‘Boy From Heaven’ Review: Tarek Saleh Crafts A Gripping Exploration Of Religion & Politics In Egypt [Cannes]

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorReligion of Sports, the sports media production company founded by Tom Brady, Michael Strahan and Gotham Chopra, announced $50 million in Series B funding.With the new investment, which brings the company to about $63 million raised to date, Religion of Sports plans to develop new intellectual property — including expanding into areas beyond sports like entertainment, business and music — as well as scale its creator network and increase global strategic partnerships.The Series B round was led by Shamrock Capital, with participation from Cerro Capital and previous investor Elysian Park Ventures (the investment arm of the L.A. Dodgers).

The Tampa Bay Rays 16th “Pride Night” was held Saturday, the Florida club’s annual show of support of the LGBTQ+ community.

The Palme d’Or can be a blessing and curse, a gold-plated sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of filmmakers lucky enough to claim it. After the first waves of shock and joy recede, and their subsequent year-long victory lap reaches the finish line, those same filmmakers are left alone with one troubling thought: What’s next? Director Hirokazu Kore-eda offers a fine case study in how that question might trip someone up.

As countries go, Iceland is probably one of the most fast-changing in terms of its biological make up, its intense volcanic activities reshaping its surface and contours at a speed fast enough to be perceived within a single generation. Paradoxically, it is also a place where time appears to stand still, with the sun omnipresent for half the year and absent for the rest.

It’s the plight of the plightless: a kid from a comfortable, upper-middle-class background wants to be some manner of artist, except that he’s (and it does seem to be a he more often than not) bereft of the experience, grit, or outsider credibility that define the role models he hopes he could one-day call influences. He ventures out into the big bad world in search of something to put a bit of hair on his creative chest, only to face the spiny question of whether this effort to get real is just class tourism, a jaunt in the gutter that one phone call to Dad could prevent.

“Decision To Leave” deals in illusions. Is Song Seo-rae’s dress blue or green? Is she really the innocent wife she claims to be? In her living room, she sits surrounded by sapphire wallpaper, its lines suggesting the mountains near her Busan home that she so loathes — but they could easily be seen as waves, too.

During the winter in a small town in northern Finland, you might find yourself making plans to ask questions about human existence on a Saturday night. Or perhaps you’ll stay up in bed, giggling while reading a book by Sigmund Freud.

As if unleashing all the pent-up narrative impulses tamped down for the hard-bitten minimalism of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Australia’s proudest son George Miller returns to Cannes’ out-of-Competition section with a sumptuous banquet of storytelling in service of storytelling. “Three Thousand Years of Longing” compresses eons of heartbreak, happenstance, and hope into a hotel room tête-à-tête that then re-blooms to the size of the universe, a parable both titanic and intimate in scale as it negotiates one woman’s complacent solitude against the welfare of mythologies dating back to the cradle of civilization.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticElections, as everyone knows, are too important to be left up to chance, and so the world is constantly inventing ways to ensure their outcome in advance. In Egypt, when it comes to the choice of a new Grand Imam — a lifetime appointment, whose fatwas impact national law — the process doesn’t even pretend to be democratic: The successful candidate is selected from a small Supreme Council of Scholars, with considerations the outside world will never know.

It’s early days at the Cannes Film Festival, so awards prognostication might seem a little premature, but still, it’s hard to imagine that the phenomenal performance given by Swedish-Lebanese actor Fares Fares in Tarik Saleh’s searing political thriller Boy from Heaven will go entirely unnoticed by this year’s jury. Topping the work he did in Saleh’s 2017 Sundance hit The Nile Hilton Incident, Fares commands the screen from the moment he arrives, playing a character whose disheveled appearance conceals a ruthless efficiency, a laser-focused mind and an entirely pragmatic concept of morality.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentSwedish/Egyptian director Tarik Saleh is in competition in Cannes with “Boy From Heaven” his second film to delve into the underbelly of modern Egypt — and the Arab world at large — following his 2017 political thriller “The Nile Hilton Incident,” which depicted political power abuse and police corruption. “Nile Hilton” won the grand jury prize at Sundance and was banned in Egypt.In Saleh’s new potentially explosive pic, the young protagonist Adam, who is the son of a small-town Egyptian fisherman, is offered the privilege of studying at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which is the epicenter of power of Sunni Islam.

Frank Grillo is set to star in Liam O’Donnell’s horror-thriller Merciless, which Sentient Pictures International is shopping here in Cannes this week. The company also has announced that Columbian actor Juan Pablo Raba (Peppermint, Narcos) has been tapped to lead Antonio Negret’s new action thriller Sombra.