Cannes International Film Festival

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares71 Views

    Ridley Scott on ‘Gladiator II,” Denzel Washington and Joaquin Phoenix

    by

    It’s been 24 years since the director Ridley Scott scored one of the biggest hits of his career with “Gladiator,” a swords-and-sandals epic starring Russell Crowe that won the Oscar for best picture. Now 86, Scott still works at a prodigious pace, sometimes even directing two films in the same year.His latest is “Gladiator II,” which picks up two decades after Crowe’s character, Maximus, died heroically in the arena. In the years since, Lucius (Paul Mescal) — Maximus’s secret son — has been shuttled to North Africa where he, too, has become a capable fighter. But war waged by the Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) will draw Lucius back to his birthplace, where the clever arms dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington) will try to manipulate the young man to further his own ambitions.In October, I met Scott at his Los Angeles office, which was decorated with posters of some of his memorable films like “Alien,” “Blade Runner” and “The Martian.” True to form, while gearing up for the Nov. 22 release of “Gladiator II,” he was already deep into preproduction for his next movie (a Bee Gees biopic set to shoot in February) and had even begun storyboarding the one after that (a sci-fi adaptation).“I feel alive when I’m doing something at this level,” he said. “I don’t call it stress, I call it adrenaline. And a bit of adrenaline is good for you.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Paul Mescal in “Gladiator II.” Scott said spotting talent is crucial to directing, and added: “To me, a casting director is as important as a good camera.”Paramount PicturesA sequel to “Gladiator” had been in the works for over two decades, making it by far the longest film you’ve ever developed. What made you want to see it through?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares162 Views

      in Music

      How Zaho de Sagazan Won Over Iggy Pop

      by

      Zaho de Sagazan went viral for her performances at the Cannes Film Festival and the Paris Olympics. Next, she’s coming to America.On the Verge showcases emerging talent from the worlds of fashion, food, music, art and design.When the French singer-songwriter Zaho de Sagazan, 24, was a teenager she earned the nickname Petite Tempête — “Little Storm.” “I was crying all the time,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do with all my angst.” But after her twin sister introduced her to the work of the English singer-songwriter Tom Odell — with which she quickly became obsessed, learning all his lyrics and teaching herself to play his songs on the piano — she realized that music could be a means of processing her dark emotions. By 2020, she was sharing videos of her original songs, which blend elements of synth-pop, electronica and chanson Française, on Instagram. Her expressive, sometimes husky voice caught the attention of Warner Chappell/Virgin Music, which released her first album, “La Symphonie des Éclairs” (“The Symphony of Lightning”) in spring 2023. It went platinum in 2024 and earned four awards at Victoires de la Musique, the French version of the Grammys. Tomorrow, a reissued edition will hit streaming platforms with new material, including “Old Friends,” which de Sagazan recorded with Odell. “I basically slid into his DMs,” she says. “We’ve been friends since. Singing with him is one of the few things I dreamed of for myself.”De Sagazan was born and raised in the working-class shipyard town of Saint Nazaire, on France’s Atlantic coast, reared in a family of artists and free spirits with few rules and plenty of encouragement. Her father, Olivier de Sagazan, is a painter, sculptor and performer who has collaborated on immersive exhibitions and videos with musicians including FKA Twigs. During her adolescence, de Sagazan spent hours holed up in her room, alone at the piano, writing about themes including self-doubt, addiction (she recently quit smoking weed, a decade-long habit), climate change and romantic love — though she says she hasn’t yet experienced it herself. She moved to Nantes at 17 and attended university for a while to appease her mother, a schoolteacher, though her ambition was to make music or start a label. To earn money, she worked as a home health aide. “I thought I’d become a nurse or work in a hospital,” she says. “I wanted to care for people. Music is another way of doing that.”Amélie Ambroise and music courtesy of Disparate / Warner Chappell Music FranceWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Mikey Madison Finds Common Ground With Her Character in ‘Anora’

      by

      Mikey Madison, by her own admission, cries a lot — whether she’s happy or sad, that’s how she expresses herself.During our conversation at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, the star of the Palme d’Or-winning “Anora” told me a number of stories that involved weeping. She cried on the way home from a horseback-riding competition when she was a teenager and realized she would have to choose between life as an equestrian or an actor. (She was too single-minded to do both.) She cried after every single acting class in the early days of her career. She cried after her first Russian language session in preparation for this latest role.But when she was living in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach to shoot “Anora,” Sean Baker’s film about a tough-as-nails sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son, she found that the tears didn’t come easily. “I was, like, holding it in in a way that I hadn’t done before,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Am I numb? What’s happening here?’” She ultimately realized it was something different: the title character, known as Ani, was taking hold of her in a way that had never happened in her career. She had heard fellow actors talk about that kind of thing, but had never related to it before.Mikey Madison with Mark Eydelshteyn in “Anora,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.NeonIt makes sense that Ani would exert a certain power over Madison because “Anora” is a monumental film in the 25-year-old’s career. Though she had memorable parts in the movies “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019) and “Scream” (2022) and a crucial role on “Better Things,” the critically acclaimed FX series, “Anora” raises her to a new echelon in Hollywood. Almost as soon as the film premiered at Cannes, Madison was given the “star is born” treatment and declared a potential Oscar nominee. When “Anora” hit the Telluride Film Festival a few months later, a producer told Variety, “I need to work with Mikey Madison ASAP.”The film begins one night at her strip club gig, when her boss instructs her to talk to a patron, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who asked for a Russian-speaking girl. Turns out he’s wildly rich, and their whirlwind romance leads to a quickie marriage. But when his parents learn of it and send heavies to arrange their annulment, Ani refuses to go quietly. She fights off men twice her size with piercing screams and shockingly powerful kicks. For all that ferociousness, Madison also conveys how Ani’s thick skin is a form of self-defense against a world that rewards those, like Ivan, with easy access to money and finds new ways to punish those who don’t. Over the course of the action, you watch exhaustion seep into her face, which once glowed with the possibility of a fairy-tale ending.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Francis Ford Coppola and ‘Megalopolis’: What to Know

      by

      The controversies surrounding the new epic include accusations of on-set problems, a pulled trailer and more.Francis Ford Coppola waged war with studio heads throughout the making of “The Godfather.” Production on his 1979 Vietnam War epic, “Apocalypse Now,” was so troubled — there was a typhoon and a near-fatal heart attack — that it was chronicled in a documentary.So it’s not exactly a surprise that his latest movie, “Megalopolis,” a nearly two-and-a-half-hour futuristic fable about the battle between art and greed that stars Adam Driver, arrives in theaters Friday mired in controversy.The 85-year-old filmmaker’s self-financed passion project, which he conceived all the way back in the 1970s, has earned headlines about a reportedly chaotic shoot, allegations of misconduct and questions about the film’s commercial prospects. While we wait to see whether it will find a place in the canon of Coppola masterpieces or go down as a $120 million mistake, here is a guide to the movie’s complicated history.When did this all start?More than four decades ago. Yes, you read that right — Coppola first had the idea toward the end of filming “Apocalypse Now” in the late 1970s. The new project, he told Film Comment in 1983, would confront big questions — the why and what of existence. It simmered on the back burner for years — Coppola scrapped and re-envisioned the script in each subsequent decade — until he finally began shooting it in 2022.Why did it take so long to make?Coppola followed up “Apocalypse Now” with “One From the Heart,” a 1982 musical romance that bombed at the box office, grossing a mere $636,796 against a $26 million budget. That meant he was stuck making studio-friendly films for a decade so he could pay off his debts. (A film called “Megalopolis,” after all, hardly portends a small budget.)But even after “The Godfather Part III” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” put him back on track, studios remained cautious about signing on, fearing a repeat of the infamously chaotic production of “Apocalypse Now.” Also, after Sept. 11, the idea of a film about New York City being rebuilt after being nearly destroyed hit a little too, well, close to home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Festival Winners Crowd New York Film Festival Main Slate Lineup

      by

      Top titles from Cannes and Berlin, like Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” join new work by Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.Ross’s film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.Two festival mainstays, the filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a Seoul suburb. (Hong also showed two films last year.)The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Margot Benacerraf, Award-Winning Venezuelan Documentarian, Dies at 97

      by

      She made only two films, but her “Araya,” a rumination on the daily rituals of salt-mine laborers, became an enduring work of Latin American cinema.Margot Benacerraf, a critically acclaimed Venezuelan documentary filmmaker whose hypnotic “Araya,” a visual tone poem chronicling the daily lives of salt workers on an austere peninsula on her country’s coast, shared the critics’ prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, died on Wednesday in Caracas. She was 97.Her death was announced by the country’s culture minister.Hailed as a major figure of Latin American cinema, Ms. Benacerraf founded Venezuela’s national cinematheque and in 2018 was given the Order of Francisco de Miranda, honoring outstanding merit in the sciences and humanities, by the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.But although Ms. Benacerraf was celebrated, she was not prolific. She made only two films in her career: “Reverón” (1952), a 23-minute documentary short about the reclusive later years of the Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón, and “Araya,” her sole feature-length work.Influenced by the magic realism of novelists like Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier, Ms. Benacerraf captured, in 90 minutes, the sweat and toil of workers amid the towering salt pyramids on the centuries-old mining terrain of the Araya peninsula. “Araya” shared the International Federation of Film Critics award at Cannes in 1959 with Alain Resnais’s landmark New Wave film, “Hiroshima Mon Amour.”A scene from Ms. Benacerraf’s acclaimed 1959 documentary, “Araya,” which the director Steven Soderbergh called “a gift to cineastes.”Milestone FilmsIn 2019, the New Yorker film critic Richard Brody called “Araya” a “majestic documentary portrait” of salt producers and their families. “Benacerraf’s grand style,” he wrote, “captures the drama of subsistence in the face of nature,” adding that “the overwhelming beauty of the wide-open spaces contrasts with the workers’ burdened trudges through them.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      Which Cannes Films Might Become Oscar Contenders?

      by

      Films backed by the studio Neon have won Cannes and gone on to Oscar nominations regularly in the last few years. That’s one reason to keep an eye on “Anora.”Last year’s Cannes Film Festival was practically a one-stop shop for Oscar voters, premiering three major films — “Anatomy of a Fall,” “The Zone of Interest” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” — that would go on to be nominated for best picture.Does this year’s crop of Cannes movies have the same juice?At the 77th edition of the festival, which concluded Saturday, Sean Baker’s “Anora” was named the winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or. Three of the last four Palme winners went on to receive a best-picture nomination — “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Triangle of Sadness” and “Parasite” — and all of them, like “Anora,” were distributed by the studio Neon. That’s an astonishing streak that positions “Anora” in the best way possible, lending a veneer of prestige to Baker’s raucous comedy about a Brooklyn stripper who marries into Russian wealth.In 2018, Baker’s “The Florida Project” came awfully close to a best-picture nomination. If voters are more amenable to his indie sensibility this time around, expect robust campaigns for the lead Mikey Madison and for Baker’s script and direction. More of a long shot but equally worthy is supporting actor Mark Eydelshteyn as the live-wire heir our title character weds: Though Oscar voters rarely reward young men, this kid’s a total find, like a Russian Timothée Chalamet.Zoe Saldaña shared the best actress award at Cannes with three other female co-stars of “Emilia Pérez,” which is so much more than a musical.VixensIn a surprise move, the Cannes jury split the best actress award four ways, honoring the main female cast of the talked-about musical “Emilia Pérez.” That means the ensemble member Selena Gomez now has a Cannes trophy that has eluded the likes of Marion Cotillard, though I suspect more fruitful Oscar campaigns would be waged on behalf of the leading lady Zoe Saldaña, who’s never had a more robust role, and especially Karla Sofía Gascón, who could become the first trans actress to be nominated for an Oscar. (The fourth winner was Adriana Paz.)Netflix has picked up “Emilia Pérez” and will certainly give it a significant awards push, though the streamer’s stewardship could have drawbacks. It’s true that this is a hard-to-classify film — equal parts crime drama, trans empowerment narrative and full-blown movie musical — which would have made it a difficult theatrical sell. But some of its more outrageous moments are certain to be memed and mocked as soon as it makes its streaming debut, which could hobble the film’s reputation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Sean Baker’s ‘Anora’ Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival

      by

      The movie about a sex worker, from the American filmmaker Sean Baker, took the top prize at a ceremony that also honored George Lucas.The Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival was awarded on Saturday to “Anora,” a giddily ribald picaresque from the American director Sean Baker about a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch — and things get very messy.A critical favorite, “Anora” takes a nonjudgmental attitude toward its protagonist, played by Mikey Madison in a go-for-broke breakthrough performance that critics have praised. George Lucas, who received an honorary award at the ceremony, presented the Palme d’Or. Baker hugged Lucas and thanked the jury before blurting out, “I really don’t know what’s happening now.” He dedicated his award to “sex workers past, present and future — this is for you.”The ceremony, which took place in the Grand Lumière Theater in the festival’s headquarters, opened with a spoof of the opening crawl of the original “Star Wars.” When Lucas eventually took the stage, he received a thunderous standing ovation. The applause grew even louder when Lucas’s longtime close friend Francis Ford Coppola appeared to present Lucas with an honorary Palme d’Or. Coppola, who referred to Lucas as his “kid brother,” was at the festival with his epic “Megalopolis,” which screened in the main competition and did not win anything.The competition jury, led by Greta Gerwig, gave a special award to the gripping Iranian tragedy “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” about a small family that comes violently undone just as the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement in Iran is igniting. The director, Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled the country right before the festival opened, accepted the award in person. On May 13, he announced on Instagram that he had left Iran after being sentenced to eight years in prison for his movies; he was also to be fined and whipped, and have property confiscated.The Grand Prix, the festival’s second-highest honor, was given to “All We Imagine as Light,” from the Indian director Payal Kapadia. A gentle drama about three women coming to terms with one another and their own desires in contemporary Mumbai, “All We Imagine as Light” was another critical favorite. In Kapadia’s acceptance speech, she thanked the three leading actresses, whom she brought onstage with her, as well as all of the workers who make the festival run.Mikey Madison in a scene from “Anora.”Neon, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Mohammad Rasoulof, Director Who Fled Iran, Brings a Message of Hope to Cannes

      by

      At a news conference for his film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Mohammad Rasoulof reveled details of his escape from the country to avoid a prison sentence.While shooting his new film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” the director Mohammad Rasoulof learned that he was facing eight years in prison for making movies that criticize Iran’s hard-line government.So Rasoulof fled Iran, made his way to Germany, and then arrived in France this past week for the Cannes Film Festival. After “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” premiered in competition at the festival to strong reviews on Friday night, Rasoulof promised to continue making films that shine a light on the situation in his country.“The Islamic Republic has taken the Iranian people hostage,” he said at a news conference on Saturday. “It’s very important, then, to talk about this indoctrination.”Set against a backdrop of student protests in Tehran, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” follows an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran whose job approving death sentences begins to take a heavy toll on him and his family. The judge’s paranoia is stoked after his gun goes missing, and as he begins to suspect his wife and daughters of conspiring against him, he makes drastic moves to determine who the culprit is.Rasoulof said the idea for the film had come to him in 2022, when he was imprisoned alongside the director Jafar Panahi for signing a petition that called on Iran’s security forces to use restraint during public protests.After his release in February 2023, the director began formulating a plan to shoot “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” in a clandestine fashion, with a small crew, so as not to arouse suspicion. “Sometimes people said, ‘There’s someone outside lurking,’ and we would all scatter,” Mahsa Rostami, an actress in the film, said at the news conference. “We just prayed that this project would be followed through to the end.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More