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Second jewellery theft hits French Riviera during Cannes film festival
3 hours 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. »
Warmest Colour new frontrunner for Palme d'Or
3 hours ago
Abdellatif Kechiche's latest film has been hailed as a landmark in cinematic depictions of lesbian love and female sexuality
A hail of enthusiastic tweets followed the Cannes premiere of Blue is the Warmest Colour – elevating it to the status of the critics' favourite of the festival, and not a moment too long at three hours.
It also happens to contain the lengthiest, most intimate and most graphic lesbian sex scenes in mainstream cinema history. Praised for its tenderness and intensity, it has been hailed as a landmark in cinematic depictions of lesbian love and female sexuality.
Both lead actors spoke of their trust in director Abdellatif Kechiche over the four-month shoot for the film, including the scenes that, in the opinion of the Hollywood Reporter, "cross the barrier between performance and the real deal". According to Léa Seydoux, who plays the older of the two women, "I succeeded in »
- Charlotte Higgins
Cannes comes down to earth with depression-era movie Nebraska
3 hours ago
Shot in black and white, Alexander Payne's new movie is a melancholic, gentle road movie
This year at Cannes, film after film has delved into the world of the wealthy. The Great Gatsby's lavish parties have been rivalled by only the madly superficial Roman fiesta that begins Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty. Meanwhile their glittering possessions are filched in Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring.
But now Cannes has come back to earth, and the hyper-real colours have drained away. Shot in black and white, Alexander Payne's Nebraska is a "depression-era movie", the director said. A melancholic, gentle road movie of the post-sub-prime, recession-hit mid west, a landscape of dirt-poor farms, overweight and unemployed young men and with a chief character, like the companions in The Wizard of Oz, in search of a dream that turns out to be an illusion. Its visual style, said Payne, »
- Charlotte Higgins
Alec Baldwin: 'The movies are abandoning serious acting to television'
3 hours 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
10 things we learned at this year's festival
3 hours ago
Hollywood is still squeamish about homosexuality, money can't buy you happiness, and there is no conceivable situation in which Ryan Gosling doesn't look hot – these are the things you never truly learn until you have spent a week at the world's greatest film festival
Plastic surgeons are the new secular priests
The Cannes programmers give guests a religion they can at least relate to. First came La Grande Bellezza, Paolo Sorrentino's swooning fresco of Italian high society, in which an exacting cosmetic surgeon dispenses Botox injections as though he's offering holy sacrament. Then, not 24 hours later, came the sight of Rob Lowe's smirking little Frankenstein, resplendent in a Farrah Fawcett hairdo, in Behind the Candelabra. Lowe's character is tender, wise and knows what is right. He comes to make Matt Damon's chauffeur into Liberace's own image. It's what the man upstairs demands. Damon's response: "I suppose I should be flattered. »
- Xan Brooks, Elliot Smith, Henry Barnes, Charlotte Higgins
Liz Hurley and Gérard Depardieu's Chechnya adventure: the story so far
3 hours 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
Oscar Isaac: 'Playing music is like sex with strangers'
3 hours ago
For years he has waited while others mopped up the applause. Now the star of the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davies is finally hot property
This is Oscar Isaac's fourth Cannes. He was here in 2009 with Agora, then Robin Hood in 2010, then Drive the year after. Actually, he's quite the film fest fixture: at Venice with W.E. and Toronto with 10 Years. So it's testimony to his quicksilver skills – or to a collective forgetfulness – that he was greeted at Cannes like a starlet emerged fresh from the ether. A miraculous discovery found fully formed on the shore.
"Is that guy a real folk singer?" asked the veteran critic next to me as the end credits rolled on the Coen brothers' latest, Inside Llewyn Davis, in which Isaac stars as a Dave van Ronk-ish singer-songwriter seemingly destined for obscurity in early 1960s New York. "Where have you come from?" was »
- Catherine Shoard
The Big Wedding – review
3 hours ago
Precious little joy is on offer about in a marriage comedy about divorced parents who must get back together for their son's big day
Weddings can often be occasions of trauma, as well as joy, and so it proves with this ensemble comedy. Well – minus the joy, that is. Adapted with tin ear and cack hands from a French farce, Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton star as divorced parents of adoptive son Ben Barnes. When he gets engaged to Amanda Seyfried (again playing a bride-to-be wrangling parents), he wants his birth mother to be at the nuptials. But she's a devout Catholic, and so De Niro and Keaton must pretend to still be married, despite his having shacked up with Susan Sarandon years back (a grisly early scene involves Keaton interrupting kitchen-table oral sex). Adding insult to injury are a subplot about sibling Topher Grace's unexplained vow of premarital chastity, »
- Catherine Shoard
Grave of the Fireflies – review
3 hours ago
This animated Japanese masterpiece is a war story as wrenching as any live-action movie
If you thought Bambi or Up were as emotional as animation gets, you need to see this Japanese masterpiece. It's a war story as wrenching as any live-action movie, and it has reduced many a viewer to tears – this one included. Based on Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical novel, it is focused on a teenager and his sister struggling to survive at the tail end of the second world war, and it records their plight with unsentimental intimacy. Not many cartoons would depict a boy seeing his mother's burnt, maggot-infested corpse being stretchered away, for example, but that's just the start of their traumas. Parentless and homeless, they are forced to wander the countryside, beset by hunger, American bombings and the self-serving indifference of adults. It's not all suffering and desperation, though. There are magical moments of natural beauty and childish delight, »
- Steve Rose
Alejandro Jodorowsky: 'I am not mad'
3 hours 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 trouble 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
My Neighbour Totoro – review
3 hours ago
Hayao Miyazaki's family fantasy is full of benign spirituality, prelapsarian innocence, but little icky sentiment
An established classic in Japan, this animated family fantasy is a recommended gateway drug to the rich, bright, hand-drawn universe of director Hayao Miyazaki. You could call it a ghost story, though there's barely any story at all – no baddies, no conflicts, nothing scary, little beyond "mild peril". It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their father to be close to their sick mother in a nearby hospital. Readjusting to their unfamiliar surroundings, they discover a host of cuddly forest spirits, invisible to grown-ups. That's about it, but as with all of Miyazaki's works, it's full of benign spirituality, prelapsarian innocence and joyous discovery, all rooted in a carefully detailed reality. Despite the cuteness, there's little in the way of icky sentiment – indeed the spectre of death hangs over the »
- Steve Rose
Something in the Air (Après Mai) – review
3 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
Epic – review
3 hours ago
Perfectly serviceable though it is, this animated woodland saga feels cobbled together from many sources
That title is inviting the addition of the word "fail", but actually this is perfectly serviceable family animation. Even so, "generic" might have been a better description. Its woodland saga feels cobbled together from a dozen other sources, including FernGully, A Bug's Life, Arthur and the Invisibles, The Borrowers, Roger Dean, even Fifi and the Flowertots. Our heroine is a lonely human teen (Amanda Seyfried), who's shrunk to fairy size to aid magical forest dwellers in their battle against decay-spreading baddies. (The motivation for the decay-spreading is unclear – they're just baddies.) Boxes are studiously ticked. There's a mini-teen hunk for Seyfried to flirt with, comedy gastropod sidekicks, parenting issues, eco sentiments, bird-back aerial action and random celebrity voice cameos, including Beyoncé, Steven Tyler and Pitbull. What stands out is the animation. The microcosmic woodland world is luminous and detailed, »
- Steve Rose
Benjamin Britten: Peace and Conflict – review
3 hours ago
Although it feels a little homemade at times, this film switches effectively between dramatisation, documentary and contemporary performances of the composer's works
This drama-documentary, coinciding with Britten's centenary year, is unlikely to bring the composer to new audiences, but music lovers will find it illuminating and evocative, though in all honesty, it has BBC4 written all over it. It views the composer's life and work through the prism of his commitment to pacifism, from his liberal, progressive education to towering works such as the War Requiem, via flirtations with communism and a fateful visit to Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Director Tony Britten (no relation), a former composer, is clearly more intimate with the music than the finer points of film-making. It feels a little homemade at times, though the action switches effectively between dramatisation (newcomer Alex Lawther is very good as the fey, plummy young Britten), well-researched documentary (narrated »
- Steve Rose
The Hangover Part III – review
3 hours ago
Less a caper than a trudge, the third film in the blokey comedy franchise has hit the wall
They probably won't be putting "not as offensively racist as the last one" on the poster, but that's about as much praise as the (hopefully) final instalment of the blokey comedy franchise merits. It could have gone either way. The first was an unexpected delight, with its clever "what just happened?" structure (lifted from the underrated Dude, Where's My Car?); the second was an unimaginative replica, with anti-Asian jokes. Both elements are toned down this time, and if the racism isn't missed, the amnesiac-mystery device is. This is less a caper than a trudge; a linear adventure that proceeds in fits and starts, with few surprises and fewer laughs. There's barely even a hangover.
Things get off to an ominous start with a motorway gag involving a giraffe that is telegraphed 20km in advance. »
- Steve Rose
The King of Marvin Gardens – review
5 hours ago
Treat yourself to a re-released gem of the American new wave with an astonishing performance from a young Jack Nicholson
American film-maker Bob Rafelson has just celebrated his 80th birthday, and you couldn't give him or yourself a nicer present than to see this marvellous film, now restored and re-released: The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). Like his Five Easy Pieces (1970), it stars Jack Nicholson giving a performance of melancholy, introspective subtlety that will astonish those who only know about the grinning "old devil" Nicholson, recently to be seen on TV flirting with Jennifer Lawrence. The other glory of this movie is that it shows us what a great actor Bruce Dern is, matching Nicholson in charisma and presence. Nicholson is David, a gloomy talk-show host in Philadelphia, regaling his listeners with long, literary monologues about his life. Jason (Dern) is David's estranged brother, a hustler and shady wheeler-dealer who needs »
- Peter Bradshaw
Cannes film festival diary: day nine
8 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
Cannes 2013: Nebraska – first look review
8 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
Jerry Lewis: women doing broad comedy bothers me
9 hours 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
Close up: Cannes, crime and ultraviolence
9 hours 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 »
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