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Jerry Lewis: women doing broad comedy bothers me
21 minutes ago
French favourite Jerry Lewis, 87, presents new movie and keeps press – mostly – in stitches at the Cannes film festival
The French adoration of comic Jerry Lewis is a legendary, and the country at last got its wish: Lewis has a film at the Cannes film festival for the first time since 1989, and the 87-year-old duly turned up to receive the plaudits, waspishly shouting "[The French] kept me alive for 50 years!"
The film in question, Max Rose, was written and directed by Daniel Noah, and casts Lewis as a newly-widowed jazz pianist (also 87) who is concerned that his entire apparently-happy marriage may have been illusory, and that his recently-deceased wife may have been in love with another man.
At his press conference, Lewis was vocal in his praise for the film. "I thought it was the best script I'd read in 40 years … it's an incredible movie, that's going to give a lot of people a lot of pleasure. »
- Andrew Pulver
Alec Baldwin: 'The movies are abandoning serious acting to television'
45 minutes ago
The actor has been at Cannes making a documentary, Seduced and Abandoned, about the film festival. Here he talks about the state of his profession today
Where I've ended up, I'm pretty content. I see the people at the top of the movie business today and I compare their careers with those at the top 40 years ago. I wouldn't trade places with those that dominate today; I don't necessarily want what they have. I want the choices they have but I look at some of the films they make and think: "You could get anybody to play those parts."
They'll roll out a film like Lincoln every now and again with Kushner and Spielberg and Day-Lewis – who is someone I worship. I saw him at the SAG awards and I said: "Do you realise what your career means to other actors? You give them hope that there is still some purity in acting. »
- Catherine Shoard
Close up: Cannes, crime and ultraviolence
49 minutes ago
Catch up with the last seven days in the world of film
This time last week the biggest story coming out of Cannes was The Great Gatsby – but oh, how quickly things change. Since then critics have been getting in a lather about all manner of things, but no film has been quite as divisive as Only God Forgives, Nicholas Winding Refn's follow-up to Drive.
Starring Ryan Gosling as Julian, a westerner submerged in Bangkok's criminal underworld, it's a creepy, ultraviolent revenge tale that provoked boos and walkouts when it screened at Cannes on Wednesday – although that didn't stop Peter Bradshaw awarding it five stars while declaring that "every scene, every frame, is executed with pure formal brilliance."
Xan Brooks offered more praise (albeit slightly more reserved), while our report from the press conference found the director confessing that he approaches filmmaking "like a pornographer: it's about »
Second jewellery theft hits French Riviera during Cannes film festival
50 minutes ago
Necklace of 'high value' is taken from resort of Cap d'Antibes near Cannes
An expensive necklace was stolen overnight in the luxurious resort town of Cap d'Antibes, police said, the second jewellery theft on the French Riviera during the Cannes film festival.
A police official said on Thursday that the necklace was of "high value" but could not put a price on it. She would only speak on condition of anonymity because an investigation was under way.
Last week, thieves stole about $1m (£660,000) worth of jewels after ripping a safe from the wall of a hotel room in Cannes, where the world's movie stars are attending the festival.
During last year's film festival the international Senegalese footballers, Souleymane Diawara and Mamadou Niang, had four luxury watches worth around £340,000 stolen from their villa.
Cap d'Antibes is just down the coast from Cannes and is an even more exclusive Côte d'Azur resort. »
Candelabra shows our best romances are gay
54 minutes ago
As Soderbergh's Liberace biopic hits our screens, why is it that homosexual love stories now work so much better than hetero?
I know where I'll be Sunday night. The reviews coming out of Cannes for Steven Soderbergh's Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra, which airs on HBO on Sunday night, have turned it into must-see TV.
We might have been able to guess that Soderbergh's take on the kitsch-addicted superstar would turn out to be "mesmeric, riskily incorrect, outrageously watchable and simply outrageous" (The Guardian). Or that Michael Douglas would be "shrewd, rude, wickedly funny" (Indiewire) in the central role. What is interesting is that the film, which was made for HBO because it was "too gay" for mainstream cinematic release, has turned out to be "both hilarious and heartrending" (The Playlist), an "intimate love story" (Thompson on Hollywood) and Soderbergh's "most emotional and touching work" to date (Hollywood Elsewhere »
- Tom Shone
Cannes 2013: La Vie D'Adèle Chapitres 1 et 2 (Blue is the Warmest Colour) – first look review
1 hour ago
Epic and erotic yet intimate – Abdellatif Kechiche's uncompromising story of an affair makes other films look tame
There's a devastating mix of eroticism and sadness in Abdellatif Kechiche's new film, which returns to the style and setting of his 2003 movie Games Of Love and Chance. It's the epic but intimate story of a love affair between two young women, unfolding in what seems like real time. There's an interestingly open, almost unfinished quality to the narrative, although this could just be because the print shown here in Cannes was still without credits. The film is acted with honesty and power by Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos; the affair itself is a little idealised, and the film is flawed by one rather histrionic scene, though not, I think, by its expansive three-hour length. Nonetheless, this is still a blazingly emotional and explosively sexy film, which reminds you how timidly unsexy most films are, »
- Peter Bradshaw
Liz Hurley and Gérard Depardieu's Chechnya adventure: the story so far
1 hour ago
The 'actress' is in Grozny, shooting a film with the French bon viveur, and hanging out with colourful Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. But, best of all, Steven Seagal is also in town
To a news report concerning Gerard Depardieu's views on the alleged Boston bombers, and a statement so appallingly controversial that Lost in Showbiz can still scarcely believe it. "Speaking in the southern Russian province of Chechnya, where he is shooting a movie with British actress Elizabeth Hurley, Depardieu said: 'I agree with [Chechen president] Ramzan Kadyrov who said that the Tsarnaev brothers have a Chechen last name, but their upbringing is American.'"
I'm sorry, but What? Tell me I didn't just read that. And yet, there it is in black and white: "where he is shooting a movie with British actress Elizabeth Hurley".
Mine eyes!
For a long time, it has seemed as though the "actress" part of Liz's Twitter biography – "mum, »
- Marina Hyde
Alejandro Jodorowsky: 'I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul'
1 hour ago
Th 84-year-old director rolled into Cannes this week to discuss his latest film La Danza de la Realidad, a magic-realist memoir of his youth. He talks about his troubled childhood, his passion for psychomagic – and why ageing doesn't touble him
Missing, believed lost, Alejandro Jodorowsky rolls into Cannes like a conquering hero. He has a room at the Croisette and a film in the directors' fortnight – a rambunctious sidebar away from the Palais. "I am like the rain, I go where I'm needed," the director explains. "If I were in the big house, with the red carpet and photographers and all the fancy women, I would be ashamed." He has always been happier way out on the fringes.
Jodorowsky turned 84 last birthday. He has white hair, bright eyes and a crocodile smile. It is now more than four decades since he thrilled the faithful as El Topo, a mysterious gunslinger in rabbinical black, »
- Xan Brooks
The Golden Cage – first look review
1 hour ago
Three Guatemalan teenagers' attempts to cross the murderous Mexico-us border region makes for gripping viewing
Even when Ken Loach doesn't have a film in competition in Cannes, his influence is still keenly felt. Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez was a camera assistant on Loach's Carla's Song, Land and Freedom and Bread and Roses, and there is something very Loachian in this tough, absorbing, suspenseful drama showing in the Un Certain Regard section about three Guatemalan kids trying illegally to cross the Mexican border into the Us.
He has avowedly stuck to Loach's realist directing style: shooting in narrative sequence and using a semi-improvisatory approach on location. It is interesting that while British directors such as Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard have hyper-evolved the Loach idiom into beautifully realised and photographed dramas of naturalism, Quemada-Diez is arguably closer to the gritty, grainy original.
The title comes from a Mexican ballad, Jaula de Oro, »
- Peter Bradshaw
Cannes film festival diary: day eight
1 hour ago
People are beginning to leave Cannes. Perhaps it's because they don't want to catch germs from Only God Forgives
Inside the Lumière theatre, a spectator is coughing. The coughing on one side sparks a response in the other and before long everyone appears to be at it and the whole place sounds like New Year's Eve at the TB sanatorium. I seem to remember the same thing happening last year; it's like some weird Cannes tradition. By this point of the festival, the delegates are breaking down.
Already the first cardboard boxes have appeared in the marche, the first sign that the sellers are packing up and moving on. The Salle Buñuel at the top of the Palais is more than half-empty for the late morning screening. It gives the place a morbid air. Logic tells me that these absentees can all be accounted for. They are off riding trains, »
- Xan Brooks
Prophet boosting: the new Muhammad films
1 hour ago
Two big-budget biopics of the prophet in production – difficulties around presenting his image notwithstanding – have genuine blockbuster potential, and could promote cultural dialogue
"Be a bridge!" Those are the Turkish teacher's last words to the Bosnian boy he's just pulled out of a surging torrent, before he dives back into the river to reach a second pupil. Seconds earlier, the two teenagers had been locked together – Muslim v Orthodox Christian, a knife hovering between them. But the teacher, doggy-paddling against the current, knows that religion makes no difference when lives are at stake. There's a message from on high (and we're not talking Allah) about the dangers of division between men: overhead is Sarajevo's Latin Bridge, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand received his fateful 1914 gunshot.
Turkish religious hit Selam certainly doesn't shy away from the grand gesture. That's the climax to one of its three stories, which all focus on the »
- Phil Hoad
Cannes film festival diary: day nine
2 hours ago
From the rumoured vantage point of a luxury yacht, Spielberg and his fellow Cannes judges may have a different perspective to critics on the pick of this year's offerings – not least Nebraska
Rumour has it that the jurors at this year's Cannes film festival occasionally bypass the official screenings, preferring instead to watch the films from the luxury of Steven Spielberg's yacht, with its infinity pool and state-of-the-art cinema. Obviously, there is no way of knowing if such gossip has any bearing on reality (not really mixing in those circles and all), but I do relish the image of the millionaire judges – Spielberg, Ang Lee, Nicole Kidman et al – vaguely squinting at the screen while the champagne and cigars are passed around. It sounds like something out of La Grande Bellezza.
What they are thinking is anyone's guess. By this stage last year, the consensus had it that Michael Haneke »
- Xan Brooks
Something in the Air (Après Mai) – review
2 hours ago
Olivier Assayas seems to be dramatising his own youth with this beautiful-looking account of the soixante-huitard aftermath – but politics give way too easily to nostalgia
In contemporary French and European cinema, the events of May 1968 live stubbornly on – intensely debated and treasured and re-mythologised. A whiff of tear gas is a madeleine. For wasn't it cinema itself, and the attempted sacking of the Cinématheque Française chief Henri Langlois, that helped spark the Paris uprising? Philippe Garrel's Les Amants Réguliers, or Regular Lovers (2005), showed a young poet, played by the director's son Louis, taking to the barricades in 1968. Louis Garrel played something similar in Bernardo Bertolucci's soixante-huitard swoon, The Dreamers (2003). Before that, Louis Malle's Milou En Mai, or May Fools (1990) starred Michel Piccoli as the provincial Milou, whose family estate in May 1968 is on the verge of being dismembered by history itself.
Olivier Assayas's Après Mai, or After May, »
- Peter Bradshaw
Cannes 2013: Nebraska – first look review
5 hours ago
Alexander Payne's bittersweet road movie, which finds Bruce Dern in terrific form, blends hard truths with a soft heart
After the glossy and faintly implausible Oscar-bait picture, The Descendants, director Alexander Payne has returned to a more natural and personal movie language for his new film in the Cannes competition. Nebraska is a bittersweet road movie starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte as Woody and David, an elderly father and middle-aged son taking an uncomfortable road trip together. Their story is laced with pathos, comedy and regret, recalling the classic indie cinema of Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson. It is shot, with almost Amish austerity in monochrome, which gives a wintry, end-of-the-world drear to that homely roadside Americana that Payne loves to pick out with his camera.
Nebraska may not be startlingly new, and sometimes we can see the epiphanies looming up over the distant horizon; the tone is, »
- Peter Bradshaw
Soderbergh sale suggests long goodbye near end
6 hours ago
Director to donate auction profits to children's charity as exit looms despite success of new film Behind the Candelabra
This time, Steven Soderbergh really is quitting the movie business. And to prove it, the Oscar-winning Us film-maker has announced he will be selling off an array of film memorabilia from more than two decades behind the cameras.
Soderbergh, whose Cannes film festival smash Behind the Candelabra is being screened on the pay TV network HBO in the Us, will donate profits from the auction to charity.
"I didn't want to throw this stuff away but I didn't want to keep it either, so I figured the smart play was to put it up for auction and donate the money to charity," he told Yahoo. "If you have a friend, relative, or child that digs movies, maybe these items would make a great gift or a talisman of some sort. 100% of »
- Ben Child
Gérard Depardieu says Chechnya not to blame over Boston Marathon bombing
6 hours ago
Actor voices support for his adopted homeland at media briefing for new film Turquoise, co-starring Britain's Elizabeth Hurley
The actor Gérard Depardieu, who moved to Chechnya earlier this year to escape rising taxes on wealthy citizens in his native France, has said his adopted homeland is not responsible for the actions of the Boston marathon bombers.
Speaking at a press conference to promote his new revenge thriller Turquoise, which is being filmed in Grozny, Depardieu said the two brothers accused of mounting the terrorist attack were raised as Americans. "I was in the United States when the terrorist act was carried out in Boston," he said. "I agree with [Chechen president] Ramzan Kadyrov, who said that the Tsarnaev brothers have a Chechen last name but their upbringing is American. You Chechens don't carry any responsibility at all."
Depardieu is starring in two films in the Russian republic of Chechnya, a state notorious for human rights violations. »
- Ben Child
Robert Redford on America: 'Certain things have got lost'
8 hours ago
The writer-director uses Cannes press conference to say that the Us has lost its way since the second world war, and that rampant development must be controlled
Robert Redford today accused the Us of losing its way in the years since the second world war. Speaking at the press conference for his new film All Is Lost at the Cannes film festival.
"Certain things have got lost," said Redford. "Our belief system had holes punched in it by scandals that occurred, whether it was Watergate, the quiz show scandal, or Iran-Contra; it's still going on…Beneath all the propaganda is a big grey area, another America that doesn't get any attention; I decided to make that the subject of my films."
Redford, now 76, also had critical words for the Us's never-ending drive for economic and technological development, which he considers has been a damaging force.
"We are in a dire »
- Andrew Pulver
Cannes 2013: Only God Forgives – first look review
17 hours ago
Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn re-team for an emotionally breathtaking, aesthetically brilliant and immensely violent thriller set amongst Us expatriates in Bangkok
It may not win the Palme D'Or, but it could win the Walkout D'Or, a gold trophy of a cinema-seat banged up into the upright position. Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives is a glitteringly strange, mesmeric and mad film set among American criminal expatriates in Bangkok.
It is ultraviolent, creepy and scary, an enriched-uranium cake of pulp, with a neon sheen. The first scenes made me think that Wong Kar-wai had made a new film called In the Mood for Fear or In the Mood for Hate.
Ryan Gosling plays Julian, the co-owner of a Muay Thai boxing club with his brother Billy (Tom Burke): an operation which is a front for selling drugs. Both brothers are naturally angry and violent, though in keeping his feelings in check, »
- Peter Bradshaw
Nicolas Winding Refn says he made Only God Forgives 'like a pornographer'
18 hours ago
Drive director confesses to a fetish for violence, and star Kristin Scott Thomas says film became 'more and more despicable'
Two sounds provided the keynote of the first screening of Nicolas Winding Refn's follow-up to Drive: the screams of characters being subjected to grotesque acts of dismemberment and torture, and the slap of seats springing upright as members of the press walked out of the grandest cinema at the Cannes film festival. One American woman exclaimed loudly as she exited: "This is shit."
Even its British co-star, Kristin Scott Thomas, said: "Films where this kind of violence happens I don't enjoy watching at all" and joked that as the film was made "it got more and more despicable". But its director, Nicolas Winding Refn, said that he approached filmmaking "like a pornographer: it's about what arouses me. Certain things turn me on more than other stuff and I can't suppress that. »
- Charlotte Higgins
Colour footage of London in the 1920s allows us to be tourists in our own past
22 May 2013 10:12 AM, PDT
The full-colour silent era footage that caused so much excitement online recently is almost like science-fiction
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London looks itself and other in this footage. For a 21st-century viewer it is like watching a science-fiction film in which almost everything is the same until you notice little differences that betray a completely alien quality. The past is another country, but in Claude Friese-Greene's film of the capital's streets and sights it is a place disguised as our own.
This is because this 1926 footage, which is currently a Twitter talking point, was shot in colour. Friese-Greene and his father William pioneered their own method of shooting in colour, back during the silent era: it is a byway of cinema history, an experiment that never caught on. In fact, it is part of a lost history of rival technologies in which Britain »
- Jonathan Jones
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