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    BAFTA Nominations List: ‘Dune' and ‘The Power of the Dog’ Lead Awards

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    Dennis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic and Jane Campion’s western secured the most nominations in a lineup notable for its diversity.Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Power of the Dog,” which was nominated for eight BAFTA awards on Thursday.Kirsty Griffin/Netflix, via Associated PressLONDON — The unpredictability of this year’s award season continued on Thursday when the nominees were announced for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic “Dune” was nominated for best film at the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, as was “Don’t Look Up,” the climate change satire starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jane Campion’s tense western “The Power of the Dog.”Those films will compete against “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s black and white movie based on his childhood in Northern Ireland, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ’70s coming-of-age romance “Licorice Pizza.” But of those movies’ directors, only Campion and Anderson were also nominated for the best director prize. They will compete in that category against several directors lesser known in the United States: Aleem Khan, the director of the British movie “After Love”; the French director Julia Ducournau for her Cannes-winning horror movie “Titane”; Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the Japanese director of “Drive My Car”; and Audrey Diwan, the French director of the abortion drama “Happening,” which was the unexpected winner of the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival.The BAFTA nominations, which were announced in a YouTube broadcast, are often seen as a bellwether for the Oscars, because of an overlap between the voting constituencies for both awards.Learn More About ‘Don’t Look Up’In Netflix’s doomsday flick, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth.Review: It’s the end of the world, and you should not feel fine, writes the film critic Manohla Dargis.A Metaphor for Climate Change: With his apocalyptic satire, the director Adam McKay hopes to prompt the audience to action. Meryl Streep’s Presidential Turn: How the actor prepared to play a self-centered scoundrel at the helm of the United States.A Real-Life ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment: The film revives memories of a nail-biting night in the Times newsroom two decades ago.“Dune” secured 11 BAFTA nominations, the most overall, although many are in technical categories like costume and production design. “The Power of the Dog” secured eight nominations, the second highest, with three of those in the acting categories.This year’s list also includes some acting nominees that may not be to be on the Oscars’ radar. The nominees for best actor, for instance, include Stephen Graham for “Boiling Point,” a British movie set behind the scenes in a restaurant, and Adeel Akhtar for the British romance “Ali & Ava,” as well as big names like Will Smith (“King Richard”), Benedict Cumberbatch (“The Power of the Dog”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“Don’t Look Up”) and Mahershala Ali (“Swan Song”).The nominees for best actress similarly include the British actress Joanna Scanlan for her role in “After Love,” about a white Muslim convert who uncovers her husband’s secret past, as well as Lady Gaga (“House of Gucci”), Alana Haim (“Licorice Pizza”), Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) and Tessa Thompson (“Passing”).Amanda Berry, the chief executive of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which gives out the awards, said in an interview that the diversity of this year’s nominees was partly down to changes introduced in 2020 to encourage voters to watch more widely among the nominated movies. Before they cast their ballots, voters must now watch a random selection of 15 films via an online portal, to ensure they don’t just focus on the most-hyped movies, Berry explained. How much overlap there is between the BAFTAs and Oscars nominees will soon become clear. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science is scheduled to reveal the nominees for this year’s Oscars on Tuesday.The winners of the BAFTAs are set to be announced on March 13 at a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and Berry said she expected the event would return to its usual, pre-pandemic format. Last year, nominees attended via video link, but Berry said she expected the awards to be given out in person in March, and that the glamour of the red carpet would be back. More

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      Their Film Is One of the Weirdest Prizewinners of the Year. Deal With It.

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      “Titane” may follow a female killer who has sex with a car and impersonates a man’s son, but the director and star say it’s really about love.It’s when Alexia’s breasts start leaking motor oil that there’s no mistaking the father of her baby was the tricked-out Cadillac she had rough sex with after the erotic car show, the night she killed a guy by stabbing him in the ear.That’s before she goes on a killing spree, breaks her nose and disguises herself as the missing son of a fire chief on steroids who agrees: she is his child.That is just a glimpse of the harrowing happenings in “Titane,” Julia Ducournau’s audacious splatter-drama that opened Friday. The film is winning prizes and critical acclaim for its comic carnage and upending of gender — and for a raw performance by the newcomer Agathe Rousselle as Alexia, who’s carnally attracted to cars.“Titane” is also generating dropped jaws and screams from filmgoers scandalized by its gory, outré approach to the story of a woman who, as Ducournau put it, “is driven by her impulses and desires for the dead material that is metal” but who “starts getting in touch with her humanity step by step.” One reviewer called it “the most shocking film of 2021.”A scene from the movie, which won the Palme d’Or at Canne.Carole Bethuel/NeonSitting at a French-enough bistro the day before “Titane” had its first screening at the New York Film Festival, the word Ducournau used most often wasn’t “berserk” or any other scary-sounding adjective reviewers have used. The word was “love.”“The whole point with my film is to make you feel what the characters feel, but it’s hard to make you feel love, to physically feel it” cinematically, she said. “So I decided to do it as a challenge and ask: can you do that with love?”Rousselle, too, used the word to describe the movie in a separate interview: “You have this beautiful love story between my character, who has never been in love before, and a father who doesn’t think he can ever love again and they find out what loving means and what love means,” she said. “Love is the movie.”At 37, after just two feature films, Ducournau, a Paris native, has already become a genre film sensation. In the view of Alexandra West, the author of “Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity,” Ducournau’s work is “extreme and absurd but also human” and “part of the driving force behind what’s to come for cinema.”“She’s challenging audiences and getting audiences to react to cinema and to talk to each other,” West said. “That’s exciting.”Ducournau said, “The whole point with my film is to make you feel what the characters feel, but it’s hard to make you feel love, to physically feel it” cinematically. Jeanette Spicer for The New York TimesThe director M. Night Shyamalan took notice: Ducournau directed two episodes of the macabre AppleTV+ series “Servant,” for which he’s an executive producer. “Julia Ducournau killed it. Brooding, shocking & cinematic,” he tweeted.Reviews of “Titane” have been mostly celebratory (Entertainment Weekly called it “outrageously good”) while still mindful of its grisly bravado (“the work of a demented visionary.” IndieWire wrote). Others wondered: to what end? In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott wrote: “For all its reckless style and velocity, ‘Titane’ doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.”In July, “Titane” was the surprise winner of the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the first time a woman had won the award since Jane Campion in 1993 for “The Piano.” Ducournau said she was in disbelief until she hugged Sharon Stone and wouldn’t let go. Then the actress asked how she was feeling.“I said, I’m not sure yet, but it feels like history?” Ducournau said. “She started laughing, only the way Sharon Stone can laugh, with no stress and no tension and super radiant, and she said, honey, it is history.”Ducournau was caught off guard at the beginning of the ceremony when Spike Lee, president of the jury, was asked to name the first prizewinner but instead accidentally revealed “Titane” was the first-prize winner. He later said he “messed up,” and apologized to festival organizers.“At the moment it was hard to find the humor in it,” Ducournau said. “But in retrospect, I find it very much.”Ducournau said she knew she wanted a nonprofessional to play Alexia. After her casting director found Rousselle on Instagram, Ducournau said, she made Rousselle return several times over six months before giving her the job, and they worked together for a year before shooting.To prepare for a physically demanding role involving extreme transformations, Rousselle studied dance and boxing, and learned wrenching monologues from other films and shows, like the “Twin Peaks” graveyard speech delivered by Laura Palmer’s best friend.Rousselle also spent up to eight hours a day getting in and out of makeup and prosthetics that gave her larger breasts, expanded belly shapes and three different noses (for a look-if-you-dare nose-breaking scene). It helped that she had worked as a model favored for her androgyny.“Gender was never relevant to me,” said Rousselle. “When I worked in fashion I would take off my clothes for a fitting and they would say, you have boobs? I would say yes, deal with it.”Beneath the gore is a film that’s affectionate in its scrutiny of love and family, made by a director who cares deeply about family, identity and, most tenderly, the lives of women.Rousselle studied dance and boxing for her physically demanding role.Jeanette Spicer for The New York TimesWomen in transformation, actually. That’s what Ducournau explored in her short film “Junior” (2011), about a teenager whose body seeps goo as she evolves from tomboy to girly-girl. She explored transformations again in her debut feature, “Raw” (2017), a blood-soaked coming-of-age story about a young woman who gruesomely converts from vegetarian to carnivore to cannibal.She does it again in “Titane” with Alexia, a woman whose pregnancy (thanks to that Cadillac) and whose propensity to kill at random are connected to the titanium plate doctors put in her head after a car crash she survived as a girl. (“Titane” is French for “titanium.”)Ducournau, left, and Rousselle, who said the movie has been repeat viewing for some French teenagers.Jeanette Spicer for The New York Times“Titane” opened in France in July, and Rousselle said she had been heartened by the response from “the nerdy crowd of high school kids who play video games and have blue hair.” Some have seen the film multiple times, she said.Rousselle thought the movie could be important to teenagers “because it goes through the questions of how you want to be and who you can be and how you can escape where you’re from and how much control you can have in your life,” she said. “It’s freeing for them.”Ducournau said that as she mulls her next project, she found inspiration in the work of the photographer Nan Goldin and the directors Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini and especially David Cronenberg. In his movies — like “Crash,” about people turned on by car accidents — she said that “everything that people find repulsive could be shown as human.”“A vision that transcends expectations inspires me very much,” she said. More

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      ‘Titane’ Review: Auto Erotic

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      Julia Ducournau’s new film, a prizewinner at Cannes, is a grisly, philosophical thriller that puts the pedal to the metal.Alexia is a strip-club dancer in the South of France whose hobby — her compulsion, her kink, her vocation — is murder. As the bodies pile up and the law seems to be closing in, she leaves the house where she lives with her parents and takes on the identity of Adrien Legrand, a boy who went missing many years before.Having seen a computer-generated image of the teenager Adrien might have grown up to be, Alexia fashions herself into a plausible likeness, cutting her hair short, binding her breasts and smashing her nose against a bathroom sink. The disguise works well enough to convince the boy’s dad, Vincent, the ultra-manly commander of a fire-and-rescue squad. But there is a complication: Alexia is pregnant. The father, as far as we can tell, is a Cadillac with hydraulic suspension and a custom paint job. As the pregnancy progresses, Alexia starts to lactate petroleum.Maybe we should back up for a moment. “Titane” is Julia Ducournau’s second feature. The first, “Raw,” which also included a character named Alexia (and one named Adrien), was a gruesome, witty, insistently thoughtful quasi-horror movie about sex, cannibalism and the varieties of hunger. Awarded the top prize in Cannes this year, “Titane” consolidates a filmmaking style based on visceral shock, grisly absurdism and high thematic ambition. Violence is often played for comedy. Cruelty collides with tenderness. Eroticism keeps company with disgust. Through the stroboscopic aggression of Ducournau’s images you can glimpse ideas about gender, lust and the intimacy that connects people and machines.Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) may be a little of both. As a child, she survived — and caused — a car crash that left her with a titanium plate in her skull. That explains the title of the movie, though not the character’s fascination with motors, which predated the accident, or the bloodthirstiness that drives her adult self. Titanically alluring, she seduces men and women before attacking them with a metal shank that doubles as a hairpin. After driving it through one guy’s ear, she wipes it clean as if she had just checked the oil in a car’s engine.There is slapstick as well as dread in the way Ducournau stages Alexia’s crimes. “How many of you are there?” she asks as a quiet evening of one-on-one homicide threatens to turn into a mass casualty event. “I’m exhausted,” she complains to one of her victims, who actually seems to feel sorry for her.Rousselle, a model making her film debut, has a sullen magnetism. Her iciness is edged with melancholy. Once Alexia becomes Adrien, moving in with Vincent (Vincent Lindon) and joining his crew, she seems less like a predator than a vulnerable, isolated misfit. Lindon, an avatar of weary, blue-collar masculinity, seems at first to be too obvious a foil for Rousselle. But Vincent turns out to have kinks and complications of his own. He fights aging with heavy doses of steroids, and seems willfully to overlook signs of his supposed son’s real identity.His firehouse is a cauldron of unchecked virility and barely suppressed homoeroticism. He insists that Adrien/Alexia will be one of the boys, with some special privileges. “To you, I’m God,” he tells the men, adding that his son is therefore Jesus — but also, the audience knows, a kind of Madonna figure, carrying a miraculously conceived child. This is what I mean by high thematic ambition: “Titane” is a movie concerned with gender politics, metaphysics, the nature of love and a great deal more.It’s no wonder that those concerns don’t entirely cohere, given Ducournau’s furious sensationalism. The hectic, brutal intensity that drives the first part of the movie, before Alexia becomes Adrien, dissipates in the middle, as the narrative engine sputters. The pregnancy supplies some suspense, of course, but the situation becomes curiously static, and the provocations increasingly mechanical. For all its reckless style and velocity, “Titane” doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.TitaneRated R for sex and violence, in and with cars. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      In-Person New York Film Festival Unveils Lineup

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      Opening with Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” the event will include the body horror tale “Titane” and the Harlem Renaissance adaptation “Passing.”The Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Titane,” about a serial killer with rather unorthodox sexual tastes, and the Sundance critical hit “Passing,” an adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance novel by Nella Larsen, are among the highlights of the 59th New York Film Festival, organizers announced on Tuesday.After last year’s virtual edition, screenings will be held in-person with proof of vaccination required, although there will be some outdoor and virtual events. (More details on pandemic protocols will be released in the coming weeks.)As previously announced, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s solo directing debut, will play opening night, Sept. 24. A take on the play by Shakespeare, it stars Denzel Washington in the title role and Frances McDormand, the director’s wife, as Lady Macbeth. The centerpiece of the festival will be “The Power of the Dog,” the first Jane Campion film in more than a decade, and “Parallel Mothers,” from Pedro Almodóvar, will be the closing-night title.The main slate will feature a mix of premieres and highlights from earlier festivals. The body horror tale “Titane” made headlines last month when its director, Julia Ducournau, became only the second woman (after Campion in 1993) to win Cannes’ top prize. Other titles from the French festival heading to New York include “Benedetta,” Paul Verhoeven’s 17th-century lesbian nun potboiler; “The Souvenir Part II,” Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama about a film student in 1980s London; and “The Velvet Underground,” Todd Haynes’s documentary about the band synonymous with Andy Warhol’s New York.From Sundance, “Passing,” directed by the actress Rebecca Hall, who adapted Larsen’s 1929 novel, stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as childhood friends who reconnect from opposite sides of the color line. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated “Flee,” which won the Sundance world cinema documentary prize, focuses on a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark.Other titles of note include Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth; the comic-drama “Hit the Road,” from Panah Panahi, son of the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi; and two films from the Korean director Hong Sangsoo, “In Front of Your Face” and “Introduction.”Passes are on sale now; tickets to individual films will go on sale Sept. 7. Go to filmlinc.org for more details. More

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      Spike Lee Accidentally Reveals Palme d’Or Winner Early: It’s ‘Titane’

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      Julia Ducournau becomes the second woman to win the top prize, after Jane Campion in 1993. The surprise reveal came at the start of a chaotic ceremony.CANNES, France — The 2021 edition of the Cannes Film Festival gave its top prize, the prestigious Palme d’Or, to the French film “Titane.”A wild serial-killer story with some of the most controversial scenes of the festival, “Titane” was directed by Julia Ducournau, who became just the second woman to win the Palme, after Jane Campion took the prize in 1993 for “The Piano.”And though “Titane” had been hotly tipped as a prime contender for the Palme, that reveal came much earlier than intended: At the beginning of the closing ceremony, when the jury president, Spike Lee, was asked to announce the first prize of the night, he misunderstood and read off the first-prize winner instead.“Don’t do it!” shouted the actress-director Mélanie Laurent, a jury member seated next to Lee. But the cat was already out of the bag.(At a news conference after the ceremony, Lee said that he had no excuses and that “I messed up,” adding, “I’m a big sports fan. It’s like the guy at the end of the game in the foul line, he misses the free throw or a guy misses a kick.” He also said he apologized to the Cannes organizers. “They said forget about it.”)The accidental “Titane” reveal was only the first of several chaotic moments at the ceremony, as the spoiled Palme reveal was followed by a best-actor prize for Caleb Landry Jones for the Australian tragedy “Nitram.” When a nervous-looking Jones took the stage, he appeared sick to his stomach, said, “I cannot do this,” and beat a hasty retreat.Still, by the time a teary Ducournau was brought out at the end of the ceremony to finally accept her Palme, she had embraced the chaos. “This evening has been perfect,” she said, “because it’s so not perfect.”Julia Ducournau, left with her star, Agatha Rousselle, became the second woman to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes history.Eric Gaillard/ReutersOther major winners included Leos Carax, who took the best-director prize for his eccentric musical “Annette,” best-actress winner Renate Reinsve for the Norwegian romantic dramedy “The Worst Person in the World,” and a pair of ties: The second-place prize was split between “A Hero,” from the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, and the Finnish drama “Compartment No. 6,” while the third-prize tie went to the Nadav Lapid film “Ahed’s Knee” and “Memoria,” starring Tilda Swinton.At the last Cannes film festival, held in 2019, the Palme winner was “Parasite,” the first major prize Bong Joon Ho’s film took on its path to the best-picture Oscar. Though “Titane” is far too gory to become a major Oscar contender, its Palme win firmly establishes Ducournau as a major international director only two feature films into her career.Correction: July 17, 2021An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the winner of the best director prize. He is Leos Carax, not Leox Carax. More