoints narrative.

    Since his first fiction film in 1995, Kore-eda has made more than a dozen critically acclaimed features.

    He was first in competition for the Palme d’Or in 2001 with “Distance”, about the devastating personal toll of a cult massacre.

    His breakthrough outside Japan came three years later with “Nobody Knows”, inspired, like many of his films, by a real-life event, this one set around four young siblings abandoned in an apartment by their mother.

    The Cannes Film Festival runs until May 27 with 21 films in competition, including other past Palme winners such as Britain’s Ken Loach and Germany’s Wim Wenders.

    CANNES: Japan’s Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda unveiled his new movie “Monster” (“Kaibutsu”) at Cannes on Wednesday, a heartwarming tale despite its ominous title.

    Treating issues including bullying and domestic abuse, “Monster” bears many hallmarks of Kore-eda’s tender cinema about tough lives and unconventional families that already won him the top prize in Cannes in 2018 for “Shoplifters”.

    “Monster” begins as a disquieting tale of teacher-pupil harassment with a clear baddie, but judgements are swiftly revised as the film switches points of view.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    “I wanted the spectator to be able to search in the same way the characters were doing in the film,” the 60-year-old director told AFP about the movie’s central mystery: who is the monster?

    Shameful system
    But while Kore-eda’s characters emerge with their humanity intact, Japan’s education system does not come off so well.

    “When an institution puts protecting itself at the very top of its priorities… then ‘what really happened is not important’,” said Kore-eda, quoting a line from the film.

    The phrase, he said, “is relevant not only for Japan’s education system but also the majority of collective institutions that have a tendency to want to protect themselves at the cost of many other things”.

    Kore-eda’s film comes just a year after his last one, “Broker”, premiered in competition at Cannes and scooped the best actor prize for Song Kang-ho, the South Korean star best-known for the multi-Oscar winning “Parasite”.

    In a break from his usual working method, Kore-eda did not pen the script for “Monster” himself, but turned to screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto.

    “As it’s not me who wrote it, I can say without a second thought that I think it’s really a very good screenplay!” he joked about the intricate, multiple viewpoints narrative.

    Since his first fiction film in 1995, Kore-eda has made more than a dozen critically acclaimed features.

    He was first in competition for the Palme d’Or in 2001 with “Distance”, about the devastating personal toll of a cult massacre.

    His breakthrough outside Japan came three years later with “Nobody Knows”, inspired, like many of his films, by a real-life event, this one set around four young siblings abandoned in an apartment by their mother.

    The Cannes Film Festival runs until May 27 with 21 films in competition, including other past Palme winners such as Britain’s Ken Loach and Germany’s Wim Wenders.