Cannes Film Festival Responds To Threat Of Strike Action; Urges “Collective” Talks

Ghost story, body horror, feminist comedy and a freshly minted edition of that very French subgenre, How to Get Rid of a Troublesome Corpse: Noémie Merlant, familiar as a fine actress from Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, packs a good deal into her sophomore feature as director, The Balconettes. The message is essentially Time’s Up, maxxed out to include revenge killings; the medium is Mediterranean color. Sciamma co-wrote the script with Merlant, which may come as a surprise given that this swirl of blood and wackiness, complete with a running gag about a severed penis, is about as far from the restraint of Sciamma’s own films as could be.

Cate Blanchett blew kisses to the Cannes Film Festival audience as her new film, “Rumours,” earned a four-minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night. The crowd welcomed the film’s dark humor, laughing throughout the entirety of the late-night screening. While some of the auditorium emptied out while the credits rolled, the majority of filmgoers waited patiently to pay their respects to the film’s stars.

Richard Gere poses for a family photo while attending the 2024 Cannes Film Festival premiere of his upcoming film Oh, Canada held at Palais des Festivals on Friday (May 17) in Cannes, France.

Demi Moore is back on the red carpet in Cannes!

Nicolas Cage is stepping out to promote his new movie!

Selena Gomez is rocking a bold red lip for an evening out at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Selena Gomez has touched down in France to attend the 2024 Cannes Film Festival!

James Franco and his girlfriend Izabel Pakzad made a rare public appearance amid the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Barry Keoghan strikes a pose with his Bird costar Jackie Mellor on the red carpet at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

The cast of Megalopolis took to the red carpet at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on Thursday (May 16) to attend the movie’s premiere.

Joe Alwyn is touching down in France to attend the 2024 Cannes Film Festival!

Rithy Panh has dedicated the lion’s share of his career to interrogating the genocidal Khmer Rouge era in his native Cambodia, and it is no trivial obsession. Panh fled Phnom Penh when he was just 11, and after his family was devastated in the Killing Fields, he escaped to a Thai refugee camp at 15. Now 60, Panh has been committed to keeping the memory of the impact of Pol Pot’s tyrannical regime alive in documentary, narrative and animated film.

“When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free,” says Cesar Catalina, the futuristic architect at the beating heart of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (to give it its full title), a mad eco-sci-fi blockbuster some 40 years in the making. Catalina says it several times, and it’s one of the more succinct aphorisms that he spouts in a script that is stuffed with seemingly random literary allusions from the likes of Petrarch, Crassus and Marcus Aurelius to Goethe, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Watching Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire and eating cheese afterwards would be the only way to replicate its fever-dream grandeur, a series of stunning images, carried along by the loosest of plots, that pontificate on the self-destructive nature of humankind, the only species capable of civilizing itself to death.

Late in the highly entertaining and enlightening new HBO Documentary Films movie on the life and career of Faye Dunaway we learn how much this iconic star just loves coming to the Cannes Film Festival. “Just about every year,” she says not only for the world’s best films but also to immerse herself in all aspects of filmmaking. In fact I have seen her many times just soaking it all up cinematically both here in Cannes and Telluride to name two fests. So it seems appropriate that the Cannes Classics section would be the place for the World Premiere Wednesday night (in the presence of Dunaway as the French like to call it) of this terrific new docu in which Dunaway pretty much tells it all straight about her life, loves, desires, ambitions, movies, co-stars, depression, controversies, family, and hopes for the future in a profession she says she can’t imagine not working in.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth lead the red carpet at the screening of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” at the Cannes Film Festival in southern France on May 15, 2024.

“Mommie Dearest” actress walked the red carpet at the premiere of the action film “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” starring Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy. She was joined by Laurent Bouzereau, 62, who is the director of her new documentary that is premiering at Cannes, and her son Liam Dunaway O’Neill, 43, who appears in the HBO doc.The Hollywood icon wore a black blazer over a white shirt with black pants.

“Hater says I’m superficial,” muses one of the TikTok influencers who rule the version of the world that obsesses 19-year-old Liane in Agathe Riedinger’s Cannes Competition entry Wild Diamond (Diamant Brut). “Yes, I’m superficial,” continues the influencer, “but that doesn’t mean I’m a moron.” 

The immediate cost of war is front and center these days, as the grim scenarios in Gaza and Ukraine continue to play out in front of us. But in his fiction debut, documentary filmmaker Jonathan Millet takes us beyond the headlines of the now to present the little-discussed realities that face those people displaced.

Anya Taylor Joy is hard at work during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival!

Anya Taylor-Joy, Heidi Klum, and Helena Christensen were among the stars who arrived at the Opening Ceremony and the screening of “Le Deuxieme Acte” at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 14, 2024.This year’s jury members, including Greta Gerwig, Eva Green, and Lily Gladstone, are tasked with deciding the winners of the various awards.The Opening Ceremony was highlighted by the presentation of the Honorary Palme d’Or to Meryl Streep, awarded in recognition of her illustrious career and contributions to film.The 2024 Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14 to May 25, 2024.