Cannes International Film Festival

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      The Cannes Love Affair With American Cinema Takes Unexpected Turns

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      Whether it’s Demi Moore’s performance in “The Substance” or Sean Baker’s tale of a Brooklyn sex worker, this year’s jury will have a lot to ponder.One truism of the Cannes Film Festival is that no matter how alarming the news about the American movie world, Hollywood — however you understand that word — retains a powerful grip on this event. Cannes is a thoroughly French affair, but its love for le cinéma américain is evident everywhere from the faded images of Hollywood stars that are scattered about to the honorary awards that the event bestows. On Saturday, it will present an honorary Palme d’Or to George Lucas, the 11th American to get an award that it’s given out just 22 times.Given the United States’ long domination of the international film market, it’s no surprise that the country looms large here. The Disney adventure “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” it is worth pointing out, was No. 1 at the box office in France and in much of the rest of the world when Cannes opened last week; it still is. That said, the hold that American cinema maintains on this festival goes beyond market share. Americans have also won more top awards at Cannes than filmmakers from Britain, Italy or France. This fact that reminds me of the moment in “Kings of the Road,” the 1976 Wim Wenders road movie, when a character says, “The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.”There are always movies from around the world here, of course, but the selections that often generate the loudest chatter are either from the United States or are Hollywood-adjacent. Three such titles this year are a heat-seeking troika that involve American notables who, after a period of relative domestic quiet, have showily returned to the international stage. Kevin Costner is here with “Horizon: An American Saga,” a baggy western that’s the first chapter in a multipart series, and Francis Ford Coppola has a new epic, “Megalopolis.” Then there’s Demi Moore, who’s being hailed for her bold starring role in “The Substance,” an English-language horror movie from the French director Coralie Fargeat.Demi Moore as an actress of “a certain age” in “The Substance.” Universal PicturesA gross-out fantasy that suggests Fargeat has watched her share of David Cronenberg movies, “The Substance” centers on a beautiful actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), who is what’s often irritatingly called a certain age. When her TV show is canceled, the actress does what you might predict given the movie’s exaggerated look and tone: She despairs at what she sees in the mirror and reaches for an outrageous solution. This turns out to be the mysterious treatment of the title, which allows her to effectively generate (birth) a younger version of herself. This Demi 2.0, as it were, is played by Margaret Qualley, who, like Moore, bares her all in a 140-minute movie that’s as simple-minded as it is bloated.I am (personally!) sympathetic to the points about women, beauty and age that Fargeat seems to be trying to make. Yet the movie never gets beyond the obvious, and the whole thing soon becomes grindingly repetitive despite its two vigorous lead performances, all the many eye-catching shots of Qualley pumping her butt like a piston and the chunky tsunamis of gore. Far more successful on both feminist and filmmaking terms is “Anora,” Sean Baker’s giddily ribald picaresque about a Brooklyn sex worker, Ani (Mikey Madison), who, more or less impulsively, weds the absurdly juvenile son of a Russian oligarch.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

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      Did Cate Blanchett Make a Pro-Palestinian Fashion Statement at Cannes?

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      The actress hasn’t said so, but some internet users think she did. Plus, a bleak week for small fashion brands and wedding dresses for fashion-forward brides.Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, followers of events known for being fashion spectacles — the Oscars, the Met Gala, Eurovision — have watched them become venues for making sartorial as well as political statements about the conflict.The Cannes Festival in France has not been immune to this trend. Several attendees have used the red carpet on the Croisette to show their support for Israelis or Palestinians during the film festival, with some wearing sashes saying “bring them home,” referring to Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, and others wearing red pins calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.Off the carpet, the model Bella Hadid ate ice cream near the beach in Cannes wearing a dress made of the material used for kaffiyehs, the scarves long seen as a symbol of Palestinians solidarity and identity.But those obvious displays have not generated as much buzz as the dress that the actress Cate Blanchett wore on Monday to the premiere of “The Apprentice,” a docudrama about the early life of former President Donald J. Trump.At first glance the gown — a piece from the designer Haider Ackermann’s one-off spring 2023 couture collection for Jean Paul Gaultier — looked like a simple black dress worn with a pearl necklace across the length of Ms. Blanchett’s bare shoulders.But as she began to walk the carpet, flashes of other colors emerged: The back of the dress was a pink so pale that it appeared white, and the gown had an emerald green interior lining that Ms. Blanchett repeatedly revealed by lifting its train. The dress had been significantly altered since it appeared on the runway, where it had a knee-length hemline, a lime-green back and a lavender lining.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

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      ‘The Substance’ and ‘Emilia Pérez’ Cause a Stir at Cannes

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      “The Substance” features Demi Moore in go-for-broke mode, while “Emilia Pérez” is a musical crime drama that defies description.Maybe “Megalopolis” was just an amuse-bouche.After Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million movie polarized audiences during the first week of the Cannes Film Festival, the big swings have continued with “The Substance” and “Emilia Pérez,” two much-discussed films that are either stone-cold classics or total fiascos depending on whom you talk to here.But at a festival where a dozen new movies arrive every day and each title is in danger of being overshadowed, there’s nothing more effective than causing a commotion.The gory horror-comedy “The Substance” casts Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, an Oscar-winning actress who, as she ages, can find no better work than hosting an aerobics program. Even that gig is in danger thanks to an unscrupulous network executive (Dennis Quaid) who’s dead set on replacing Sparkle with someone younger and hotter. Backed into a corner, Sparkle decides to inject herself with the Substance, a mysterious fluid that promises a path to rejuvenation.But this procedure goes several steps beyond Botox and fillers. After taking the Substance, Sparkle’s younger self (Margaret Qualley) emerges painfully from her body and sets about reclaiming the aerobics gig that the network yanked away. The only catch is that Sparkle’s younger and older selves must trade off every week, agreeing to hibernate while the other one goes out on the town. Failure to maintain that balance could have gruesome effects on their bodies, and it isn’t long before this peaceful trade-off becomes an increasingly disfiguring tug of war.“The Substance,” directed by Coralie Fargeat, offers plenty to talk about, from Moore’s go-for-broke, bare-it-all performance to an outrageous finale that consistently pushes the line on gross-out gore. But the most spirited discussions at Cannes are over whether the movie is trenchant or skin-deep. David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised it as the best of the fest, but several people I’ve spoken to were positively angry about having watched it. Maybe any reaction is the right one when it comes to something so gleefully provocative: In a post online, the writer Iana Murray called the film “shallow” and “painfully unsubtle” but added, “i had a hell of a time though why lie.”“The Substance” is one of the higher-rated movies on the Screen International critics’ grid, a compilation of reactions that often presages the winner of the Palme d’Or, Cannes’ top prize. But another Palme contender, Jacques Audiard’s audacious “Emilia Pérez,” has prompted nearly as much conversation and debate. A crime drama that’s also a trans empowerment epic that’s also a full-blown movie musical, “Emilia Pérez” is virtually impossible to sum up: Imagine Pedro Almodóvar meets “Sicario” meets Jennifer Lopez’s wacky visual album “This is Me … Now: A Love Story,” and you’re only halfway there.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

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      Trump Calls ‘Apprentice’ Biopic at Cannes ‘Garbage’ and Plans to Sue

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      The director of “The Apprentice” was unfazed by the threat to the film, which covers the ex-president’s relationships with his first wife and the fixer Roy Cohn.The day after the Cannes Film Festival premiered “The Apprentice,” a biopic of Donald J. Trump, the former president hit back at the movie, calling it “malicious defamation” and threatening legal action.“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign.Directed by Ali Abbasi and written by the author Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” follows Trump (Sebastian Stan) as an ambitious young man seeking to establish himself as a real estate magnate. He finds a mentor in the wily lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and a first wife in the fashion model Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova), though Trump is willing to discard both once they’re no longer of use to him.The film is hardly a flattering portrait of the former president, and includes scenes where the business mogul goes under the knife for liposuction and a scalp procedure to fix his bald spot. In its most controversial sequence, the Trump character sexually assaults his wife after she criticizes his looks. (Ivana, who died in 2022, accused Trump of rape in her divorce deposition, though she disavowed the claim later.)Cheung said the Trump team plans to file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”Though the threat could affect the release of “The Apprentice,” which currently has no distributor, Abbasi sounded unfazed at the film’s news conference on Tuesday.“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people,” the director said. “They don’t talk about his success rate, though.” More

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      At Cannes, the Dogs Were Good Again This Year

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      The festival has long embraced canine stars like Messi, the hero of “Anatomy of a Fall,” while human stars are happy to take their furry friends along.On the morning the Cannes Film Festival opened, Messi, the canine hero of last year’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anatomy of a Fall,” was practicing climbing the stairs of the Grand Lumière Theater. The majestic entry is typically reserved for stars dressed in their finery, but the official red carpet had not yet been rolled out. Messi’s owner and trainer, Laura Martin Contini, coached him to bound up to the first landing and pose. He wasn’t quite hitting his mark, stopping just one step below, but he eventually got the hang of it. Contini rewarded him with coos of “Oui, jolie” and “Oui, bravo” and a squeaky soccer ball toy he seemed to particularly enjoy, his blue eyes growing even more intense at the sight of it.Messi was rehearsing for the opening credits of his new talk show, “Messi: The Cannes Film Festival From a Dog’s Eye View.” In the series of shorts for French TV, the star was going to interview talent (using the voice of a human actor).His presence was proof of an incontrovertible fact about the festival, now in its second week: Cannes loves dogs. You could see that as Demi Moore, star of this year’s “The Substance,” brought her Chihuahua, Pilaf, to the photo call. And you could see it as Messi went through his paces, occasionally carrying a camera in his mouth, and onlookers just outside the barricades took photos. “It’s like if I had George Clooney with me, but it’s just a dog,” said Tim Newman, a producer who came up with the idea for Messi’s program.Demi Moore brought Pilaf along during a photo call Monday for her new film, “The Substance.”Sebastien Nogier/EPA, via ShutterstockThe talk show is something of a victory lap for the pooch, who emerged as one of the biggest stars of the 2023 festival, even receiving the Palm Dog Award, given annually to the premier canine performer, though he couldn’t make that ceremony. “Last year we were not able to climb the famed steps of the Cannes arena, so this time we are returning and we are able to be at the red carpet and to support all of the dogs that will be considered for the Palm Dog,” Contini said, speaking through a translator.So why is this particular festival so friendly to pups? “Cannes is a good place for dogs to get a showcase because the French have a very sensible approach to dogs,” the Palm Dog founder Toby Rose said, explaining, “They are always pretty much without exception welcome to join in restaurants, which I know to the Anglo-Saxon American and Brits is almost heresy.” (Indeed, on the first day of my stay in Cannes this year a regal greyhound tottered in and out of a creperie while I ate.)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

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      Trump Biopic Hits Cannes Film Festival: ’The Apprentice’

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      The film covers Donald J. Trump’s relationships with the fixer Roy Cohn and his first wife, Ivana, and tries to explain the future president, at least as a young man.Would Donald J. Trump enjoy Cannes? It’s possible, since the extravagant displays of wealth here — all the yachts and glamour — are typically his thing.But would Cannes enjoy Donald J. Trump?You might be tempted to say no, since the Cannes Film Festival draws the sort of liberal-leaning artists that reliably vote against the former president and his allies. But that clash of sensibilities lent a frisson to Monday’s premiere of “The Apprentice,” starring Sebastian Stan as a young Trump.Directed by Ali Abbasi (“Border,” “Holy Spider”) and written by the author Gabriel Sherman, this origin story of sorts begins with Trump in his late 20s as he aspires to greatness but mostly putters around collecting overdue rent for his father’s real estate company. (One angry tenant responds by hurling a pot of boiling water at him.) Trump is a man in need of a mentor, and he finds it in the lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who takes an immediate liking to this young striver. And why wouldn’t they spark to each other? On one visit, Trump hops out of a car emblazoned with the license plate “DJT” and sees that Cohn’s own plate reads “RMC.” Game recognizes game.The closeted Cohn character has complicated reasons for keeping Trump close: There’s a one-sided attraction there, and when giving Trump an expensive suit, he tells the younger man, “If you look like a million bucks, I look like a million bucks.” But mostly, he sees Trump as an appreciative vessel for his lessons in venality. Cohn teaches him how to use dirty tricks to succeed in business and imparts three rules that will become Trump’s modus operandi: Always be on the attack, deny everything and never admit defeat.But in its own way, theirs is a “Star Is Born” dynamic: As Trump rises, Cohn falls on harder times, and the protégé who was once so easily impressed now seems sickened to spend time with someone no longer on his level. By the time we reach the 1980s, Trump has married his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), and broken ground on his crowning real estate achievement, Trump Tower. Still, Cohn won’t be dispatched from his high-flying life quite so easily.Is the movie sympathetic to Trump? Not exactly, though it labors to at least explain him. At first, Stan’s performance feels surprisingly toned down: Though young Trump is certainly full of himself, he seems more abashed in Cohn’s outsize presence. But as Trump gets hooked on success (and speedlike diet pills), Stan transforms into the man we know today, who leads with bluster and arrogance. “The Apprentice” suggests he’s little more than a MAGA magpie, stealing his famous “Make America Great Again” phrase from a Reagan operative and even modeling his orange complexion on Cohn, who liked to tan himself to a radioactive umber.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

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      Lily Gladstone in the Spotlight at the Kering Women in Motion Dinner

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      The juror found herself at the center of the Kering Women in Motion dinner, a year after she was a little-known guest for “Killers of the Flower Moon.”At the Cannes Film Festival, much is made of the standing ovation. Every round of applause earns breathless headlines, with outlets racing to report which movie received the most prolonged cheers.But sometimes at Cannes, where you sit is just as important as when you leap to your feet.This is something Lily Gladstone found out Sunday night at Kering’s annual Women in Motion dinner, a star-studded bash that drew the likes of Michelle Yeoh, Julianne Moore, Isabelle Huppert and the jury president, Greta Gerwig. As one of Gerwig’s fellow jurors, Gladstone will help decide the winner of the Palme d’Or. It’s a prestigious position that also represents a full-circle moment for the actress, whose profile was turbocharged last year when “Killers of the Flower Moon” debuted at Cannes.The day after that premiere last May, Gladstone found herself at the Women in Motion dinner. At one point, she made her way to the party’s center table to greet her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio and perched next to him on an empty chair reserved for the festival’s president, Iris Knobloch.Recounting the story to me on Sunday, Gladstone grinned. “Iris and I were just laughing about that, that she had to kick me out of her chair last year and now I’m sitting next to her,” she said. In fact, this year Gladstone had been assigned what could be considered the party’s most prestigious spot, the chair between Knobloch and the Cannes artistic director, Thierry Frémaux.“I’m the Leo this year!” Gladstone said, chuckling. “I’m totally in his seat.”At this point in the festival, Gladstone and her fellow jurors have seen almost half the films in competition. “Last year, I only had to be concerned with one film,” Gladstone said. “This year, it’s 22.” And her jury experience comes after several months spent on the awards circuit for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which earned her a best actress Oscar nomination.But though Gladstone’s dance card is full — she’ll soon star in “The Memory Police,” a sci-fi film scripted by Charlie Kaufman, as well as a remake of Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” that will co-star Bowen Yang — she said that taking time out for Cannes has recharged her artistic battery.“I’m ready to get back to work and shift that gear, and immersing yourself in other people’s creativity is a great way to kick-start it again for yourself,” she said. “So I’m enjoying the hell out of it.” More

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      Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe on Yorgos Lanthimos’s New Film

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      In the new Yorgos Lanthimos film “Kinds of Kindness,” a character played by Emma Stone recounts a dream in which she was the denizen of a bizarre world. “There, dogs were in charge,” she murmurs. “People were animals, animals were people.” But being brought to heel by their canine masters wasn’t as bad as it sounds, she says: “I must admit, they treated us pretty well.”Compared with how the human beings treat each other in “Kinds of Kindness,” a dark new comedy that just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is in theaters June 21, the dogs would surely be an improvement.Comprised of three separate stories with the cast members recurring in different roles, “Kinds of Kindness” begins with the tale of Robert (Jesse Plemons), a corporate underling whose every interaction in life — including what to eat, how to speak or even who to marry — is controlled by a boss (Willem Dafoe) whose decisions send poor Robert into a tailspin. The second story follows Daniel (Plemons again), who becomes convinced that his wife (Stone) is not who she claims to be and coaxes her into insane tasks to prove herself.And in the third sequence, cult members played by Stone and Plemons search for a woman able to wake the dead, though the whims of their guru (Dafoe) dictate that this mysterious woman also be a certain height and weight and have an identical twin. (Even when it comes to awesome supernatural powers, there are dealbreakers.)Dafaoe and Stone worked on Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” together, for which she won the best actress Oscar. “I still don’t know what that was,” Stone said. “That was cuckoo bananas.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesOn Saturday afternoon in a hotel here in Cannes, I met with Stone, Plemons and Dafoe to try to make sense of this triptych. According to the actors, Lanthimos isn’t keen to give too much away. “Yorgos says he likes it when people have different takes on the movie,” Dafoe said. “I think that’s the strength of it.”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