Will a Weird Cannes Give Us a Weird Palme d’Or Winner?

“Small Axe: Lover’s Rock” and “Top Boy” breakout Micheal Ward is set to star alongside Olivia Colman in the new Sam Mendes-directed feature “Empire of Light,” Deadline reports. Produced by Searchlight, the film will mark Mendes’ first film since the one-take World War One drama “1917” and also marks his first solo script as a writer.

EXCLUSIVE: WME has signed All the Crows in the World writer-director Tang Yi after the film won the short film Palme d’Or this month at the Cannes Film Festival.

Well, that’s a wrap on the 2021 Cannes Film Festival; 56 reviews and counting (there might be one or two more stragglers to come, but we are basically done). It was a pretty great festival and strong year despite the COVID-19 protocol confusion, those changing rules, and Spike Lee spoiling the Palme d’Or prize early (Spike!!).

Titane, a wild body-horror thriller written and directed by Julia Ducournau, has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It makes Ducournau only the second female filmmaker to win the festival's top honour in its 74-year history.

The awards ceremony for the 74th Cannes Film Festival has started where it should have ended, with jury president Spike Lee mistakenly announcing that the serial killer odyssey Titane has won the festival's top honour, the Palme d'Or. If confirmed at the end of the show, it would make French director Julia Ducournau only the second female filmmaker to win the accolade.

Julia Ducournau's "Titane," a wild body-horror thriller featuring sex with a car and a surprisingly tender heart, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making Ducournau just the second female filmmaker to win the festival’s top honor in its 74 year history. The win on Saturday was mistakenly announced by jury president Spike Lee at the top of the closing ceremony, broadcast in France on Canal+, unleashing a few moments of confusion.

Video: Cannes: Asghar Farhadi's 'A hero' in competition for the Palme d'or (France 24)Europe floods: Officials warn such disasters to become more commonAt least 93 dead, hundreds missing in huge floods in Germany and BelgiumOver 90 dead, dozens missing in Germany and Belgium'It's unprecedented': French justice minister Dupont-Moretti questioned over conflict of interestSouth Africa's Ramaphosa says unrest was instigatedCovid-19 measures create travel chaos across EuropeLebanon's PM designate

The 2021 Cannes Film Festival jury stepped out together one last time while attending the festival’s closing ceremony.

With some preemptive help from jury president Spike Lee, the Cannes Film Festival has announced director Julia Ducournau’s provocative Titane as the winner of the 2021 Palme d’Or. To see photos of every Palme d’Or winning film, click here or on the image above.

Cannes Film Fesitval’s jury president Spike Lee appeared to inadvertently lift the lid on this year’s Palme d’Or winner – naming Julia Ducournau’s Titane – after a mix-up early in tonight’s closing awards ceremony. Watch the moment further down this page.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticCANNES — The awards show for the 2021 Cannes Film Festival competition is underway.Jury president Spike Lee presided over a majority-female group that included French-Senegalese actor-director Mati Diop, American actor-filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal, Austrian director Jessica Hausner, French actor-helmer Mélanie Laurent, Brazilian helmer Kleber Mendonça Filho, French actor Tahar Rahim, South Korean actor Song Kang-ho and cult French singer Mylene Farmer.The prizes

Director Vincent Maël Cardona uses western Europe in the early-1980s as the canvas upon which he paints his layered and achingly genuine portrait of young love, familial bondage, artistic aspiration, and universal chaos. Unburdened by a firm connection to any one genre or narrative archetype, “Magnetic Beats” tells a simple story with a full arsenal of source music, thoughtful set design, and crisp acting at all levels to pull off this love letter to a particular moment in time.

Academy Awards, too. Only one female filmmaker has ever won Cannes top award (Jane Campion for “The Piano”), so a win for Ducournau or Mia Hansen-Løve ("Berman Island") would be history making.

It’s a good thing you can’t catch a virus from an image because if you could, just a few frames of Kirill Serebrennikov‘s fabulously yeasty, bilious, dank Competition title, “Petrov’s Flu” would bring all of Cannes‘ anti-Covid measures to naught.

French Dispatch actor’s outfit at Tuesday night’s Louis Vuitton dinner during the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.  For the star-studded event — which was also attended by Spike Lee, Amina Muaddi, and Maria Bakalova, among others — Chalamet wore (shocker!) Louis Vuitton in the form of an ‘80s-inspired teal track jacket from the spring ‘22 menswear collection, as well as two locket bracelets that designer Virgil Abloh made in partnership with UNICEF.

What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops.

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having.

Premiering in competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Nanni Moretti’s wild melodrama “Three Floors” is based on a 2017 Israeli novel called “Shalosh Qomot” from writer Eshkol Nevo and begins with an undeniably tragic event. One dark night on a quiet street of Rome, a drunk driver runs over a lady crossing the road, narrowly avoids hitting a pregnant woman, then finally crashes into a building, landing straight into a family’s living room.

Cinema’s love affair with trains goes back, of course, to the very origins of the art form, and more than a century later, the flame shows no sign of dimming. To recent examples such as “Snowpiercer” (2013), “Train to Busan” (2016), and the latest of many adaptations of “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) can now be added “Compartment no.6” (“Hytti Nro 6”) from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, premiering in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.

Director Joachim Trier has developed quite a relationship with the Cannes Film Festival over the years. Two of his films, 2011’s “Oslo, August 31st” and 2015’s “Louder Than Bombs,” have premiered at the festival, and he also served as the Jury President for the 57th Independent Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2018.