Cannes 2023 Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

CANNES – Martin Scorsese isn’t the only 80-year-old filmmaker with a movie in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Marco Bellocchio, who was most recently at the festival in 2019 with “The Traitor,” returns at the spry young age of 83 with the ambitious tale of Edgardo Mortara, in “Kidnapped.” A movie that begins with a horrific act by the Catholic Church and then attempts to paint a portrait of one of the most infamous popes of relatively modern times, Pope Pius IX.

The show is still days away from arriving on HBO, but the months leading up to the release have made “The Idol” a hot-button topic to discuss. And most of the discourse surrounds the behind-the-scenes drama that plagued the production.

Cults and eating disorders warp the mind much in the same way: they convince the individual that their behavior is special and vital, that everyone else can’t see themselves or the world clearly, and that any external opposition only proves the effectiveness and power of their behavior. In her grueling new film “Club Zero,” Austria’s most fearless button-pusher Jessica Hausner fuses the two into a trajectory of slow-moving, inexorable body horror as primly buttoned-up as the lemon-lime polo shirt uniforms selected by her costume-designer sister Tanja.

An English lieutenant, an American cowboy, and a mixed-race Chilean sheepherder venture into the inhospitable limits of the Tierra de Fuego region at the southernmost tip of the South American continent—the ends of the Earth, some might call it. Under the orders of their employer, landowner José Menéndez (the always masterful Alfredo Castro), the trio’s mission is to savagely murder as many Indigenous people as they encounter in their path.  READ MORE: 2023 Cannes Film Festival: 21 Must-See Movies To Watch Set in 1901, “The Settlers” (Los Colonos), a scorching Western on Chile’s blood-soaked national myth, takes aspects from the official text-book history and probes at their conveniently sanitized interpretations of how they shaped the country’s future.

There is no dialogue. There are no humans.

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.

CANNES – Henry VIII was a bad, bad, bad man. The 16th Century King of England notoriously beheaded two of his six wives, divorced another two, and saw another die during childbirth.

Of King Henry VIII’s six wives, his final marriage to Catherine Parr is perhaps the most ignored. The others are rife with tragedy: there are the two he detested the most that he bent the will of God to legalize divorce; there’s Jane Seymour, who died soon after giving birth to an heir; and most notoriously of all, there are the wives he beheaded.

CANNES – David Grann‘s acclaimed novel “Killers of the Flower Moon” has gone through a number of interactions to finally get to the big screen. One constant, however, has been director Martin Scorsese and star and producer Leonardo DiCaprio‘s commitment to do right by the Osanage Nation, who are at the center of tragic events the book depicts in the 1920s.

With all the headlines dedicated to the #MeToo movement over the past few years, it can sometimes feel like the industry has made progress — certainly, enough to launch several biopics and television shows about its own misconduct. But this is still a time when “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” actress Adèle Haenel feels compelled to quit the French film industry in protest, and when the director of the Cannes Film Festival feels the need to say, out loud, that Cannes is not a “festival for rapists.” READ MORE: Cannes Director Says Event Is Not “A Festival For Rapists” Needless to say, there’s still work to be done, and it’s good that these conversations continue to happen – especially when they involve an icon of the French film industry, Marion Cotillard.

Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” playing in Competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, begins with an interview between a writer and a student interested in her work. It’s a lighthearted, almost flirty discussion where double entendres are part of a seemingly harmless game.

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.

“Eureka” seems somewhat deceitfully simple: a man called Murphy (Viggo Mortensen) searches for his abducted daughter with the help of the mysterious El Coronel (Chiara Mastroianni), even if he has to shoot everyone who stands in his way.

There’s trouble in the paradise of Savannah, Georgia, where the skeins of Spanish moss-draped over corridors of trees wave in the gentle coastal zephyrs with each night’s picture-perfect sunset. Spouses Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) have opened their palatial home for a backyard BBQ; he’s manning the grill, and she’s darting about trying to make everything just right, each well aware of their role to play.

CANNES – Perhaps it was the fact we’ve reached the halfway point of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and the media have reached an inevitable breaking point with lack of sleep. Or maybe it was the often (but not talways) demure personalities of “May December’s” Oscar-winning stars, Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.

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.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been a Cannes regular since his debut short, “Koza,” in 1995. An assured auteur from the very beginning, Ceylan made a name for Turkey on the festival circuit, and every year he brings a new title to the Croisette, critics and audiences alike already know what they’re in for.

God, what a terrible thing it is to be a teenage girl. A body once free to roam and run and be transformed by the unforgivable rush of hormones, cunning little tricksters pumped through blood in a mad rush to reach the anti-climatic cusp of adulthood.

CANNES – Is it possible for a movie about a woman suffering from excessive hair growth in the 19th century to be, well, predictably formulaic? Granted, there can be some reassurance in that. A story of someone different, perservering against ignorance can be uplifting to many.

CANNES – If anyone tells you the world doesn’t need any more films about the holocaust or the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in 2023, we’d suggest you politely correct them. Despite over eighty years of cinema on the subject, there continue to be new stories waiting to be told (and some re-told).

CANNES – We are not one to complain about the length of a film. Directors can make an artistic impact specifically with pacing and structure.

Hong Sang-soo shows no signs of slowing down, does he? After two feature films a year for the past two years, the South Korean director will do it again in 2023, with his 30th film, “In Our Day,” ready to close the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival on May 25. Hong’s latest comes after “In Water” premiered at the Berlinale in February to universal acclaim.

Michel Gondry returns to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time since 2012’s “The We And The I” with “The Book Of Solutions,” his first film in seven years. And in the days before his new movie’s premiere in the Director’s Fortnight section on May 21, Gondry talked with THR and IndieWire about why he took so long between 2015’s “Microbe & Gasoline” and his latest feature.

What a night it was for Harrison Ford yesterday, receiving an honorary Palme d’Or and a special tribute to his career before the world premiere of “Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny.” Did James Mangold‘s take on the legendary franchise live up to the proceedings? Well, the reviews from the premiere (including The Playlist’s) are pretty mixed. But many note Ford’s performance as a major highlight, so at least the actor gives his most popular movie character a proper send-off.

In Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s “Black Flies,” silence is as scarce a commodity as hope. Young first responder Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan) learns very early on that the job comes with two partners: the one sitting next to you and the relentless cacophony of sounds that cut through the vastness of night as shears.

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.

Over the past several years, Johnny Depp has been the subject of a number of controversial reports, most of them stemming from his alleged erratic behavior on set and the accusations of abuse from his ex, Amber Heard. Since then, he’s been persona non grata in major Hollywood productions, which included being fired from the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise.

Five years ago, on March 14th 2018, a car pulled alongside Brazilian Councilwoman Marielle Franco’s vehicle and fired several shots, killing both the politician and her driver. The crime, which enraged a country undergoing grave political turmoil, still remains unsolved.