‘The Breaking Ice’ Review: Anthony Chen’s Long-Awaited Return To Cannes Is A Humanist Triumph

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’ve ever wondered when it was that Michel Gondry, the gifted French director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” became the world’s most annoying filmmaker, you might say the answer is, “He always was.” Yet no one, including me, quite thinks of him that way. That’s because the few works of his that have come to prominence possess a special combination of facility and charm. I adore “Eternal Sunshine,” a virtuoso movie that bends your brain and breaks your heart at the same time. You might simply choose to characterize it as the masterpiece of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, but the truth is that Gondry directed it ­— the leaps in time, the emotionally convulsive performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet — with a masterful sense of play and gravitational control.

Scotland's Home of The Year search has ventured to the south of Scotland as judges Anna Campbell Jones, Banjo Beale, and Michael Angus secured the final home.

Police have charged a man who was arrested at the FA Cup final at Wembley yesterday (Saturday).

Chinese author Yu Hua is no stranger to Cannes. The famed postmodernist writer’s work first graced the silver screens of the Palais back in 1994 with director Zhang Yimou’s masterclass adaptation of his seminal novel, “To Live.” A searing portrait of a single family’s struggle through China’s mid-century upheaval and the Cultural Revolution, “To Live” would go on to win the festival’s coveted Grand Prix award, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and the Best Actor Award.

Two films by Arab women directors are sharing the L’Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) prize for the best documentary in Cannes. Four Daughters (Les Filles d’Olfa) by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania and The Mother of All Lies (La Mère de tous les mensonges) by Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir were announced as the winners at a joint ceremony this morning at the Palais in Cannes.

Ken Loach still has more to say against The Man in society with his cinema, that was clear coming away from the Cannes press conference for his latest movie The Old Oak.

sting.Jane Fonda revealed Friday she “was in love with” Robert Redford, her on-screen partner for four films — but the “Ordinary People” director, 86, “did not like to kiss” and “has an issue with women.”“He’s always in a bad mood, and I always thought it was my fault,” said Fonda, 85, but added that “he’s a very good person.”The two-time Oscar winner dropped tidbits about her famous male co-stars during an interview at the Cannes Film Festival. Fonda and Redford co-starred in “The Chase” (1966), “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), “The Electric Horseman” (1979) and “Our Souls at Night” (2017).“The last movie I made with him was six years ago,” Fonda said, referring to the Netflix film “Our Souls at Night.”“What was I, about 80 years old or something like that? And I finally knew I had grown up.

Two era-defining sitcom roles prove that in Hollywood, lightning can strike twice. Mary Tyler Moore’s turn as Laura Petrie in “The Dick Van Dyke Show” in the 1960s was followed a decade later with the groundbreaking “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Going from playing a housewife to a single career woman when second-wave feminism was in full force puts Moore at the center of a conversation about role models and representation—a conversation she wasn’t always comfortable being the face of.

A picture of Austin Hill with his arm around his dad, Mark, on holiday in Greece in 2021 captures the love between them. It was taken just two weeks after Mark had been diagnosed with bowel cancer.

Anthony Chen’s well-regarded Mainland China-set “The Breaking Ice” has found favor with multiple European and Asian buyers in the few days since its Sunday premiere as part of the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard. The film narrates a love triangle story among China’s lost youth generation and is set in the middle of winter in Yanji, a town that is heavily populated by ethnic Koreans. It is headlined by a star-studded Chinese cast of Zhou Dongyu (“Better Days”), Liu Haoran (“Detective Chinatown” franchise) and Qu Chuxiao (“The Wandering Earth”). “The Breaking Ice” has been newly licensed to Challan for release in South Korea, Trigon-Film for Switzerland, One From the Heart for Greece, Tucker Film for Italy and Edko Films for Hong Kong.Rights sales are handled by Rediance, Mainland China’s leading indie sales company, which reports that addition territory deals are currently being negotiated.

Chinese actress Zhou Dongyu, who is in Cannes with Anthony Chen’s Un Certain Regard title The Breaking Ice, has had a fairytale career trajectory. 

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about cooking as a form of care, an idea intrinsically linked to the feminist revaluation of the work usually performed by women, which is most often unremunerated yet essential to day-to-day living.

For three decades, filmmaker Takeshi Kitano was fixated on a period of Japanese history, in which Lord Oda Nobunaga was inexplicably betrayed by one of his closest allies, Akechi Mitsuhide, in an ambush at Honno-ji Temple. The reasons behind Mitsuhide’s deception are unknown, but Kitano dedicated years to concocting his own theories, going so far as to pen a novel imagining the events that led to the incident.  Adapted from his own book, “Kubi” is an outrageously exhilarating update of the samurai epic, dialing up the blood and guts and sprinkling in the sick humor to match.

Michel Gondry’s new film “The Book of Solutions,” playing in Directors’ Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, centers on the torturous life of being a creative filmmaker and begins at the heart of the matter: Marcc(Pierre Niney) is in a meeting with the producers of his new film, and they are unhappy with what he has delivered them. They’re ending the shoot, putting a new editor in charge to salvage what is already there, and his producing partner of many years finally turns his back on him.

New dad Robert De Niro was off-duty this weekend while attending festivities at the Cannes Film Festival in France. In town to premiere his new film "Killers of the Flower Moon," De Niro made his red carpet debut with girlfriend Tiffany Chen. The couple recently welcomed their first child together, daughter Gia Virginia Chen-De Niro, in what many found to be a surprise announcement.  De Niro wore a navy blue suit with a matching tie while Chen spotted a sparkly black gown and over-sized sunglasses.

In 2013, filmmaker Anthony Chen’s first feature, “Ilo Ilo,” won the coveted Caméra d’Or at Cannes. Centered around the inseparable bond between a 10-year-old Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny, Chen’s full-length debut deployed a specific lens — a family weathering the 1997 Asian financial crisis — to tell a universal story exploring the nooks and crannies of our shared humanity.

You’d expect a movie called “The Breaking Ice” to be cold and Anthony Chen’s gentle drama about three isolated young people finding moments of connection definitely stays away from passionate and heated statements. But it’d be a mistake to think that Chen’s restraint comes at the expense of feeling, because “The Breaking Ice” is one of the most beautifully evocative films to screen during the first few days of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.A luminous “Jules and Jim” riff with a stunning visual design and a real purpose to its apparent aimlessness, “The Breaking Ice” screened on Sunday in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, bringing the Singaporean director back to the festival where he won the Camera d’Or for “Ilo Ilo” in 2013, and also appeared as part of the COVID-era anthology film “The Year of the Everlasting Storm” in 2021.“The Breaking Ice” begins with a fascinating shot of workers cutting ice blocks from a frozen lake.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International In 2021, a generation of disillusioned youth in China decided to step off the hamster wheel and “lie flat” on the ground. Crushed by overbearing workloads with no long-term reward in the form of job security or home ownership, young people indulged in the “tang ping” resistance movement, which advocated for manageable working hours and a quality of life — all of which were the antithesis of China’s punishing 9-9-6 work culture — working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. It’s this tang ping generation that Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen is speaking to in his latest film, “The Breaking Ice.” The movie, which premieres in Un Certain Regard at Cannes on May 21, follows three young people who hit the road together after their lives intersect unexpectedly.

In “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the sturdy lark, positioned precariously in the liminal space between commerce and taste, there are the familiar callbacks, the big set pieces, the cracking bullwhip, dashing fedoras, nefarious Nazis, exotic locales, old friends and new faces. Something, however, is missing.

Ukraine war and the momentous burst of rebellion against the Iranian regime prompted by the death of Mahsa Amini are reverberating profoundly at the Cannes Film Festival. At the festival’s opening ceremony on Tuesday night, legendary French actress Catherine Deneuve paid tribute to the war’s victims by reciting a poem from Ukrainian poet Lessia Oukraïnka, solemnly declaring: “I no longer have either happiness or freedom, only one hope remains to me: to return one day to my beautiful Ukraine.” One year ago, Cannes got off to an emotional start with remarks from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.