A flailing relationship is no joke—unless you’re Alex Novak (Will Arnett), who stumbles into personal salvation by cracking wise in front of a live audience. Multi-hyphenate Bradley Cooper’s latest film Is This Thing On?, now playing in theaters nationwide, traces this journey, which begins with Alex’s spur-of-the-moment impulse to get up in front of a crowd and emotionally unload. “It’s the first time that he talks about what he’s going through,” Arnett told Observer. “It’s kind of the first time he admits it to himself.”

What triggers the confessional is a still-fresh separation from longtime wife Tess (Laura Dern), after 20 years of marriage (and 5 years as a couple before that). A quarter-century together will change anyone—moving to the suburbs, having kids, sacrificing professional goals for familial stability. The real question is how to acknowledge that change in each other without falling apart.

Arnett, who co-wrote the script with his writing partner Mark Chappell and Cooper, came up with the idea for the film after hearing the origin story behind British comedian John Bishop, who unexpectedly started his career in comedy—and saved his marriage—by turning his estrangement from his wife into comic fodder that became a catalyst for personal change.

“It’s a midlife catharsis, not a crisis,” explained Cooper at a press screening before Is This Thing On?, which premiered as the Closing Night Film of the New York Film Festival. “This movie’s not about a guy who’s unhappy in his profession. It’s that he’s not really comfortable with who he is.”

Arnett echoed the sentiment during his talk with Observer. “We don’t see Alex at work, for instance,” he said. “We don’t see any of that stuff. What was important to us was really getting down to him trying to find his voice. And by that I don’t mean his comedic voice, but his voice as a person—to see him start to connect the dots and be able to actually speak.”

Is This Thing On? is both a thematic continuation and a pivot for Cooper, whose trajectory as a writer-director-actor-producer includes his splashy Lady Gaga vehicle A Star Is Born and the ambitious Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. Both of those were big-budget productions that, at heart, were relationship dramas writ large. Is This Thing On? compresses that canvas and trades studio spectacle for low-budget intimacy.

Intrigued by the story’s possibilities, Cooper—who has known Arnett for almost 30 years and even was his roommate in L.A. as their careers were getting off the ground—offered to join Arnett and Chappell to explore the script’s characters further with a rewrite. He then added himself to the cast (in a small role as a Falstaffian goofball buddy nicknamed Balls) and brought together a terrific ensemble, .including Academy Award winner Dern; Andra Day as Balls’s frustrated wife; Arnett’s Smartless podcast cohost Sean Hayes as his newlywed friend (coupled with Scott Icenogle); plus Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds as Alex’s parents. Amy Sedaris and Peyton Manning pop up in smaller roles, and stand-up legend Dave Attell even makes an appearance.

Cooper and his collaborators pulled together the film very quickly and shot almost entirely on location in New York last spring over 33 tight days, getting it edited in time to premiere at the NYFF in the fall. “New York is a treasure chest and very, very little was shot on a stage,” said Cooper, a native Philadelphian who relished being back in the downtown neighborhood where he spent time as a grad student in places like the Comedy Cellar and Bar Six (both of which play key roles in the film). Alex’s apartment is on 12th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, right on the same street where Cooper got his MFA at the New School.

“It was a small budget,” said Cooper, who often served as his own camera operator. “That shot of him crossing Sixth Avenue? I’m on a seatbelt on a dolly handheld with nothing shut off from the street. That’s all actual traffic. And there’s just the cop there. We’re like, ‘Is it okay?’ ‘Yeah, you got ten minutes.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, okay!’”

But that run-and-gun indie vibe was inspirational for the cast. “It’s like Christmas on steroids!” said Dern at the NYFF press screening, and then invoked her longtime professional relationship with David Lynch. “Inland Empire was the only other experience I had where my director was right there with the camera. Bradley, as an actor and as our family, knows us so well and feels the instincts with us in character. The most fun of your life is to be in it and feel an instinct as an actor that you catch up to after the take is done, and you go, ‘Oh man, maybe I should try this…’”

Arnett was even further in uncharted territory, handling a dramatic role while surrounded by Oscar-caliber talent. “For me, that was a lot of the work,” he said. “To just be present in those moments and be open and vulnerable. These kinds of roles never came my way,” said the actor best known for indelible turns like being Job in Arrested Development or the voice of Lego Batman. “But, also, I did it to myself. I’ve heard people say that I got typecast. Well, I didn’t have to do all the things I did. I had fun doing them—but certainly to do something like this is much closer to what I’d always wanted to do.”

Day, an Oscar-nominated actress better known as a Grammy Award-winning singer, plays a small but larger-than-life role in the film as Christine, an unhappy wife simmering with marital discontent. She has a seminal scene with Arnett when Christine hilariously confronts Alex about the rage she feels toward him. “She tells him straight up, ‘I despise you because I hate myself. You remind me of me’,” she told Observer, laughing. “Let’s see what you’re going to do now with that truth!”

But that interaction speaks to a greater truth: the film has no villains, only people who are adrift and unable to communicate with each other. “She’s not a victim,” said Day about her character. “She’s not blaming everyone else. She’s like, ‘What am I passionate about? What do I love? Well, shit, maybe I’m pissed at myself!’ You know what I mean? I love that the movie talks about this theme of grace. We have to transform as people in order to actually have a pulse and be alive. We need to have grace to allow other people to transform.”

Dern echoed those same feelings at the NYFF press screening. “The film finds the unbelievable complexity of relationships. I hadn’t seen a script or a film allowing us to know that we don’t know how we got here. Because most of us don’t, in moments of despair, in one’s self and in relationship.”

And for Arnett, as the lead in this marital reckoning, Is This Thing On? was truly transformative. “It was a difficult task for me,” he said. “I did have to recalibrate and remember why I started doing this in the first place. Making a movie like this was how I always envisioned my life going when I was a young man. For me, it was kind of like a rebirth in a way, as opposed to a new thing. It was just reconnecting to something I always wanted to do.”

Anyone unimpressed with Glinda’s newly gifted vehicular spherical globe in Wicked: For Good might follow the Yellow Brick Road to Las Vegas and its own magic bubble. James Dolan’s Sphere, known mainly for hosting live concerts, is currently the home of a wildly distended, dazzlingly supersized and grotesquely manipulated version of 1939’s classic film The Wizard of Oz.

All the action unfolds on a 160,000-square-foot LED screen with 16K resolution, dominating its viewers with an image over 300 feet high. (IMAX, eat your heart out.) Capacity for the event is 10,000 for each screening, and audiences have been coming in droves since it opened on August 28. The initial run-through, scheduled to end on March 31, has now been extended through May.

Not quite the cinematic reinterpretation that the pair of Wicked films offer, this newly bedazzled curio—known formally as The Wizard of Oz at Sphere and presented in 4D—is, in its own way, just as subversive, if not downright corny. Brace for a teeth-rattling tornado sequence with actual wind machines blowing debris all around while your haptic seat shakes and quivers! Dodge the Styrofoam apples that fall from the ceiling when the sentient trees throw their fruit at Dorothy! Feel the Great and Powerful Oz thunder his declarations while white flashes and bursts of flames pop around the venue’s perimeter! And are those mannequin-sized drones buzzing overhead doubling as flying monkeys?

The butchery is undeniable: This Sphere-ified Oz is 75 minutes long, nearly 30 minutes shorter than the beloved classic. Hope you’re not a big fan of the Cowardly Lion, because his song about being the King of the Forest is totally gone. Other nips and tucks include less time with the villainous Almira Gulch, a truncated visit to Professor Marvel, shortened conversations with Glinda the Good, a condensed version of “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead,” plus abbreviated introductions to the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.

But there’s more than enough spectacle to impress. The film is literally expanded in all directions, giving a truly immersive dimension to Hollywood’s adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s fairy tale. You think the Tin Man gets buffed and shined in the Emerald City? This Oz is digitally zhuzhed and A.I.-enhanced beyond belief, with beautifully crisp landscapes and buildings that feel uncannily real.

Sepia-toned Kansas is even more starkly handsome, with razor-sharp bales of hay, lifelike barnyard chickens and cows and an expansive copper sky overhead. When Dorothy sings about happy little bluebirds in “Over the Rainbow,” one of those chirping warblers is now soaring above to match her upward gaze.

And when that twister uses its gale-force winds to lift up Dorothy’s house, we’re no longer on the inside looking out; now we’re in the eye of the storm, watching not only the house fly by but also swirling bovines, airborne men in a rowboat and—in an extended version of the iconic sequence—a bicycling Ms. Gulch transformed into the broomstick-riding Wicked Witch of the West. (Look straight up at Sphere’s domed ceiling, by the way, and you can see right out of the tornado’s cylindrical form and notice a perfectly calm circle of sky.)

One set piece after another amazes. The Yellow Brick Road looks newly-paved in its bright canary hue; the merry old Land of Oz has vast rolling hills and picture-perfect mountains; candy-colored Munchkinland is an absolutely vibrant village; the Haunted Forest has a vividly menacing darkness; And the Emerald City, with extended towers and ornately expanded walls, shimmers in all its Art Deco glory. The Wizard’s vast, dark green Chamber now has a skylight; the Wicked Witch’s castle looms with extra wickedness. And the ruby slippers shine with vibrant intensity. The glammed-up production design is absolutely astounding.

There’s only one problem, and it’s a big one: the cast. No amount of digital wizardry (yet) can convincingly re-render actual 1939-era actors into a 2025 production. You can only upconvert the visual resolution of the film’s characters so much—completely wiping away the film grain eliminates skin pores, leaving faces eerily smooth and plastic.

Dorothy and her trio look like they’ve been peeled off the impeccably revivified Yellow Brick Road and then placed back, like sticker-book figurines. There’s a loss of gravity to their movements. At times, they even seem to be floating. Toto, too, with his shock of matted fur, seems digitally fuzzy. And other people have garish enhancements: the Wicked Witch suddenly has a hugely prominent black hair growing out of the mole on her green chin.

Even worse are the background actors. The main reason why so many scenes were trimmed and cut from the original film wasn’t necessarily to tighten up the running time; it was also to cannibalize the Extras and reinsert them on the left and right sides of the newly extended, digitally enhanced scenery.

So Munchkinland now has crowds of people standing behind Dorothy, in an A.I.-sweetened loop where they rock back and forth, waving their arms or shifting their weight endlessly in a computer-generated spell that prolongs their screen time. Some of the Extras’ faces look smeared and oddly deformed, due to those same A.I. enhancements. More than a few times, they even stare, with dead-eyed smiles, straight into the camera. It’s deeply unsettling and more than a little distracting.

Intriguingly, many scenes have less editing in them: instead of cutting between the Tin Man’s solo dance and a shot of Dorothy and the Scarecrow watching him, for example, all three of them now share the same enormous frame—the Tin Man in the middle, Dorothy and the Scarecrow on the right. Thanks again to A.I., the Tin Man’s entire dance routine is seamless. But now Dorothy and the Scarecrow’s sight lines don’t match. Dorothy actually looks a bit bored, and seems to be staring off into the distance.

Worst of all is how A.I. has compromised the film’s emotionally poignant climax. In the original film, when Dorothy says goodbye to her companions, the camera fills the frame with them one at a time for each tender farewell. At Sphere, all three stand in a row, waiting for Dorothy to talk to them. Weirdly, each one is slightly out of focus—and each only comes into focus once Dorothy starts to talk to them. When she stops talking to them, they stop emoting and go back out of focus. Then, like the Extras, each one goes into a powered-down mode, shifting back and forth as though in a trance.

As an example of cutting-edge technology used to turn a national cultural treasure into a gloriously kinetic thrill ride, The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is certainly great and powerful. As a tool for enhancing the power of human connection through storytelling, it needs to keep waving its magic wands. We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, but we still have a long way to go before we get to Oz.

The Cannes Film Festival has a way of inspiring its attendees. Just take it from acclaimed auteur Wes Anderson, returning to the Riviera for his fourth time with The Phoenician Scheme. “When we were here four years ago with The French Dispatch,” said Anderson during last week’s press conference, “I said to Benicio, ‘Something’s going to be coming your way. I hope you’ll be interested in this.’”

At the time, Anderson only had an image of the film’s lead, Benicio del Toro, dressed as shady industrialist Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda. “I didn’t know what was going to happen,” continued Anderson. “I just knew this character, and he was moving relentlessly through the story. And you can’t kill him.” 

Del Toro, who had only ever worked with Anderson on the episodic multi-character ensemble French Dispatch, sparked to the idea, especially since Anderson wanted to collaborate with him at such an early stage while developing the script with longtime writing partner Roman Coppola. “I get to channel the kid in me to really explode,” del Toro explained. “And that’s unique as an actor.” 

“Benicio was part of forming it with me,” said Anderson. “This character has a ruthlessness and a brutality. But the layers are in Benicio, and that informed the story when Roman and I were writing it.” 

Unlike his previous film, the meta-textual quasi-sci-fi Asteroid City—heavily self-reflexive, slower-paced and tinged with ennui—The Phoenician Scheme plays like a propulsive thriller, opening with the comically determined Korda surviving another plane crash (his sixth), yet again having evaded the assassins constantly trying to kill him. “I’m in the habit of surviving,” says the tenacious tycoon, famously known as Mister 5% for taking a lucrative cut of every business deal he touches.

But the near-death experience makes him reconsider his life just enough to summon his estranged daughter-turned-nun Liesl (Mia Threapleton) from her convent for an important family meeting at Palazzo Korda. His plan: make Liesl the sole heir to his estate, and immediately assign her to be manager of his business affairs—specifically the Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme. And so Korda insists on taking her through each of his projected ventures and uncommitted business partners across Phoenicia, involving railway magnates, shipping vessels, dams, tunnels, and more than a few exploited laborers pilfering natural resources.

“We were writing something that we intended to be very dark,” said Anderson, “a character who’s not concerned about how his decisions are affecting populations of workforces and landscapes. The darkness of a certain type of capitalist. But it took us somewhere else.”

That new direction was all due to the good-hearted Liesl, who turned this tale into a Wes Anderson staple: the family drama. “I have a daughter, Roman has a daughter, Benicio has a daughter,” said Anderson. “If we didn’t, then Zsa Zsa probably wouldn’t have.” In Anderson’s telling, the real gambit in the Phoenician Scheme is Korda’s reconciliation with the resistant Liesl. “This whole business venture, without him knowing it, is just a way for him to get back his daughter,” Anderson explained. “He’s created this vast ritual that they go through; and by the end, it’s less and less the thing he wants.” 

Korda harkens back to classic Anderson antiheroes like Royal Tenenbaum in sharing a megalomaniacal outlook on life, an amoral pursuit of winning at any cost, and a slippery identity protected by money. “I don’t live anywhere,” Korda says to Liesl at one point. “I’m not a citizen at all. I don’t need human rights.”

The larger-than-life rogue, charmingly dangerous and willfully dismissive of life’s rules, was inspired by Anderson’s late father-in-law, a businessman and engineer named Fouad Malouf (to whom the film is dedicated). “He was a very warm, wise person. He was very alpha. Maybe a little scary at first. Strong. The first conversation I ever had with him, I asked him what the men who worked with him were like. And he told me, ‘All lions. I only work with lions.’ He was a lion.”

Anderson surrounds del Toro not only with Liesl, but also with her tutor, Norwegian entomologist Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera). For both Threapleton and Cera, The Phoenician Scheme is their first time working with Anderson. “I’ve been a huge fan forever,” Cera told Observer during a conversation after the press conference. “I saw The Royal Tenenbaums in the theater when I was, like 11, and loved it. The Life Aquatic, Bottle Rocket. I watched Rushmore 8000 times. It was just one of the most important movies to me, and one that helped me find my tastes.” 

Threapleton also confessed to being a diehard Anderson fan—not to mention a longtime aspirational member of his ensemble. “I was going through some old journals recently,” said Threapleton at the Cannes press conference. “And I stumbled across an entry from 2013 that said, ‘Watching Moonrise Kingdom again. Bloody love this film. Really wish I can work with Wes Anderson one day.’” 

Cera admitted that he was so fascinated with watching Anderson direct that he spent much of his time on set whenever possible—so much so that Anderson joked Cera was pulling a Willem Dafoe. “I kept finding ways to get into shots that had not been planned with me,” Cera explained. “Wes said that that was the Willem Dafoe trick from The Life Aquatic. Dafoe would just say, ‘Do you think my character Franz should just be up on that ridge over there?’”

Cera and Threapleton are in almost every shot with del Toro, and the film really focuses on the trio’s misadventures together around Phoenicia. “We were very fortunate to have a chance to rehearse with Wes, the three of us,” said Cera. “And Wes said that he never does that. I remember him saying that that was his first time ever doing rehearsals.”

All three of the actors’ performances seem atypical for a Wes Anderson film, and their rehearsals together might have given them a chance to develop a deeper emotional bond than usual. Although castmate Benedict Cumberbatch felt like the genial, goofy Cera was born to be in a Wes Anderson film. “Watching Wes use Michael is like God discovering water: it seems like a pretty obvious, natural element to have in his arsenal as a filmmaker,” said Cumberbatch at the press conference. “It’s the perfect partnership.”

A journalist then asked if Anderson had any plans to use Cera again. “Me?” Anderson replied with surprise. “I say yes. But I’m just asking.”

Cera smiled at the answer. “I’ll agree with Wes. With a hopeful yes.”

“Let’s shake on it,” replied Anderson. “Sometimes people say yes, but they don’t really mean it later. Let’s get this on the record.” And the two exchanged a firm handshake while the journalists clapped.

“Are you fucking kidding me? Okaay,” crowed Kristen Stewart at the world premiere of The Chronology of Water, her debut as a bona-fide filmmaker after eight years of struggling to adapt Lidia Yukovich’s acclaimed memoir for the big screen. Vibrating with nervous excitement during her opening remarks, she thanked all of her collaborators with a fierce joy, ending with a dedication to the book’s author. “To Lidia Yuknavitch,” she said, “for writing and spewing the very face of fuck! Thank you for your trickle, thank you for the gush. Thank you for everything! Now let’s rip off this bandage and watch this fucking movie!” 

Actors acted like directors this past week during the Cannes Film Festival, and their newfound roles were just as surprising and convincing as their acclaimed performances in front of the camera. Along with Stewart’s messy but vibrant debut, Scarlett Johansson debuted her rookie film Eleanor the Great, a touching work starring nonagenarian June Squibb that was sweetly reminiscent of quirky ’90s indie comedies. And up-and-coming Brit hottie Harris Dickinson followed up his steamy turn co-starring with Nicole Kidman in feminist sex fantasy Babygirl by getting behind the camera himself and making Urchin, a searing and startlingly mature piece of social realism.

The trio of films were not in the Official Competition at Cannes, instead appearing in the sidebar section Un Certain Regard, a less high-pressure berth that offers a more supportive showcase for new and emerging filmmakers. All three have enough commercial potential—and artistic merit—to guarantee a commercial release, if not an end-of-year awards campaign. (Sony Pictures Classics had already picked up Eleanor the Great before the festival selected it). But what’s so striking are their stylistic differences, and how they reflect each actor’s sensibilities.

True to form, The Chronology of Water is all Kristen Stewart—and might arguably be the most Kristen Stewart movie ever made: aggressively aggrieved, almost comically confrontational, hyperventilating with an in-your-face attitude that belies a self-consciously juvenile insecurity. At times, the drama delivers genuinely harrowing shocks; but interspersed are moments so over-thought and over-wrought—all lookkit-me camera angles, word-salad sound design, and flutter-cut montages—that it plays like the product of an addled film student more eager to provoke than impress. 

And then there’s Imogen Poots. The wide-eyed intensity and physicality that Poots brings to her portrayal of Yuknavitch—from sexually abused teen to weathered-and-wise middle-aged mother—is revelatory. And that’s clearly due to Stewart’s clarity of vision. The way that Poots expertly delivers bursts of anger, fleeting moments of joy, wallowed self-pity and adrift soulfulness proves that an assured directorial hand is working behind the camera to modulate those mood swings.

The strongest parts of The Chronology of Water are those character reveals—especially the quieter ones, when a wrung-out Yuknavitch, after a punishing gauntlet of sex, drugs, and alcohol, slowly finds the path to redemption by writing her way out of personal oblivion. That’s when Stewart’s dogged devotion to the source material shines though in a way that signals a major filmmaking talent.

With Eleanor the Great, Johansson is taking a much less ambitious stab at directing, one that feels more like a test run than a full-throated attempt to become an auteur. It also feels like the project was inspired by her 94-year-old lead actor. “When we were shooting my film,” she said in her opening remarks at the film’s premiere, “I said, ‘if I do my job right, my dream is to see June on the Croisette in Cannes.’ And here we are! So it really is a dream come true.”  

Eleanor the Great is modest in style but emotionally rich, a comic drama where Floridian retiree Eleanor, after the death of her longtime best friend, moves back to New York City to be with her overworked adult daughter and genial but detached grandson. Faced with empty days and lonely nights, she starts to deliver little white lies that eventually snowball into an avalanche of deception. 

As a director, Johansson trusts Squibb to carry the film, letting the actor’s genial nature lead a light-hearted story into sadder depths. “It’s about friendship, it’s about grief, it’s about forgiveness,” said Johansson. “And I think those are all things that we can use a lot of more of these days.” 

But of these three Cannes-fêted neophyte helmers, the twentysomething Dickinson is the one who delivers a real cinematic wallop with Urchin—a film he not only directed but also wrote. His look at the self-destructive patterns of a young man on the fringes of East London feels so fully formed, so confident in its plot points and performances, so strikingly restrained in its direction and so absolutely wrenching overall that the result feels preternaturally mature for such a young actor-turned-director. 

Skeptics might call Urchin a knock-off of iconic kitchen-sink miserabilists like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh—British masters who have devoted their astonishing careers to chronicling society’s disenfranchised and alienated. But there’s something different enough about Dickinson’s approach that he feels more like a successor to these directors than an imitator.   

Like Stewart and Johansson, Dickinson’s acting acumen certainly explains the uniformly absorbing performances—especially from lead Frank Dillane, a frustratingly charming mess too prone to self-sabotage despite his best efforts to resist the temptations of drugs and petty theft. But it’s the cumulative power of his storytelling, a slow-burn episodic script that builds confidently and irreversibly towards tragedy, that heralds Dickinson as such a promising new voice. There’s no doubt more will come from all three multi-hyphenate stars.

“Knicks! Knicks! Knicks!” yelled Spike Lee to the glitterati of Cannes as he entered the black-tie Lumière screening for his latest film, the kidnapping thriller Highest 2 Lowest. Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals was the following night—his beloved team facing off against the Indianapolis Pacers at Madison Square Garden—so Lee had basketball on his mind, rolling up on the Croisette in an orange-and-blue pinstripe zoot suit, sporting a blue felt hat ribboned with orange along with blue eyeglasses rimmed with orange highlights.

Denzel Washington, the film’s star, wore a more sober black suit and looked a bit less cavalier on the red carpet. He had just flown in from New York a few hours earlier and had to boomerang right back to the airport once the film started. Still in the thick of his sold-out run as Othello on Broadway, Washington had no time to spare, so the Cannes Film Festival deliberately programmed the movie on a Monday, the one night when Broadway is dark.

Washington didn’t have time to stick around and watch Lee’s swaggering Gotham update of Akira Kurosawa’s classic nail-biter High and Low. But, once everyone was seated, he did stay long enough for the festival’s president Iris Knobloch and general delegate Thierry Frémaux to award a surprise honorary Palme d’Or.

“Because, Denzel, you are here,” announced Frémaux from the stage. “We want to make something special for you. A gift!”

“A bag of money?” Washington cracked under his breath to Lee as they sat in their seats.

“A way to show our admiration,” replied Frémaux with a laugh.

After the festival played a tribute reel with highlights from his most acclaimed performances—including clips from his two Academy Award-winning turns in Glory and Training Day, as well as his four previous collaborations with Lee (Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game, and Inside Man), Lee and Washington joined Frémaux for the presentation.

“This is my brother, right here!” said Lee. “I love him, I love him, and I’m glad you’re here for all the people who love you.”

Washington, who hadn’t been to Cannes since his first visit in 1993 with Kenneth Branagh’s all-star Much Ado About Nothing, was a bit stunned by the unexpected accolade and the audience’s extended standing ovation. “This is a total surprise for me, so I’m a little emotional,” he said. ‘It’s a great opportunity to collaborate with my brother-from-another-mother Spike. We’re a very privileged crowd in this room—that we get to make movies and wear tuxedos and get dressed up and paid for it as well. We’re blessed beyond measure. So, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”

“Thierry did a sneak attack!” said Lee during a panel interview at the American Pavillion the next day. “It was a secret. This was on the low-low. I asked Denzel, ‘You gonna put it on the shelf between your two Oscars?’ And eight shows a week of doing Othello—that ain’t no joke.”

But Lee was more tickled at the synchronicity of the previous night’s timing, since Highest 2 Lowest premiered on the same day, and in the very same theater, as Do the Right Thing in 1989. And May 19 was also the 100^thbirthday of Malcolm X. “Just put that together!” said Lee. “It’s numerology. Things. Line. Up. That’s beautiful.”

A remake of High and Low had been knocking around for decades—certainly since 1999, when, during Cannes, the trades announced that Martin Scorsese was in talks to put together a version that David Mamet was planning to write and direct, potentially starring Steve Martin, William H. Macy and Joe Mantegna.

But it was Lee and Washington who finally got it made. As Washington’s music producer character David King says in the opening minutes of Highest 2 Lowest, “It’s not a risk. It’s a rebirth.” That bravado is also an apt summary for Lee’s brassy update, his most commercial movie since 2006’s Inside Man (not coincidentally his last Washington collaboration) and a powerful showcase for the actor’s skills.

King, the embattled head of once-great record label Stackin’ Hits, had cashed out a controlling interest to enjoy his success. But now outside investor Stray Dogs Enterprises wants to pay handsomely to control 100% of Stackin’ Hits’ roster of legacy artists for commercial-licensing revenue. “They’ll squeeze out every drop of black culture and integrity,” he sneers at the offer, hatching his own plan: pour every penny of his personal wealth, including mortgaging his penthouse duplex and Sag Harbor house, into a scheme to buy back the company.

What’s beautiful about Highest 2 Lowest is how Lee portrays the Black culture King talks about in the character’s posh apartment on Front Street, referred to in the film as the “DUMBO Olympia” of Brooklyn overlooking the East River. King’s walls are covered in priceless paintings and photos by icons like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden and Gordon Parks. “A lot of that stuff is my own art,” said Lee. “We made copies of it. My wife and I have Beardens, Basquiats. This is a type of Black excellence, you know? It’s inspiring when, in my office and my home, I’m surrounded by great artists and people who I love and respect.”

King’s plans to retake his company get complicated when a kidnapper calls and says he has King’s 17-year-old son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) and wants $17.5 million for his safe return. But then Trey comes home alive; and they all realize the one that got nabbed is actually Trey’s best friend Kyle (Elijah Wright), the only child of King’s widowed driver Paul (Jeffrey Wright). Does King still pay all the money—and go bankrupt to save another man’s son?

Adding a meta level to the anguish is the fact that Spike cast Jeffrey Wright’s real-life son Elijah. “I had very little to do with it,” said Wright at the film’s press conference. “I had no idea. He sent Spike some tape. And then I hear that Elijah’s reading with Denzel. And then I get a call from Denzel saying, ‘Yeah, we tried but I don’t think it’s going to work out. He did his best, but maybe the next one.’ And I said, ‘Man, you’re calling from Elijah’s phone! Stop playing with me!’”

A$AP Rocky plays the heavy in Highest 2 Lowest, and his two extended scenes with Washington—filled with tense provocations, psyche-out bluster, and flat-out threats—are electric showdowns. At the root of it all, though, is money. “It’s on the poster, and I made Denzel say this line twice: All money ain’t good money,” said Lee at the press conference. “We all have our own specific morals, and what you’ll do for money. And that’s what makes Kurosawa’s film so great. Denzel, he’s jammed up. He’s faced with a moral dilemma.”

“That’s where the moral dilemma is,” added Wright. “Is it money or love? And what do you do for that? But that’s the world we’re living in now, where everything is for sale, and everybody is for sale. Everything is transactional. I think we can do better.”

“Maybe we have to, right?” said Lee. “We have to.”

Crawling on all fours like a cat in heat. Letting her own breast milk drip down onto an ink-pooled paintbrush. Rubbing her sex-starved crotch insatiably. Throwing herself through a glass-paned door. Never let it be said that Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t commit—especially when she’s playing a character who might just end up committed.

The semi-surreal, wildly expressionistic Die My Love, based on the 2017 novel by Ariana Harwicz, had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this past weekend, and left viewers wide-eyed at Lawrence’s no-holds-barred portrayal of Grace, a woman suffering from such severe post-partum depression she literally walks through fire. It’s the kind of head-turning star turn that Cannes audiences witnessed when Demi Moore brought The Substance here last year. No surprise that, within 24 hours of its debut, deep-pocketed distributor MUBI, which steered Moore to an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win, snapped up U.S. rights (and a few international territories) to the picture for $24 million.

Lynne Ramsay’s feral film, intensely experiential, also stars Robert Pattinson as Jackson, the hapless and helpless husband who doesn’t know how to stop Grace’s descent, preferring to disappear for days at a time on unspecified work trips—and leaving his wife alone with their 6-month-old boy, a cavernous house in the middle of nowhere and an unruly pet mutt she never even wanted.

The duo, transplanted from New York City to an unspecified flat rural landscape, moved into a house previously owned by Jackson’s Uncle Frank, found dead from a mysterious self-inflicted wound. Just down the road is Jackson’s addled father Henry (Nick Nolte), suffering from Alzheimer’s and near death himself; as well as patient mother Pam (Sissy Spacek), who has a habit of sleepwalking outside with her shotgun.

A late addition to the Cannes competition lineup, and still fresh from the editing room, Die My Love is designed for maximum discomfort, with frenzied physicality, haunting cinematography and a soundtrack full of chirping crickets, wild horses, buzzing flies and incessant dog barking. But the unnerving drama still earned a 6-minute standing ovation from the black-tie crowd, which left Ramsay visibly shaken and deeply touched.

“Thanks so much!” the Scottish filmmaker chirped to the room in an exhausted Glaswegian accent. “C’mon—let’s get out of here. It’s a bit overwhelming.” She then marched out of the packed 2200-seat Grand Theâtre Lumière, where festival director Thierry Frémaux was waiting in the lobby with open arms and a huge smile. “Well, that went well,” she confided. “I’m mean, there are still things I’m like, ‘What the fuck? I’m going to change that.’”

Robert Pattinson came up behind, his face full of wonder, expressing his delight to Frémaux. “It’s very different from the last time I saw it,” said Patterson.

Lawrence, a co-producer on the film, was thrilled by the material the moment Martin Scorsese sent the book to her office and suggested it might be a great project for her. She agreed, and then approached Ramsay about possibly directing and adapting the material (she co-wrote the script with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch).

“I’ve wanted to work with Lynne Ramsey since I saw Ratcatcher, and I was just like, ‘There’s no way,’” Lawrence said at the film’s press conference the next day. “We took a chance and we sent it to her, and I cannot believe that we’re here with you and this happened!”

Lawrence first became a mother in 2022, and just had her second child earlier this year—experiences that clearly informed her decision to produce this film as well as how she would portray Grace. “It was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she would do,” Lawrence said. “When I first read the book, it was so devastating and powerful. Lynne said it was dreamlike. I had just had my first child, and there’s not really anything like post-partum. It’s extremely isolating.”

Grace and Jackson’s move to the country, and not having any friends nearby, is by definition even more isolating for the troubled duo. “But the truth is, extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating no matter where you are,” she added. “You feel like an alien. And so it deeply moved me.”

Ramsay also saw the novel as being about more than post-partum depression, which helped her envision the film adaptation in more universal terms. “It was about post-natal, but It’s also about being stuck, and being stuck creatively—and dreams and fantasies and sex and passion,” she explained. “Jennifer sent it to me and I thought about it for a while. Maybe I can’t do this, but I’m gonna try, I’ll do an experiment. It’s like a love story, and that kind of gave me a way in.”

The tumultuous couple go from writhing on the floor in naked ecstasy to shouting matches and shocking moments of self-harm—at one point, Lawrence slams her head into a mirror; in another she scratches the wallpaper in her bathroom with such a frenzy that her fingers are bloody pulps. She’s tormented, and he’s paralyzed with indecision about how to make her feel better. He’s also frustrated to the point of chilly cruelty.

“I’m quite attracted to characters who are incredibly abrasive and quite obscure,” said Pattinson. “But there’s something quite universal and interesting for me, when you’re dealing with partners going through post-partum or any kind of mental illness or difficulties. Trying to deal with her isolation and trying to figure out what your role in the relationship is, is incredibly difficult—especially if you don’t have the vernacular. And he’s just kind of hoping the relationship will go back to what it was in its purest form, not understanding why it’s intruded into the relationship. I guess it’s a fear that everyone has.”

Isn’t it romantic? Just a few days after February 14^th, the Berlinale delivered its own funny valentine to American songbook legend Lorenz Hart with the World Premiere of Richard Linklater’s beautifully melancholic Blue Moon.

In a virtuoso performance, Ethan Hawke stars as the famous (and famously tortured) lyricist still suffering the sting of his recent estrangement from composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). Set entirely on March 31, 1943—only a few months before Hart would die from pneumonia at age 48—Blue Moon takes place during the premiere of Oklahoma!, the new musical from the newly minted duo of Rogers and Lorenz’s replacement lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.

Hart is gutted, of course, and watches Oklahoma! with bitter distain before leaving its Broadway premiere early, sulking off for a whiff of whiskey and some kibbitzing with Eddie the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) at Sardi’s, which soon will be hosting the musical’s Opening Night party.

“It’s a 14-carat hit,” Hart sniffs. “And a 14-carat piece of shit.” He despises the cornpone Americana in Oklahoma!—not to mention the emphatically hokey exclamation point in its title—while recognizing that it’s the kind of inoffensive art that high schools will enthusiastically re-stage for decades to come. And he fears that his professional life is over. So long, Rogers and Hart—a wildly fruitful partnership that lasted 24 years and produced 1,000 songs for more than two dozen musicals along with countless Hollywood hits before Hart’s alcoholism caused such erratic and arrogant behavior that it sabotaged their relationship.

Blue Moon is Linklater’s character study of Hart, set almost entirely in one location and featuring Hawke in every scene as the manic, self-aggrandizing, self-loathing, wildly wounded and hopelessly longing wordsmith. Through old-fashioned movie magic, the 5’ 10” blue-eyed actor is also literally reduced in the film to match Lorenz’s diminutive stature (less than five feet tall), as well as his dark and balding complexion (brown eyes, aggressive comb-over).

Hart’s lyrics for swoony standards like “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” and “Falling in Love with Love” reveal a man who’s smitten with being smitten, so much so that he’s attracted to both men and women. “I’m omnisexual,” he declares, although most women think he’s gay and respond to his overtures with the wounding friend-zone remark “I love you—just not in that way.”

His latest object of desire: 20-year-old Yalie Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whose emerald eyes, bottle-blonde hair, and “appealingly ethereal” face have him besotted. He has an epistolary rapport with her that he thinks is evidence of something more. And her presence at the party will be his time to consummate his feelings for her. But what will bring him more pain—Elizabeth or his old songwriting buddy?

What makes this intimate film truly sing are the demands of Robert Kaplow’s original screenplay: essentially one location, with a main character who drives every single conversation with all the other characters. It’s a unique creative challenge for both the director and his main star, both of whom first came to Berlin thirty years ago with their first collaboration, Before Sunrise—which won Linklater the Silver Bear for Best Director.

“Lorenz Hart is the ultimate lyricist of unfulfilled love,” said Linklater at the film’s press conference the day Blue Moon debuted. “It’s more poignant. The film is about relationships and art but it’s also about love and its complexities.”

“What Robert Kaplow wrote for us was an absolutely beautiful script,” said Hawke. “It’s basically a film that’s one scene. To have that simplicity, but to make the verbiage come alive, to make its musical quality. When is it fast? When is it slow? When is it arresting, when is it heartbreaking, when is it silly? How can it keep changing? It takes a long time to understand the dynamics at play.”

But what made Hawke fall in love with the script was Kaplow’s three-dimensional portrait of Hart. “This character that Robert created has so many opposites,” Hawke said. “That’s what really turned me on about it. He’s very small and he’s huge. He’s a lover and he’s lonely. He’s deeply insecure and wildly confident. I could say I prepared by shaving my head and listening to Lorenz Hart songs. But that’s not really the truth.”

What impressed Scott was reading a script that made Rodgers just as vulnerable and wounded, in his own way, as Hart. Throughout the film the two have conversations that are so pregnant with emotion and history that their words bleed pain. “You’re having these stolen moments of heartbreaks and lust and love and bitterness and real affection happening,” Scott said. “How do you conduct a conversation like that during the opening night of one for the biggest musicals ever produced?”

More than anything, Blue Moon is not so much about romantic love as it is about platonic love. “For many of us, the biggest loves of our lives are our friendships,” said Scott. “And this friendship was born out of work. And I love the idea that this is sort of a workplace film.”

“It’s strange to watch a movie about heartbreak when everyone is actually trying to be kind,” said Hawke. “One of the things that I really love about Richard Linklater’s films is that they love people. And these hearts are getting broken, but people are all being kind to one another. Or they’re trying. And we still get hurt. And I find that kind of profound.”

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Moviegoers at the 75th Berlin Film Festival were seeing double over the weekend during the International Premiere of Mickey 17. Bong Joon-ho’s futuristic satire stars Robert Pattinson as one of a series of expendable clones whose sole purpose is to die and be reprinted—again and again and again. The multiples would have been helpful on Saturday night’s red carpet, as the singular Pattinson happily signed autographs and indefatigably posed for at least a dozen selfies with fervent fans crowding the barricades in 30° weather outside the Berlinale Palast.

Among those waiting patiently inside the packed house was Bong vet Tilda Swinton, a villainous official in Bong’s apocalyptic sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer (which made its World Premiere at the 2013 Berlinale) and in town to receive the festival’s honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement. The $118 million Warner Bros film—due to open in the U.S. on March 7—played well with the effusive audience members, who leapt to their feet for a standing ovation after the 137-minute film ended.

Their praise was well-earned. Buoyantly dystopian, Mickey 17 is a crowd-pleasing hoot set in an outer space colony circa 2054 where the morally dubious technological ability to pair body printing with memory transplants allows scientists to fatally and repeatedly experiment on a human life. Why Mickey Barnes? On the run from a loan shark and itching to escape earth, he signed a sure-fire contract—sight unseen—to join an outer space colony on a four-and-a-half-year voyage to distant ice planet Niflheim. “You’re applying to be an expendable?” one of the terrestrial bureaucrats asks him. “You read through the paperwork, right? It’s a pretty extreme job.” He didn’t. “I shoulda read through it,” sighs Mickey in a weary voiceover. 

Too late: scientists expose Mickey to radiation, burn his skin, blind him, gas him, mutilate him, infect him with alien viruses, make him bleed from all of his orifices—all guilt-free. If you’re printed back into existence, consciousness intact, do you ever really die? It’s a question the sweet but dim-witted 17th iteration of Mickey elides, referring to other peoples’ “ethical fights and religious blah-blah blah” about the controversial technology, and accepting his Job-like job with an existential shrug.

“I like playing characters who have an incredibly complicated philosophical situation they have to deal with, but not the typical character who would be thinking about this in normal circumstances,” Pattinson explained during a standing-room-only press conference after the film’s morning press screening. “Basically asking, ‘Why do I exist?’, but having a silly character trying to consider it.” 

Adding to the cosmic joke is the recurring sight gag of the printing process, with Pattinson’s naked body occasionally falling to the ground as it rolls out of the meat-matrix machine. “The printing is tragic and funny at the same time,” said Bong. “And when I thought of Rob Pattinson, I was in a good mood thinking I’d be printing him out endlessly. He’s very printable, you know?”

Pattinson leads (and technically outnumbers) a cast that includes love interest Naomi Ackie as special agent Nasha; Steven Yuen as two-timing opportunistic friend Timo; Anamaria Vartolomei as special agent Kai, who’s secretly sweet for Mickey; as well as Mark Ruffalo as dim-witted fascistic politician Kenneth Marshall, with Toni Collette as conniving wife Ylfa, Kenneth’s intergalactic Lady Macbeth. 

Everyone but Ruffalo was in attendance at the gushy, giggly Berlin press conference, which quickly became a Bong liebe-fest. “Bong has been on my bucket list of directors to work with ever since I started acting,” confessed Pattinson. “He’s kind of a Mount Rushmore director. All of us just basically said yes before we even knew what it was.” 

“I, too, said yes before even seeing the script,” said a smitten Collette. “I’ve never done that before in my life. But when this guy calls you, you just say yes! Bong is a true original, a proper auteur, a visionary, an incredible leader but an even better collaborator. I love you!”

A stoic Yuen pulled rank. “I’ve had the pleasure of working with director Bong two times now,” he deadpanned.

“Show off!” barked Collette, mock-enraged.

Ylfa is the brains behind her thick-headed husband, whom Ruffalo plays as a political variation on his vapid chauvinist Poor Things character Duncan Wedderburn—but MAGA-fied and crossed with the televangelism of Jerry Falwell. His bloviating (he calls a boulder “big, beautiful, handsome” and “manly”) along with his thinly veiled racist references to colonizing a “pure white planet” with “people like us” are unmistakably Trumpian. So, too, his followers, who wear red caps emblazoned with their own slogan (in this case ONE AND ONLY, in reference to their own dogmatic anti-cloning philosophy). 

Bong was coy when asked about it, though, insisting that any resemblance to a current world leader is purely coincidental. “It seems like you have certain politicians of modern times that you’re thinking of,” he demurred, saying he was inspired in part by bad former politicians in Korea. “I made this character drawing my inspiration from the past. And as history is always repeating myself, it might seem like I’m referring to someone in the present.” Riiight. 

But he did at least admit being pleased that people found relevancy in Mickey 17, a movie where human life gets devalued, where religion and corporations are conflated, and where an egomaniacal fundamentalist wants to populate a new world with a sex encouragement program that is very pro-life. “It’s science fiction and it’s outer space,” Bong said. “And although it’s a story of the future, it feels like a story that could happen in the present. If it seems to cover current events as well, this kind of reaction is a reaction I am thankful for.” 

One of the most ambitious films of the year, Brady Corbet’s 215-minute psychodrama The Brutalist stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth (Adrien Brody), an accomplished but darkly wounded Hungarian-Jewish architect. Forcibly separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), the Holocaust survivor immigrates to postwar America to find a better life and instead confronts a capitalist society—embodied by industrialist patron Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce)—that relentlessly rewards conformity even as it seemingly reveres originality. It’s a story of concrete and steel that, in the opening minutes, literally turns the Statue of Liberty on its head.

Conceived with an intermission and shot in large-format VistaVision, The Brutalist was picked up by A24 after winning the Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival in September. It’s an intimate love story as monumental epic, from the industrial coal plants of Pennsylvania to the Carrera marble quarries in Tuscany. But it’s also a brooding period piece that uses history as a divining rod for contemporary times.

“I’m very, very concerned with how we got here,” Corbet said last month at THEBlvd restaurant in Los Angeles, where Observer had a chance to talk with the filmmaker and a few of his collaborators. The Brutalist continues a thematic throughline he started with his debut, 2015’s autocrat-as-feral-youth portrait Childhood of a Leader, set in 1918 France; and continued with 2018’s Vox Lux, which uses a 1999 Staten Island school shooting as the unlikely catalyst for a future pop starlet’s uneasy relationship with fame.

“It’s really funny,” explained Corbet. “Thirteen years ago, when I was prepping Childhood of a Leader, I kept trying to explain to everybody that this is just the first entry in a body of work. At some point, this is all going to make a lot more sense—I promise!”

His films to date are not just historical fictions, but also dissections exploring how historical events impact the individual—and how that individual can then make an impact on history. “This ebb and flow of being shaped by the culture and then reshaping the culture,” is how Corbet put it. Brutalism is László’s way of processing his own suffering.

The captivating austerity of that architectural style is also discomfiting for those who don’t want to recognize the inherent pain that Brutalism can represent. “The Brutalist was written during Trump’s first term,” explained Corbet. During that time the Trump administration announced a 2020 initiative called Making Federalist Buildings Beautiful Again criticizing government buildings “influenced by brutalism and deconstructivism” and promoting Neo-classical architecture .

“There’s something really interesting about how autocrats love Neo-classical architecture,” he said. “Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson went on a sort of rant about how personally affronted he feels by Brutalist buildings. I think it’s hilarious. Donald Trump has probably never heard of Albert Speer, but little does he know that he’s apparently his hero.”

Corbet co-wrote the script with his partner, filmmaker Mona Fastvold, well aware that their film might be misconstrued as a “Great Man” story.  “We’ve had so many movies about these tortured male artists,” he said. “So we wanted to be sure, if we were going to tackle that subject, that it derails a little bit.”

“The only reason the character is male is because there were predominantly male architects in the mid-century,” he said. “The only reason the character is Jewish and Hungarian is that it was predominantly Hungarian Jews that were that were making Brutalist buildings in the mid-century. All of the characters were written to their circumstances.”

Fastvold, in a conversation a few weeks later at the A24 offices in New York, elaborated on that insight. “László is kind of a fucked-up guy in many ways,” she said. “We don’t want to idealize him. We wanted to tell a story about an immigrant, about an architect, about a survivor that did not portray him as this perfect man with a heart of gold. Even through his suffering, he can create something incredible out of his trauma.”

That calculus also factored into how they defined Erzsébet. “I’ve seen that doting-slash-disgruntled wife portrayed so many times, as the female counterpart in a relationship like this,” she said. “And we’re so uninterested in it. I don’t identify with it. I don’t think most artist couples identify with that.”

When we see Erzsébet finally arrive in America in the second half, she’s afflicted with osteoperosis—a common side effect of the suffering and starvation in the concentration camps. “It was extremely common,” explains Fastvold. “To think that you weren’t carrying that trauma on your body? That, to me, is realistic.”

And yet, despite her condition, Erzsébet is the one who shows the most strength. “She challenges his ego and pushes him forward,” Fastvold said. “She is the one who’s able to fight his battles and speak for him. I wanted to explore that—showing the complexity of this different marriage of equals, and showing also their journey reclaiming their bodies, their sexuality, their love. And their friendship.”

The script’s well-written nuances are why Brody and Jones so quickly committed to The Brutalist. “All of the characters and their psychologies were so intelligently drawn,” Jones told Observer in a recent Zoom call. “Everything felt so locked in and so true and so consistent.”

What also impressed her was how, despite her fragility, Erzsébet has such carnal urges—and that desire leads to two of the most intense, revealing scenes between the married couple. “It’s an important aspect of her character,” she said. “Physical intimacy is so vital to that relationship. That carnal instinct is how she is expressing her true self. It would be easier for them to turn away from that. But, in some ways, that’s letting the trauma win. It’s a sign of hope, really.”

“I wish I encountered more things that inspired this sense of immersion,” Brody told Observer over Zoom. “That have some social relevance, that speak to how great beauty can arise from these dark moments in history.” Brody also had a personal connection, since his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, was a Hungarian immigrant whose parents fled Budapest and came to New York City during the Hungarian revolution.

The actor is best known for his Oscar-winning portrayal of another Holocaust survivor, Polish musician Władysław Szpilman, in the 2002 film The Pianist—a role that naturally resonates with the fictional László Tóth. “Although there are some similarities, this character is vastly different,” he clarified. “But the research I’d done to understand the suffering that Władysław Szpilman endured was essential to understand the backstory of László journey.”

The film’s main foil is Van Buren, who commissions Tóth to build an enormous community center after Van Buren’s son (Joe Alwyn) surprises his father by hiring Tóth to build a radically reimagined library in the family mansion. At first appalled by the work, he soon warms to it—especially when it gives him social cachet as a man of modern refinement.

Van Buren clearly admires Tóth as much as he envies and resents him. It’s a corrosive combination that Pearce embodied with the perfect mix of arrogance and insecurity. “The script is so precise at observing and portraying the little contradictions,” said Pearce during a Zoom interview. “Van Buren is grandiose, and he’ll play sort of the humble philanthropist. And he is slightly perplexed, because László has this sense of confidence about him. But he shouldn’t have this sense. How does he have this sense? Van Buren loves László and hates him at the same time. He wants to be him. He envies him. He wants to stamp him out. There’s beautiful stuff to play as an actor.”

Corbet and Fastvold also gave the two men a few scenes where they each deliver extended confessional monologues to one another—how Tóth misses the respect he used to command before the Nazis condemned his work as too Jewish; how Van Buren humiliated his grandparents, who originally abandoned him and his single mother. “They’re really flexing, the two of them,” she said. “So male, by the way.”

Adding to the tension is Erzsébet, whose presence in the second half of the film—and her devotion to her husband—threatens Van Buren’s relationship with Tóth. “There’s a huge power struggle between them,” Jones explained. “She is just disgusted by his pretensions to civility,” said Jones. “He believes he has the ultimate power because of his economic status, and she refuses to acquiesce. She has the power because she has dignity and integrity. But they need Van Buren to execute their artistic vision. So how much do they give without giving too much?”

Echoing Brutalist architecture’s reputation as a minimalist aesthetic rendered in a maximalist way, The Brutalist was a mammoth indie undertaking. Corbet and Fastvold worked on the script for seven years, and then filmed it with limited resources in 34 days on a production budget of $6 million (the film’s entire budget came in under $10 million).

Most of the film was shot on location in Hungary—ironically doubling for Pennsylvania. The local production crew, who spoke accented English throughout the shoot, helped inspire Brody’s own vocal inflections.

And production designer Judy Becker, who avoided having to construct the entire community center by using a large-scale model and partial pieces, also found existing locations in Hungary that were perfect for a few of the building’s interiors, including using local concrete grain silos as the center’s striking chapel.

Most arresting was the community center’s cistern, an enormous space with towering columns that slope at their ends. “It looks just like the Johnson Wax Building!” Becker exclaimed. “It’s the city reservoir for Budapest. I asked if we could shoot there, and they said, ‘Yes. We can drain the water, or have a foot of water, as much as you want.’ Because we found that location, Brady added a scene that shows Laszlo drawing the cisterns to show that it’s part of the building.”

The film’s cinematographer Lol Crawley, who has shot all of Brady’s films, was tasked with using the outdated but superior VistaVision format, which threads 35mm film horizontally through the camera to provide a greater frame size for capturing sharper image quality. The format, which was mostly used in the 1950s and 1960s, is not only era-appropriate for the film’s story, but also allows for rectilinear lenses that don’t distort in the same way that wide-angle 35mm lenses do. “It felt completely correct that we should have this larger format for these moments,” said Crowley. “I mean, if you’re photographing architecture, you should work with things that honor the lines of a building.”

Due to their size, VistaVision cameras are not as flexible as other options, so Crawley used a mix of different alternatives on the set. “It’s just an un-ergonomic camera,” he explained. “I knew it could be a fiddly format to work with.” He supplemented VistaVision with a 35mm ARRI camera and a 16mm rig.

In the film’s epilogue, set in 1980, when Tóth’s niece Zsófia (Ariane Labed) gives a speech honoring her uncle’s work, Crowley even used Digibeta, that magnetic tape format dominant in broadcast TV before HD became the standard. “Brady and I have always been a fan of lower-end video,” he said. “It was important that you’d have the majesty of VistaVision and celluloid—and then, in a humorous way, use video. It’s a tongue-in-cheek way to have all of this celebration of László as amazing Brutalist architect—but captured on an appalling esthetic. It is really obnoxious.”

But it also speaks to the film’s message of endurance. “You might think this is a story about this great male genius, but it is not at all,” said Brady. “It’s about what his legacy is. The movie starts with his niece and ends with his niece. When you’re left with her at the end of the film, that is his accomplishment. It is not his body of work. It is her.”

In the same week that Donald Trump retweeted a post boasting how his potential re-election would usher in a “unified Reich,” and only a few days before MAGA minion Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted a baseless accusation that “the Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate” the 45^th president, Cannes premiered Ali Abbasi’s juicy, jaundiced DJT origin story The Apprentice.

This making-of-a-monster movie, conjuring ’70s/’80s New York City with a tactile joy, outlines how the hungry-but-clueless real estate scion (an admirably restrained Sebastian Stan) found a mentor in vampiric cutthroat uber-lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, deliciously dead-eyed). Lesson #1: Attack, attack, attack. Lesson #2: Admit nothing, deny everything. Lesson #3: Claim victory, never admit defeat. And with Cohn’s cardinal rules under his belt, Fred Trump’s son—through sheer force of will and a knack for steamrolling reality—becomes The Donald.

Trump’s browbeating father (Martin Donovan) belittles Little Donnie and thinks his plan to turn a decrepit midtown hotel into a luxury destination is a pipe dream. But Cohn makes Trump’s aspirations come true, using a little bit of blackmail and intimidation to win a $60 million tax abatement that transforms the shuttered Commodore into the Grand Hyatt.  “You create your own reality,” Cohn tells Trump as his real estate fortunes begin to rise. “Truth is malleable.” Strong’s calculating, closeted Cohn spews gay slurs, calls liberals “worse than Nazis” and reserves special contempt for any notions of justice. “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is,” he croaks.

But their power dynamic starts to switch when Trump meets model Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova) and wants to wed. “The matrimonial game is a zero-sum game,” Cohn warns. “Somebody’s got to protect you.” But Trump ignores him, the first of many times Cohn tries to steer him away from future disasters. “It’s cheap and grubby and it’s gonna be bad for your brand,” Cohn says when Trump shows him around his Atlantic City casino. Trump couldn’t care less. “What do you think of midget wrestling?” he asks Cohn.

Cohn helps Trump build Trump Tower, even as the amoral attorney watches his secret lover waste away from AIDS. Soon enough, he’s infected with the “gay cancer,” while Trump, now addicted to diet-pill amphetamines that he pops like candy, develops love handles and male-pattern baldness. He throws a 60^th birthday party at Mar-a-Lago for the seriously ailing Cohn, giving him silver-and-diamond cufflinks that are actually pewter studded with cubic zirconia. And then, after the guests leave, he makes his staff disinfect the dining room. What does Trump get for himself? Liposuction and a scalp reduction.

Not surprisingly, within hours of The Apprentice’s Cannes premiere, Team Trump threatened litigation—bringing to mind one of the many pearls of wisdom Cohn delivers in the film: “Always file a lawsuit, always file a lawsuit.” Abbasi offered to screen the movie for Trump anytime, anyplace.

“I don’t think this is a movie that he would dislike,” the Iranian-Danish filmmaker told reporters during the film’s press conference. “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised.”

“If there’s an ideology for the movie, it’s a humanist ideology,” he continued. “It’s about taking these people who are icons, who are hated or loved, and sort of deconstructing that mythological image into earthly human beings. With that comes understanding, with that comes sympathy. That doesn’t necessary mean you forgive everything they did. If there’s a cathartic mission for the movie, that would be it.”

Will Americans get to see The Apprentice? At this point, no domestic distributors have opened their checkbooks. “We have a promotional event coming up, called the U.S. elections,” Abbasi joked. “It’s gonna help us with the movie.” He mentioned that the mid-September date for the second presidential debate would be the ideal time for a stateside release.

“This is really not a movie about Donald Trump,” Abbasi insisted. “This is a movie about a system. And the way the system works, the way the system is built, and the way the power runs through the system. Roy Cohn was an expert in using that system, and he taught Donald Trump.”

He pointed out that Roger Ailes helped to create MSNBC in 1993 before Murdoch tapped him to start Fox News in 1996. “A lot of these people, they go to the same charity events, they go to the same galas, they went to the same schools,” said Abbasi. “That’s the structure you’re dealing with. The idea that there’s a very sharp divide in the United States between conservatives and liberals, I think, is a fantasy.”

Kevin Costner may have injected some Wild West machismo into the Cannes Film Festival this past weekend, but his olde tyme epic Horizon was no match for Demi Moore baring it all in an explicit body horror satire that reduced the venerable Brat Pack beauty to a shuddering pile of viscera. Upstaging them both: an electrifyingly audacious musical about the ruthless millionaire leader of a Mexican cartel who stages his own death to get a sex change. Sorry, cowboy: as far as Cannes is concerned, the future is female.

Don’t think that the French completely shunned their favorite frontiersman. Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1, the first installment in his four-part passion project, rode into town on Sunday night to a warm Riviera welcome. Dapper in his three-piece tuxedo at the film’s premiere, the lanky star of Yellowstone was sporting a bushy salt-and-pepper moustache/soul patch combo more befitting a haggard gunslinger than a SoCal movie star.

The sustained cheers when he entered the Lumière Theater nearly pushed him to tears. And by the time the three-hour film finished its run, as the audience rewarded him with even more applause, a deeply touched Costner let loose with waterworks that bordered on an ugly cry. 

It was certainly an expression of gratitude, but maybe also more than a little bit of exhaustion mixed with relief that his high-stakes cinematic gamble found an appreciative home in the auteur-friendly festival. Having reportedly shelled out nearly $98 million of his own fortune to bankroll the first three films, the Oscar-winning writer-director of Dances with Wolves is feeling the pinch. 

“I don’t need four homes,” quipped Costner ruefully at the press conference. “I’ll risk those homes to make my movies. I want to leave them to my children, but my children will have to live their own lives.” He’s been vocal about finding investors for his tetralogy, going yacht to yacht here in Cannes trying to raise the finishing funds. “I use to get no money to do this,” he added, talking about his film career. “Then I got paid a lot of money to do this. Now I need to pay my own money to do this.”

Time will tell if the big risk will lead to even bigger rewards. Based on this first film, it could be a long wagon ride to success. Chapter 1 is a 180-minute collection of promising but slight character introductions, a string of inciting incidents and episodic flare-ups that don’t yet amount to a story.  Costner himself doesn’t even show up until the one-hour mark.

But its canvas is wide, starting in 1859 and encompassing the Montana territory, the Wyoming territory, Western Kansas, the Santa Fe trail, and above all Arizona’s San Pedro Valley, where 150,000 acres of property deeds are being offered up for an area called Horizon. “Premium Virgin Land!” flyers announce—although they don’t mention the buyer-beware Apaches who don’t take so kindly to the “white-eyes” and their so-called Manifest Destiny. 

The quasi-starry cast includes Luke Wilson, Sienna Miller, Jenna Malone, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, and—after a brief climactic highlight reel of Things to Come—a quick glimpse of…Giovanni Ribisi? Most of the other players are not so recognizable, and don’t quite exude the kind of star power that is guaranteed to bring audiences back. Is this how the West was won? 

Cannes loves audacity, and viewers were far more eager to fall for a feral fairy tale like Coralie Fargeat’s genre-bending The Substance. A go-for-broke Demi Moore stars as faded movie star Elizabeth Sparkle, once adored and now running on fumes as an outdated fitness guru in Boomer-era spandex outfits. Her sleazy network honcho (a loudmouth Dennis Quaid, leaning hard into every fisheye lens camera shot) wants to dump her for fresh meat. Enter a cryptic biotech fix called The Solution.

“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” intones an intro video on a mysterious USB-stick secretly slipped into her coat pocket. She definitely wants what it’s selling: a new you that’s younger, more beautiful, more perfect. Her body, just split into two completely separate beings. But here’s the Grimm-quality twist: each new person can only be alive for a week at a time. No exceptions. And the while one person thrives, the other falls into a dormant state. 

Injections follow; Elizabeth, naked and afraid, hits the bathroom floor. Her eyeballs bubble into doubles, her back bursts along the spinal line, and out crawls an equally nude Margaret Qualley. The new entity, who calls herself Sue, is a natural, launching a shiny new exercise show and becoming a ratings phenom. But success goes to her head, which means that Sue needs to extract more fluids from Elizabeth’s unconscious carcass in order to thrive. And as each one notices how the other impinges on their happiness, sparks fly and resentments—not to mention open wounds—fester. Brace for some seriously distorted body parts, cracked bones, decrepit appendages, and a breast popping out of an eye socket. Qualley even extracts a chicken leg from her belly button. 

“You can’t escape from yourself,” the biotech firm tells Elizabeth. “You. Are. One.” As a candy-colored metaphor for human duality, as a cartoonish update of The Picture of Dorian Gray, or as a Cronenbergian successor for parables about sins of the flesh, The Substance is a staggering adrenaline shot into the heart of moviegoers. And Moore is the reason it’s all such serious fun, delivering an impressively calibrated performance that balances broad histrionics with tender vulnerability. 

The most unlikely success of the fest, though, is Emilia Pérez, the latest film from Palme d’Or winner Jacques Audiard and another in his studies of fringe people in unimaginable situations who expand their capacities for empathy, betrayal, sacrifice, and cathartic self-actualization. With stunning works like the The Beat that My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, and Rust and Bone, Audiard has spun some boldly original yarns. 

Yet nothing compares to the astonishing audacity of his latest, a Mexico-set melodrama in which a put-upon lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña) unexpectedly gets involved with a vicious crime lord Juan Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) and helps him fake his death and go through gender reassignment surgery to become the titular woman he’s dreamt of being since childhood. And they all keep breaking into song.

“Mammoplasty! Vaginoplasty! Rhinoplasty!” doctors croon as a gaggle of bandaged chorines swan around in a dance number worthy of Busby Berkeley (Damien Jalet choreographed all the numbers). The whole endeavor is a go-for-broke gambit that mixes Almodóvarian longing with spit-rap ballads worthy of Lin-Manuel Miranda. (French chanteuse Camille and composer-partner Clément Ducol wrote the music and lyrics.) Virtuosic camerawork, spontaneous dancing and fluid production design all combine to make for bedazzling dance numbers.

But the unexpected emotions are what make the film so haunting—especially when it focuses on Emilia’s desire to mother the children she left behind with now-widowed wife Jessi (Selena Gomez). And, trying to absolve herself of the guilt for her violent past, Emilia starts a foundation to help people find and recover their “disappeared” loved ones who suffered at the hands of Latin America’s sicarios and cartels. 

Crime never pays, as the shuddering climax proves, even as it shows that altering your body doesn’t always exorcise inner demons. But it’s a start. “Changing the body changes society,” Rita sings at one point to a skeptical plastic surgeon. “Changing society changes the soul. Changing the soul changes us all.” 

Director Yorgos Lanthimos is cruel to be kind in his latest, Kinds of Kindness, a demented head-trip triptych which jolted Cannes over the weekend with images of self-mutilation, emotional manipulation, and straight-up mind-fuckery. This follow-up to his acclaimed steampunk feminist fantasia Poor Things was shot quickly while that vfx-heavy film was in a long post-production process. It chronicles three unrelated surreal scenarios, each using the same actors, including his latest muse, Emma Stone. You think her Oscar-winning turn as Bella Baxter was fearless? Wait until you see Stone in a bare-it-all sex-tape foursome with Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, and Mamoudou Athie. Or Stone severing her left thumb with a kitchen knife. Or Stone being roofied by Joe Alwyn.

“I just have extreme comfort,” said the actress at the film’s press conference. “I feel like I can do anything with him, because we’ve worked together so many times. I trust him beyond the trust I’ve ever had with any director. We just have something that I can’t explain.”

Plemons must feel the same way, since he’s joining Stone in Lanthimos’ next film, Bugonia, a remake of 2003’s gonzo sci-fi South Korean comedy Save the Green Planet! which follows two men who kidnap a high-powered CEO because they think she’s actually an alien.

“You feel many different things before you understand why—it just sort of seeps in,” explained Plemons about working with the Greek director. And like Lanthimos’ other off-kilter parables of human foibles, Kinds of Kindness, in which Plemons plays three distinctly different characters, resists obvious interpretation. “I remember, early on, after reading the script a few times, having the story inside me but nowhere to place it in my head. Which is a very unsettling place to be.”

In the first story, Plemons plays a company man whose wealthy boss (Willem Dafoe) completely and absurdly micro-manages every aspect of his life—not only his daily routine and his diet, but also who he should marry, how often he makes love to his spouse, and whether he should even be allowed to have children. In the second story, Plemons plays a swinger cop who’s convinced that his wife (Emma Stone) is actually an imposter. And in the final installment, Plemons and Stone are members of a sex cult trying to find a woman with a dead twin (Margaret Qualley).

Every scenario is absurd—brace for a hilarious montage of dogs acting like humans on a remote island set to Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark”—but also poignant in its twisted take on human nature. It’s a world where people will literally rip out their own liver as a sign of adoration, or collect oddly menacing sports memorabilia like John McEnroe’s mangled tennis racquet and Ayrton Senna’s scorched racing helmet. And if murder proves your fidelity, then so be it.

When a reporter asked Lanthimos if his skewed way of representing reality is a sign of our times, he didn’t disagree. “Don’t you think something’s off with the world?” he replied. “Probably more so than the films we make. And I think it’s strange and crazy and sad a lot of times. And it’s also ridiculous and funny. And that needs to be part of what we make.”

Reality is a slippery subject in Paul Schrader’s elegiac Oh, Canada, a touching drama about an acclaimed but dying documentary filmmaker (Richard Gere) giving a final on-camera interview about his life. His insistence on talking about the crucial draft-dodging moment in 1968 when his 24-year-old younger self (Jacob Elordi) abandons the United States to avoid Vietnam—not to mention the wife and child he leaves behind and never sees again—doubles as a last-rites confessional, not only to the former students interviewing him, but also his devoted wife (Uma Thurman).

The film is based on his late friend Russell Bank’s 2021 novel Foregone, and Schrader (who adapted Banks’ Affliction into an acclaimed 1998 film) was inspired to make it after Banks told him he had cancer.

“He was a very close friend after Affliction,” Schrader said at the film’s press conference. “I would spend summers in the Adirondacks with him and I was going to go, summer before last, and, he said, ‘You can’t come. I’m going through chemo.’ I knew he had written a book about the degradations of death. So I read it, and said, ‘I’m going to make it, for Russell and for me.’”

Oh, Canada reunites Gere with Schrader for the first time in over 40 years, back when the director cast him as the louche lead in 1980’s American Gigolo. This time, his sexy physique that Schrader depicts on screen is now a wizened shell. And Gere’s performance is absolutely devastating, fully animating a man full of anger, shame, self-pity, regret, and finally a deep sense of relief.

“My father passed away a few months before Paul came to me with the project,” explained Gere. “He was just a few weeks short of turning 101. He was living with me and and my kids and my wife, and he was in a wheelchair. And the way his mind was coming in and out of many different realities and many levels of consciousness, I think that’s what I related to very much in the script.”

He and Schrader also embraced how the story conflates and scrambles timelines, making emotional truth and actual truth very hard to discern. “Linear realities have softened and time disappears completely,” said Gere. “It’s more contrapuntal, like how music exists on the page where these notes are on top of each other.”

He also talked about how his film career has equally frozen him in various moments in time. “It’s a very odd thing being an actor in film, especially because it does last. It is certainly mysterious and strange. The document remains, and the document is powerful.”

Go big or go home: The Cannes Film Festival prides itself on grand gestures and romantic ideals—especially when they exude cine-folie—making it the perfect platform this year for the World Premiere of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. “I sing of Colossus and the History of Man,” a narrator intones as the movie opens. What’s at stake? Civilization itself.

The 85-year-old filmmaker, who has nabbed the top-prize Palme d’Or at Cannes twice (for 1974’s The Conversation and 1979’s Apocalypse Now) personally bankrolled every penny of this $120 million passion project, more than 40 years in the making and already beset with breathless gossip about on-set chaos, a free-form shooting schedule, and a director who reveled in experimentation.

Shia LaBeouf in Caligula-era drag? Aubrey Plaza as a louche cable finance reporter nicknamed the Money Bunny? Jon Voight dressed as Robin Hood and bragging about his alarmingly tall boner? An early private IMAX screening in L.A. last month left baffled distributors shaking their heads in disbelief.

It’s no small wonder why. His melodrama might be larded with campy chestnuts, but Coppola also digs deep into ancient history to update the Catiline Conspiracy for his sci-fi epic, recasting the decline of the Roman Republic as the natural parallel to the end of the hegemonic American century. It reimagines New York as New Rome, a decadent capital of political power struggles, billionaire bankers, and master builders. Madison Square Garden doubles as a modern-day Colosseum with chariot races. Nightclubs host an endless bacchanalia of coke-addled scions and lamé-swathed glamourpusses rubbing flesh until dawn.

At its nexus: Cesar Catilia (Adam Driver), a Fountainhead-worthy starchitect espousing the virtues of city planning while running New Rome’s Design Authority from a perch at the top of the Chrysler Building. Imagine a beguiling fusion of Jane Jacobs and her nemesis Robert Moses, and you start to get the gist. Add in a dash of Elon Musk, too, since he’s also the inventor of a futuristic material called Megalon, strong enough to support skyscrapers and supple enough to be turned into wearable fabric.

Spoiler to his dreams is the calculating Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a short-term compromiser who’d rather built a quick-cash casino than oversee a decades-long urban revolution. His rebellious daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) is a former med school student and current tabloid-fixture party girl who plants herself in Cesar’s orbit, increasingly seduced by his vision of the future. And duplicitous Clodio Pulcher (LaBeouf), Cesar’s cousin, is eager to spoil everything, eventually doing a cannonball dive into politics where his talents as a raging buffoon-provocateur earn him a loyal base that—wait for it—have a preference for red baseball caps.

Coppola’s film—gaudy, corny, optimistic, righteous, uniquely confounding yet utterly sincere—cast its spell during the black-tie evening Cannes premiere, where it earned a 10-minute standing ovation from an adoring audience. Paul Schrader and Abel Ferrara showed their respect. Richard Gere, Coppola’s lead in The Cotton Club, gave him a big bear hug. A tuxedoed Coppola bowed widely, leaning on a bamboo cane, and made sure to embrace each one of his cast members. “It’s impossible to find words to tell you how I feel,” the overwhelmed director told his fawning crowd. “The most important word in any language is the most beautiful one: esperanza—hope. And that’s what I dedicate this film to. And the children. Make a world for the children.”

The next day’s press conference continued that theme. “I come with an army of kids!” said Coppola as he entered the room with two of his grandchildren, 17-year-old Romy (Sofia Coppola’s daughter) and her 13-year-old cousin Pascale (Roman Coppola’s daughter). No surprise he brought them, considering that Coppola had a 5-year-old Sofia on his shoulders during the Apocalypse Now press conference 45 years ago. True to his patriarchal nature, Coppola also made sure that Megalopoliswas a family affair, giving roles to sister Talia Shire and nephew Jason Schwartzman, with son Roman assisting behind the camera during production.

The respectful reporters in the room didn’t have any harsh words for Coppola’s film, but the actors were still compelled to talk with a mix of defensiveness and defiance. Prompted by a question about the film’s ultimate message of hope, Esposito gave a full-throated display of loyalty. “Film is supposed to inspire us,” he said. “It is also supposed to take risks. I’m not supposed to know all the answers. And neither does Francis!”

When asked about the state of politics in the U.S., Coppola quickly drew parallels with Megalopolis. “We might lose the republic,” he said, but then gestured to his cast—including Voight, whose vocal support of Donald Trump is no secret—and proudly asserted how they all brought myriad views. “Jon, you have different political opinions than me,” he said with a glimmer in his eye. “How do you feel about the future? How can we make a beautiful world of the future?”

“Where are we going?” Voight replied in a measured tone. “I think we’re all asking ourselves that. I agree with our film. Human beings are capable of solving every problem. We can do it if we band together. And we have to do our best.”

That sense of interdependency was evident in other actors’ experiences filming with Coppola. “Getting into his mind was kind of a trust fall,” Plaza explained. “He likes to inspire actors, and he’s very playful. And he trusts the people that he’s cast. The script for me is very dreamlike. And the process really almost reflected that in a way.”

“It felt like experimental theater,” said Driver. “And that’s what made it feel rebellious and exciting. And I think it’s reflected in the film. I don’t think that there’ll be something this imaginative on that scale again. I’ve seen it a lot of times, and last night I saw it in a different way than I had before. And I think it’ll just get richer and richer.”

One reporter asked if Coppola would be re-editing Megalopolis in a few years, like he’s done with Apocalypse Now, The Cotton Club, and The Godfather Part III. But his answer, at least for now, is no. “It’s how I felt the film should be,” he replied. “And since I was paying for it, I thought I was entitled. If there’s a way I can make the film a little better, I will try, but I know that I’m done with it because I’ve already started writing another film.”

As for his own future? Coppola is optimistic. “I’ll be back here in 20 years, I think,” he said to a burst of rapturous applause. One of the film’s leitmotifs is the slippery nature of time. Cesar, in particular, has a Neuromancer’s way of briefly stopping time. “He’s always talked about stopping time,” said Lawrence Fishburne, the actor with whom Coppola has worked the longest: since 1976, when Fishburne was just 14. “Even before he was talking about Megalopolis, he would say, ‘I could stop time. I can stop time. I’ll show you.’”

“All art is controlled time,” said Coppola. “Painters freeze it, dancers move in space with it. Goethe said that architecture is frozen music.”

But the most poignant insight came from Shire, who recalled how her brother was paralyzed with polio when he was 9. “People weren’t walking,” she said. “And Francis decided he was going to walk every day for one year. That was an act of courage. it’s very easy to go backwards. Backwards is wonderful. It’s comfortable. To go forward is unknown. Every day with my brother, he made you go forward. Take a risk. You do go forward when you’re with Francis. You go forward.”

A buzzing crowd packed the IMAX theater at AMC Lincoln Square this past Monday night for a super-sized preview of Alex Garland’s Civil War, an incendiary look at a dystopic United States tearing itself apart. Don McLean’s crooning elegiac voice from 1971 filtered through the speakers as pre-show entrance music. “Bye-Bye, Miss American Pie” indeed. 

“I’m not actually very good at public speaking,” said writer-director Garland with a self-deprecating smile as he introduced the Upper West Side screening, one of 50 such IMAX sneak peeks that distributor A24 arranged that night around the country before the film opens nationwide on April 12.

“Someone from A24 said, ‘I just want to warn you, there’s 150 journalists in this audience tonight. Be upbeat.’ So that’s what this is,” Garland added, pointing at himself with a wan shrug. 

His political provocation—full of blood-in-the-street images like a flag-toting suicide bomber detonating herself amid a riot in downtown Brooklyn, the Lincoln Memorial crumbling from a rocket launcher hit, a dump truck of dead Americans emptied into a mass grave, and the president literally clinging to the Resolute Desk as soldiers drag him away—is a $50 million gamble for New York-based indie studio A24, the most they’ve ever spent on any production.

Mounting such an audacious and potentially divisive action-drama is a bold statement from a bold company whose early reputation was forged with visionary works like Garland’s 2014 A.I. paranoid thriller Ex Machina. The British auteur is in the company’s DNA, a relationship they continued with 2022’s surreal shocker Men and now Civil War.

“I wrote this four years ago,” said Garland in a Q&A after the screening, where film critic Tomris Laffly moderated a discussion with the director and his cast, including Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, and Wagner Moura. “It’s not like there was any prescience on my part. Lots of people were concerned about division, polarization, populist politics that leads to extremism.”

More than anything, Garland was unsettled with the state of journalism—or journalism’s impact on the world around it. “There was something strange about the press,” he said. “They were writing very good stories—analytical and thoughtful and balanced and all sorts of things. But they had no traction. They didn’t seem to stop anything from happening.” 

So he wanted to make Civil War a movie about reportage—specifically in combat zones, and how that boots-on-the-ground view is all about bearing witness to the brutally logical consequences of political conflict. “We don’t ask,” says Dunst’s character, a photojournalist named Lee Smith. “We record so others ask.” 

To help with context and inspiration for their roles, Garland made sure that the cast watched Chris Martin’s film Under the Wire, a 2018 documentary about Marie Colvin, the eyepatch-wearing foreign correspondent who was killed in a bombardment during the Syrian civil war. He also added Elem Klimov’s seminal 1985 anti-war film Come and See for a further shell-shocked dollop of man’s inhumanity to man.

Dunst’s grim-faced Lee is an intrepid figure, showered with accolades but haunted by flashbacks of the deadly places and harrowing images that define her career. Her posse includes Joel (Moura), a journalist who loves the rush of being embedded in the action; Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran correspondent who files for “what’s left of The New York Times”; and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a novice photographer hungry to learn the ropes from a hesitant Lee. 

In the film, Lee shoots on a digital camera, capturing the horrors of a war-torn America through her Leica lens. But Jessie uses a traditional 35mm SLR camera, specifically the Nikon FE2, per Garland’s instructions. “So that’s what I started learning on,” said Spaeny. “And I went to darkrooms in L.A., I learned to develop that myself. And I shot every photo you see me take in the movie. Whether it was a good photo or not, no one knows!” 

“You were wasting real film!” Dunst ribbed her co-star. “Very expensive.”

The first thing Lee does is give Jessie her yellow vest to remind combatants that they’re press. After that? “Buy a helmet and some Kevlar,” she advises. So begins their 857-mile journey from New York City to Washington, D.C., having to re-route away from decimated highways blocked with car wreckage and onto alternate routes that take them out to Pittsburgh, then through West Virginia en route to the nation’s capital where they hope to get a planned interview with the president—if they’re not shot on site first as so-called enemies of the people. 

Garland shot the film chronologically, so the cast could experience the emotional and psychological build throughout their journey. And as they moved closer to the front lines, the street fighting, explosions, and gunfire got worse. And more visceral. “The last two weeks were very intense,” Dunst explained. “It was very immersive the way we did it, and the way we shot it felt as real as possible. We didn’t use the half-round or quarter-round blanks that you usually use in a film. We used full-round. So there were very loud explosions. And that stuff gets in your body.” 

Garland wanted that trauma to be an essential part of his film. If it’s true, as François Truffaut once famously said, that every film about war ends up being pro-war, then Garland was intent on avoiding anything that might glorify the action. “I didn’t want to accidentally make Triumph of the Will,” he said, referring to Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous and aesthetically breathtaking piece of Nazi agitprop.

He was especially sensitive to music selection. “Apocalypse Now is absolute masterful filmmaking in terms of the photography and the editing and everything,” he said. “You add the Doors to it: what it is, is primarily seductive. It’s not repelling you. It’s pulling you into a dark romance. So we were very careful about the music choices.”

His needle drops, including a healthy dollop of synth-punk band Suicide, are jolting and disorienting. “We discovered that contemporary music never works,” said Garland. “Because it dated it in a particular way and broke some of the spell that the film is trying to cast.” One remarkably dark sequence uses De La Soul’s bouncy rap song “Say No Go” during a horrific execution scene. The dissonance—joy, repulsion, celebration, rage, despair—is a shocking subversion of expectations.

Civil War doesn’t ever mention political parties, viewpoints, or beliefs. So is Garland being coy by not naming names? “I’ve been doing interviews, and sometimes people say, ‘This isn’t a political film,’’’ he said. “And I think, ‘What on earth you’re talking about? Of course it’s a political film.’ This president, I would say, is manifestly a fascist. He has dismantled the FBI, which legally threatens him. He’s killing his own citizens with airstrikes. And he’s a third-term president, so he’s dismantling the Constitution. I’m not sure how much clearer those dots can be drawn in terms of their implications. I’m starting to get irritated by the question.”

He trusts in the intelligence of his audience: he’s not going to spoon-feed them reams of backstory or be arrogant enough to offer them answers. “I don’t need to tell anybody why this civil war occurred,” he said. “Because I think, in conversation over a beer, everybody would know why the civil war occurred.” 

What’s more important to Garland is showing how internal strife can lead to utter devastation—a sentiment literally voiced in the film. “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning back home,” Lee says at one point. “But here we are.”

At first glance, Ira Sachs’ erotic drama Passages seems like a classic cheating-spouse story with a queer twist: a man betrays his husband for an exciting jolt of hetero infatuation, then ends up inflicting pain on both lovers. “There’s this idea that there’s one villain and two victims in this film,” Sachs told Observer last week. “But I think everybody in this film is driven by their own desire. And that’s what makes it suspenseful and exciting. That’s why I call it an action film!” 

The Paris-set Passages is no simple cautionary tale about a philanderer. It’s a much richer portrait of three people who aren’t young adults anymore and are yearning for a transition but don’t quite know how to make the next step. Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is a hotshot German filmmaker long married to British high-end printer Martin (Ben Whishaw); both are restless in their relationship, which is already showing signs of strain. Then, at the wrap party for his latest movie, Tomas meets Agathe (Adèle Excharchopoulos), a voluptuous local schoolteacher, and impulsively finds himself having sex with her. 

The next morning, Tomas confesses to Martin immediately and seems more thrilled than guilty. “It was exciting, it was something different,” he gushes. His husband glowers at the transgression. “It’s fine,” Martin sighs. But it’s really not: soon enough, Martin kicks Tomas out of the apartment, and Tomas moves in with Agathe.

“The whole film is a middle,” said the New York-based Sachs making a Zoom call from Los Angeles. “Every scene is in the middle and these lives are in the middle. They’re really trying to figure out how they’re going to construct their families, what their relationships are going to look like. And they haven’t made decisions yet. A lot of the suspense of the film is that each of them wants to build a meaningful life.” 

Martin tries to cut out Tomas, and even takes a novelist acquaintance as a new lover. But Tomas keeps showing up to Martin’s apartment unannounced, and keeps wanting to win him back—even as his courtship with Agathe intensifies and he confesses that he’s fallen in love with her. “You say it when it works for you,” she says skeptically. “I say it when I feel it,” Tomas replies obstinately. She believes him, and then watches him show up late to a meet-and-greet dinner with her parents, wearing leopard-print pants and a silky Chinese dragon tank top.

Sachs has devoted his career to studying the finely-tuned nuances of the human heart. From his 1997 LGBT breakthrough film The Delta and his 2005 Sundance Grand Prize winner Forty Shades of Blue, to gay modern classics like 2012’s Keep the Lights On and 2014’s Love is Strange, Sachs has explored how conflicted lovers tug on each other’s emotions, in ways both nurturing and acidic. He’s perfected the art of what he calls “non-melodramatic melodrama,” quietly observed stories with seismic undercurrents.

“It was such an unusual voice,” said Whishaw in a Zoom call from London last month, just a few days before the SAG-AFTRA strike put a freeze on union actors promoting their work. “Ira is curious about people’s lives in a very beautiful way. He’s not interested in analyzing relationships in terms of who’s done wrong or who’s done right. Everyone is complex, and he’s interested in everyone’s multifacetedness. And people’s ability to be contradictory.” 

Rogowski was equally enamored of Sachs’ work—a reciprocal feeling, since the filmmaker wrote Passages specifically for Rogowski despite never having worked with him. “It was very intimidating, but also an honor,” Rogowski (not a SAG member) said via Zoom this week from just outside London. “I read the script and I think we right away felt like we wanted to do this together.”

Not that Rogowski didn’t have his concerns. “Obviously the character felt a bit hard to justify, especially on paper,” he admitted. “But it’s much more than just, you know, an individual being mean. It’s a person struggling, first of all, with himself—being a friend to himself, being able to listen. We’ve all had experiences with narcissists and narcissism. What are the consequences if you live a life like he does? Once I understood those things, it was just pleasure to create him and inflict this chaos.” 

And what chaos: the lascivious Tomas prioritizes his own appetites at all costs, which is exactly the type of film Sachs had in mind. “I wanted to make a movie that turned people on,” he admitted. “Because I’m a huckster like the rest of them! I was trying to make it the most colorful, show the most skin, have the most kind of erotic attachment to the pleasures of cinema I could find.” 

It worked, since the Motion Picture Association slapped Passages with an NC-17 rating, not only for a scene where Tomas seduces Agathe into a prolonged and very carnal encounter, but also an even more enthusiastic bout of lovemaking with Martin. That particular moment—a one-sentence description in the original script—is an extended, single-shot tour-de-force of homosexual desire, legs-up thrusting and all, that’s virtually unseen in even arthouse movies. 

“I wanted a scene that punctured the movie,” said Sachs. “A scene that shifted the rhythm in a way that would linger with the audience as a memory. Because I actually think films are not made up of narrative threads. The visual impact is really what you tend to remember about a film. Images that are strong enough to knock you out.” 

The Emmy-, BAFTA-, and Golden Globe-winning Whishaw was all in. “I had no problem with any of it, really,” he said of his full-monty fornication. “It all felt totally justified by what the film is exploring, and it was worth going right into the truth of these things. It’s important to show relationships and sex as they are, or at least as they are for these particular people.” Sachs couldn’t agree more. “It’s about humans!” he said. “It’s not even just about sex. It’s about humans.” 

As a storyteller, Sachs is interested in capturing vulnerability. “In life, there are moments in which you feel like you don’t know how to protect yourself,” he said. “That lack of protection in some ways is what I’m interested in when I make a movie. I don’t rehearse, for example, which means that the actors can’t turn to something that’s been decided before we start shooting and settle there. They have to keep trying to expose themselves in honest ways.”

As honest as the characters may feel, their wardrobe choices plant them firmly in a glamorous film firmament. From Tomas’ sartorial splendor (black mesh shirts, snakeskin jackets) to Martin’s discreetly louche touches (thin red robe, crushed velvet jacket with a powder-blue blouse) to Agathe’s casual bombshell look (tight red turtlenecks; short, form-fitting dresses), the main characters are unassumingly fetching.

“They’re wonderful,” said Rogowski about Tomas’ ferocious regalia, selected by renowned costume designer Khadija Zeggaï, whose husband, Saïd Ben Saïd, is also the film’s producer. “We did a costume rehearsal in their apartment,” explained Rogowski. “It was one of our first get-togethers. I have a tendency to blend in, but I was inspired to wear these things—they’re so weird and it creates so much tension, and that’s lovely.”

Rogowski found the clothes so inspirational he even kept a few items. “Some of them are in my wardrobe now,” he said. “That transparent green pullover. And the teddy bear jacket. The striped pants. Also the scarves. Whatever drawer or door I open, I see a piece of Tomas in my wardrobe.” 

Take a story rooted in a ’90s tabloid romance, add Oscar winners Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, purée it in a post-modern blender, and season to taste with a delightful mix of camp artifice, classic melodrama, and earnest soul-searching. The heady concoction is Todd Haynes’ May December, an intoxicating reflection on identity and authenticity that premiered Saturday night in Cannes and enjoyed a big-ticket acquisition deal that started at $6 million and swiftly rose to $11 million. Netflix ended up with the winning bid, immediately dropping the steaming service squarely into this year’s awards-season conversation.

“My character is someone who transgresses—and how do we address that?” said Moore at the film’s press conference the morning after its late-night premiere. “An age gap is one thing. But a relationship between an adult and a child is something else entirely.”

Those with long memories for true-crime scandal will recall Mary Kay Letourneau, the 34-year-old schoolteacher whose 1996 statutory-rape love affair with a 12-year-old student led to pregnancy, prison, and a 14-year marriage. In Haynes’ fictionalized account, the transgressor is Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore), her student lover is Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), and their 1995 affair started in a Savannah pet shop storeroom when she was 36 and he was 13.

Now, 20 years later, long after the lurid headlines and jail time served (plus one cheesy made-for-TV movie that sensationalized their pariah status) Gracie and Joe are enjoying a settled Georgia life as their children get ready to graduate from high school, when in comes Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), star of hit TV show Norah’s Ark and the lead actor in an upcoming indie film based on Gracie and Joe. She wants research her role by spending time with Gracie and her family. “It’s a very complex and human story,” Elizabeth tells Gracie, dismissing the public’s tawdry prejudices and claiming that she wants Gracie to “be seen.” She’s seen, all right. The postman just delivered a piece of hate mail: a small box of shit.

Wrapped around all the lurid narrative threads is Haynes’s own keenly self-aware cinematic approach to genre—especially material that feels like a throughline in an afternoon soap opera. Soft-focus lenses, pointed dialogue peppered with cruel remarks, and, best of all, an overheated score (courtesy Marcelo Zavros) that recycles generous dollops of Michel Legrand’s hot-button soundtrack to Joseph Losey’s 1971 forbidden romance The Go-Between.

Best of all is Moore’s crafty way of infusing Gracie with a mix of genuine pathos and hilariously deadpan affectations. Not for nothing is Moore a perfect fit for the role, especially considering her early-career, Daytime Emmy-winning stint on As the World Turns in the mid-’80s. “This script had an amazing muscularity to it,” said Moore. “It was really deceptive because when you first read Sammy Birch’s script, it seems sort of simple. And then we all found, as we were working on it, it was just unbelievably intricate and intense and loaded and muscular. We all really leaned into that.”

With Birch’s story and under Haynes’s direction, Portman and Moore create a fascinating pas de deux of performative femininity, emotional vulnerability, and the limits of acceptable norms. It’s like Persona crossed with To Die For. “The reason this movie feels so dangerous is that people don’t know where anyone’s boundaries are,” says Moore. “And it feels scary.”

Portman agreed. “Performing femininity is a recurring theme in Todd’s films,” she said. “The whole film is so much about performance, and the different roles we play in different environments, for different people, for ourselves even.”

What’s at stake is the truth. But what does that really mean? Gracie is telling herself one set of facts, interpreting her romance in the best possible light. But she’s also hiding potentially dark secrets about what might have motivated her to get involved with a 13-year-old. Joe is both mature and naïve, as someone thrust into an adult role when he wasn’t ready, and balancing young fatherhood with his sheltered, skewed sense of love. Gracie is just as deluded about the truth of their relationship as he is. “You seduced me,” she tells him at one point. “I was 13!” he replies in disbelief.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth is busy watching audition tapes for the child role in her film. “The kids are cute,” she tells her producers. “But they’re not sexy enough.” Here is an actress so myopically focused on capturing Gracie’s essence that she raises doubts about what her own inner life might actually be—not to mention her own sense of propriety. “It’s the complexity, the moral gray areas, that are so interesting,” she remarks at a certain point—and you realize that her own filter might be dangerously out of whack.

It’s par for the course in a film where Gracie and Elizabeth—and increasingly Joe—start to question their own sense of self when it comes to loving and being loved in return. “I lost track of where the line is,” says one of them late in the film. “Who ever decides where the lines are?” comes the response.

“It’s incredible to get to be part of a film like this that has two such complex, really human characters that are full of all of kind of delicious conflicts,” said Portman. “Todd has that ability to create this incredible tension and incredible drama with very subtle strokes. It’s never pointing to what you’re supposed to feel. There’s a very restrained vision—but yet also the music is just so evocative and extreme in the best way. And there’s also such a sense of humor, too, with all of this depiction of a lot of darkness. There is always an ability to have a glimmer in the eye.”

Talk about a killer premiere: Martin Scorsese’s epic, shame-filled tragedy Killers of the Flower Moon had its world premiere in Cannes over the weekend, immediately igniting a stampede of rabid moviegoers and electrifying the Riviera film festival with its sprawling portrait of methodical, merciless mass murder in the open plains of 1920s Oklahoma.

Scorsese, the legendary auteur and longtime Cannes vet who won the festival’s Palme d’Or in 1976 with Taxi Driver, last had a debut here with one of his shortest and least expensive films ever: 1985’s $10 million, 97-minute screwball nightmare After Hours (which also nabbed Cannes’ Best Director prize). What a difference four decades makes. Killers, a $200 million, 206-minute cinematic behemoth commanded a 9-minute standing ovation from the glittering gala crowd. Among the audience members were Cate Blanchett, Naomi Campbell, and Alfonso Cuaron, along with stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, and Jesse Plemons, as well as Apple CEO Tim Cook, the man whose trillion-dollar company bankrolled Scorsese’s vision. Bucking the trend of streamers like Netflix, Apple is partnering with Paramount to guarantee an initial theatrical release starting October 6.

“Apple did so great by us,” said Scorsese in a few quick remarks to the black-tie crowd after their thunderous applause. “We shot this a couple of year ago in Oklahoma. There was lots of grass—I’m a New Yorker, I was very surprised! It was an amazing experience.”

His version of David Grann’s acclaimed 2017 nonfiction book mostly hews to the harrowing contours of its deeply researched material. The Osage Nation, suddenly flush with unexpected oil money that made them the richest people per capita on the face of the earth, found themselves the obvious targets of festering racist resentment—and bore the brunt of a clumsily arrogant sense of white entitlement that led to one mysterious death after another among the tribe. “No Investigation” was the official government response, time and again, as more than 100 people systematically died under specious circumstances.

“Osage are the finest and the most beautiful people on earth,” smiles suspiciously avuncular cattle rancher William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro, delivering menace with almost comic glee). Hale has built a sturdy reputation as a benefactor to the Osage, fluent in their language and quick to defend their needs. But he’s just as quick to recoil from them in private. “They’re a sickly people,” he shrugs, as the bodies keep falling. And when his simpleton nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from The Great War, Hale enlists the still-traumatized, gut-busted doughboy in his grand master plan to redirect the flow of all that oil money—ideally through marriage vows.

“You like women?” Hale asks. “You like red?” Burkhart smiles shyly. “I like white, red, and blue,” he tells his uncle. It’s the first of the film’s many queasy indictments of the American way, where all those land-grab, pale-skinned European descendants sneer remarks like “fucking crazy squaw!” and “savages!” with impunity as the Osage, blessed and cursed with more wealth than they know how to spend, drive around in Studebakers and drench themselves in jewelry.

The film’s most radical departure from Grann’s true-crime tale is to turn it from a murder-mystery procedural to a pitch-black romance—a critical pivot that Scorsese credits with injecting the story with an essential shot of bleak emotional heartache. There’s no intrigue in the film; Scorsese makes it very clear who wants the Osage dead. “It’s not a whodunnit—it’s who-didn’t-do-it,” said Scorsese at a press conference the next day. And that kind of narrative needed a different approach. “Leo said, ‘Where’s the heart of the story?’ The story is in the character that is least written about: Ernest.”

Grann remarks in his book that few primary sources give much insight into Burkhart, aside from his marriage to oil scion Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and his complicity in Hale’s schemes. “And I said, ‘There’s the story,’” continued Scorsese. “Let’s create Ernest as an example, as a template for that tragedy of love, trust, and betrayal of the indigenous people.”

“What Marty does so well,” said Di Caprio, “is he’s able to expose the humanity of even some of the most twisted sinister characters you can ever imagine.” He added that Scorsese had him watch duplicitous Montgomery Clift performances in classics like The Heiress, A Place in the Sun, and Red River to get in that mindset. “It’s really a throwback to great epic films of the 1940s and at their center are these very twisted, bizarre love stories.”

What makes that love story convincing is the fact that Burkhart doesn’t hide his intentions. “That money’s real nice,” he tells Mollie as they start courting. “Especially if you’re lazy like me.” And Mollie, ever clear-eyed with a chronic mournful streak that infuses her character, finds his candor refreshing—along with his dreamy blue eyes. “Coyote wants money,” she smiles at him in spite of herself.

She thinks she knows what she’s getting into, and Ernest truly feels like his attraction is genuine, despite continuing to aid and abet Hale’s low-simmering genocide against her tribe. “I think I really love her, uncle,” he tells an indifferent Hale, whose single-minded concern is locking up legal claims to all that wealth by any means necessary.

Scorsese’s big-swing cinema comes on the heels of his other leviathan, 2019’s 210-minute The Irishman. Together, that one-two punch, nearly seven hours in total, is an impressive output for any filmmaker, let alone an 80-year-old director. Why take such risks when he has nothing left to prove in his illustrious career? “As far as taking risks at this age—what else can I do?” he said with a laugh. “What’m I gonna do? I dunno,” he said, looking at De Niro and DiCaprio while gesturing at the press. ‘What do they want me to do? I don’t understand. Take a risk! ‘No, let’s do something comfortable.’ Are you kidding? You might as well be risking. You’re right, it’s a big gamble. But we took a chance.”

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“Too many Nazis,” mumbles an astonishingly de-aged Indiana Jones as he surreptitiously maneuvers through a trainful of Führer-bound soldiers, hunting down—what else?—yet another archeological artifact.

Cannes turned back time this week for the world premiere of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, James Mangold’s hired-gun addition to a movie universe that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas famously debuted with 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (and subsequently steered through three increasingly wobbly blockbuster sequels).

The legendary filmmaking duo aren’t involved in this latest Disney-mandated installment, which made sure to magically engineer that old Indy mouthfeel with an extended opening sequence set in 1944 that does a thrilling, if not completely convincing, job of reviving Indy at his most virile. All the better to shock viewers when 1969-era Dr. Jones pops up out of his La-Z-Boy slumber, sporting a surprisingly well-toned—but CGI-free—septuagenarian body.

The film festival used the fifth entry in the 42-year-old mega-franchise to fête its enduring action hero, double-fisted Harrison Ford, who turns 81 in July. Or, as festival director Thierry Frémaux would say: ’Arreson Faurd! “Your presence in world cinema has been very precious to us,” said Frémaux to a visibly moved Ford, who was invited onstage to receive an honorary Palme d’Or after a highlight reel of clips from movies like Blade Runner, Witness, and even the Anne Heche rom-com Six Days, Seven Nights.

“I’m very touched, I’m very moved,” he said to 2,300 effusive black-tie moviegoers. “I just saw my life flash before my eyes. A great part of my life.” The capacity crowd included wife Calista Flockhart, along with cast members Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, director Mangold, longtime Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and Disney CEO Bob Iger. “You’ve given my life purpose and meaning, and I’m so grateful for that,” he continued. “But I’ve got a movie you ought to see. It’s right behind me, so let me get out of the way.”

And so began Dial of Destiny, a solid, elegiac, bloated, and occasionally stultifying Indy adventure where every MacGuffin chase is just a bit too long, every character kidnapping is a bit too labored, and every death-defying encounter is a bit too preposterous. Fun isn’t the most accurate way to describe its excessive antics: there’s never a dull moment, but all the globe-trotting hullaballoo does verge on exhausting.

Get ready for the Lance of Longinus, Archimede’s Antikythera, a Polybius Square, and the Ear of Dionysius as our tomb raiders hopscotch from New York and Tangiers to Athens and Sicily. Stare in disbelief as Dr. Jones horseback rides down a subway tunnel, careens through a high-speed tuk-tuk chase, and fends off killer eels. “Just like snakes!” says one of Indy’s companions. “Not like snakes!” he snarls back. Is there a Forrest Gump moment when Indy has a run-in with yet another historical figure—this time, the Apollo 11 astronauts? Of course there is. And brace for a logic-bending, jump-the-shark climax which feels less like a derring-do Saturday matinee serial and more like an off-brand installment of the Mr. Peabody and Sherman Show.

Dial of Destiny does stick the landing by the film’s very end, with a touching, surprisingly romantic callback that gives Dr. Jones a well-deserved senior sunset full of quiet affection and enduring love. “I wanted to see a completion of the five films,” said Ford in a press conference the next day. “I wanted to round out the story. I wanted to see this man who had depended so much on the vigor of youth. I wanted to see the weight of life on him. And I cannot have been better served.”

One journalist couldn’t help but comment on his appearance onscreen in boxers and nothing else. “I think you’re still very hot,” she gushed.

“I’ve been blessed with this body,” he growled with a smile. “Thanks for noticing.”

Mikkelsen commented on Ford’s remarkable fitness and energy, especially for an 80-year-old man. “Our first all-night shoot, we wrapped at five in the morning,” he said. “We were all completely wasted, wanted to go to bed. Harrison picks up his bicycle and goes riding five kilometers!”

“Bullshit!” said Ford. “But very kind. There’s a partial truth in there.”

He’s happy to be a working actor, and mentioned how he’ll be back for a second season of both his current TV shows, 1923 and Shrinking. And he couldn’t care less if movie magic can keep him forever young. “I don’t look back and say, ‘I wish I was that guy again,’” he said. “Because I don’t. I’m real happy with age. I love being older. It was great to be young, but shitfire, I could be dead. And I’m still working. Go figure.”

It might have been damp and chilly on the Riviera, but Pedro Almodóvar’s queer Western Strange Way of Life had moviegoers all hot and bothered. “You didn’t have a bad back!” says town sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke) to post-coital paramour Silva (Pedro Pascal), bare-assed and “still smelling of cum.” Gunsmoke, this is not.

Pedro Almodóvar’s steamy 31-minute short premiered on Wednesday to a packed, rain-soaked crowd of 1,000 rapturous theatergoers here at the 76^th Cannes Film Festival. Patient throngs endured light showers for over an hour outside the overbooked and eagerly anticipated event, where distracted guards accidentally let rush-line attendees into the venue early—leaving as many as 300 proper ticket holders all washed up.

Inside, the Spanish filmmaker was oblivious to the chaos, and was just focused on how nervous and excited he was to share his new film about los cowboys. “This is the best place in the world to be—at least for me,” he gushed. Pascal, prepping for a role in Ridley’s Scott’s Gladiator sequel, couldn’t attend, but Almodóvar had his other cast members there, George Steane, Jason Fernández,  José Condessa and Manuel Rios. Standing next to him were Hawke, sporting a cream-colored suit with pinstripes; and Condessa and Rio showing off chiseled chests beneath their open shirts . “You can see the beauties that are here with me,” beamed Almodóvar. “I’ve dreamed of working with Ethan since a long time ago. Now that I have,” he said, grabbing him in a side-hug, “I can say we’re dream buddies.”

And what a dream: the richly acted, sumptuously photographed Strange Way of Life lives up to its title as a revisionist Western that embraces its classical genre roots while also carving out a very modern way of looking at the past. “Ten years ago,” said Almodóvar in an onstage interview post-screening, “they said the Western is dead.” But then movies like Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog came along and showed that there was room for more gay stories than just Brokeback Mountain. “Of course,” clarified Almodóvar, “they didn’t fuck.”

They sure do in Almodóvar’s film—although in a more traditionally romantic way that harkens back to old Hollywood classics. Over a boozy dinner, the pair reminiscence about their times in Mexico as hired guns, drinking and whoring together—and maybe even more. “How long did that madness last?” says Jake. “Two months,” replies Silva. “And it wasn’t madness.”

Silva stares at Jake’s bed while Jake stares at Silva’s ass. Jake then cozies up from behind and nuzzles Silva’s neck. Fade to black. Then the camera fades in on scattered clothes and tussled sheets—with Silva’s tush peeking out from under the conjugal mess. “We drank too much,” snorts Jake.

Regrets, frustration, and longing quickly follow, as well as an extended Mexico flashback to their youthful, trigger-happy selves, shooting up a huge wine cask and bathing under two bullet-hole-sized streams of vino tinto. They revel in the shower with the prostitutes, lapping it up, licking it off each other and stealing deep, sloppy kisses. At a certain point, the women roll their eyes at and just walk away, leaving the two men to their crotch-grabbing antics.

“The Western is still very much alive,” insisted Almodóvar, who seemed rejuvenated by his dabbling in the American mythos. “Not like Yellowstone, which is traditional in the worst way.” He prefers “new ways of looking at the genre,” such as Chloé Zhao’s The Rider.

Saint Laurent co-financed the film, as well as all the bespoke Western attire, especially Silva’s vibrant green denim jacket—itself inspired by Jimmy Stewart’s coat in Anthony Mann’s Bend in the River. But the real allure is the humanism of Almodóvar’s drama, which crisply details how Silva’s outlaw son murdered Jake’s brother and now must either face justice or flee the country. The underlining tragedy is the emotional pull between the two men, whose intense, forbidden connection forced them to separate for 25 years until they were now brought back together under the worst circumstances.

“There’s the way we are and the way we want to be, whether you’re straight or gay,” said Hawke after the screening. “It creates cracks in us. And getting older is about getting rid of those cracks.”

The moderator asked Hawke about the undetermined fate of the two star-crossed lovers after the film ends. “I think they’re going to stay together,” he said. “But Pedro and I disagree.”

Pedro then piped in. “Knowing the character of Jake,” he said, “I’m sure at some point they go to Mexico in the style of Sam Peckinpah.” He then launched into an elaborate scenario that extended their saga and complicated their destinies in surprising detail. “There would be gunfire, another standoff, but that would be at the end of two hours,” he continued. “And by then they would be free of their nightmare.” The moderator looked at him with surprise and delight that his half-hour short might eventually become a proper epic.

Almodóvar shrugged and smiled. “Perhaps I should do it!”

Baz Luhrmann brought a hunk of burning love to Cannes on Wednesday with the world premiere of Elvis, his 2½-hour tribute to Elvis Presley. Streets were jam-packed with dozens of black electric BMWs (the festival’s official vehicle) ferrying the glitterati to an 80-minute red carpet, including not just stars Tom Hanks and Austin Butler, but Australian director Luhrmann’s compatriot Kylie Minogue (who played the Green Fairy in Moulin Rouge!) and Sharon Stone. A handful of Elvis impersonators strutted around the town’s streets, while Luhrmann accented his all-black formal wear (silky shirt, bolero jacket and pants) with a glittering, chain-draped belt and fat, sparkling buckle emblazoned with ELVIS in all caps.

It’s hard to think of another subject—or another filmmaker—whose gaudy, over-the-top, maximalist styles dovetail so perfectly with an event that revels in cinematic peacocking. Lurhmann is a child of Cannes: his 1992 debut Strictly Ballroom was a sensation in the festival’s midnight slot, and his films have been the Opening Night selection twice, for 2001’s Moulin Rouge! and 2013’s The Great Gatsby. 

Cannes’ premiere audiences can be notoriously effusive—standing ovations are de rigueur—but Elvis scored an impressively sustained 12-minute firehose of applause after it ended. The candy-colored, kaleidoscopic biopic is a full-throttle, electric-boogie remix of Elvis (a galvanic Austin Butler) and his atom-splitting cultural detonation in midcentury American life, as seen through the eyes of Svengali manager Colonel Tom Parker (Hanks, eerily fat-suited and sporting a bizarre accent that’s Dutch by way of West Virginia).

It’s been 45 years since the untimely death of the outsized boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who generated hit after hit after hit, from “Hound Dog” to “Jailhouse Rock,” from “A Little Less Conversation” to “Suspicious Minds.” He helped mainstream the liberating, hip-shaking rhythms of rock & roll in the ‘50s, turned Hollywood stardom into his own lowbrow cash cow in the ‘60s, and almost single-handedly invented modern-day Las Vegas with his extended residencies at mammoth casino auditoriums in the ‘70s. Elvis’ career embodies the ridiculous and the sublime, due in no small part to Colonel Tom Parker—the man who took as much as 50% of Elvis’ profits and locked him into a straitjacket of contractual commitments and cheesy merchandise deals. And that’s what Luhrmann wants to stress.  

“There would have been no Elvis without Colonel Tom Parker, there would have been no Colonel Tom Parker without Elvis,” said Tom Hanks at the packed press conference on Thursday. “It was a symbiotic relationship.” 

Luhrmann sees it as more than that. “It’s about jealousy,” he explained. “One of my favorite films growing up was Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. Is Amadeus really about Mozart or is it about the jealousy between Salieri and Mozart? And Salieri saying, ‘God, I did everything right and you put all that talent in that horrible grotesque person?’” Elvis is an homage film—make no mistake, its subject is bathed in a fawning light—but Luhrmann is going for a grander statement. “It’s an exploration of America in the ’50s, the ’60s, and the ’70s,” he said. “But it’s also the relation between the art and the sell—the show and the business, the showman and the snowman. That’s what the big idea really is.” 

For Butler, it was about cracking that gold-plated legend, the rhinestone-studded, jumpsuited façade that’s an almost impenetrably iconic part of Americana. He spent two years studying every bit of archival footage and audio recording. “I just went down the rabbit hole of obsession,” said Butler, in a baritone drawl still tinged with a bit of Elvis. “That’s the tricky thing: you seen him as this icon or the wallpaper of society, and trying to strip all that away and find the very human nature of him that was deeper than all of that. That’s what was fascinating for me. It was the joy of my life.” It might even get him an Academy Award nomination, too, for a wildly possessed physical performance that captures every pelvic thrust, hip wiggle and lip sneer. “I practiced until it was in my marrow,” he said.

Hanks was not so prepared for his corpulent transformation. “I did not know what Colonel Tom Parker looked like, I had never heard his voice,” he said. “I thought he would be a tall, stentorian guy in a hat, full of bombast.” Luhrmann did such a convincing pitch to Hanks that the two-time Oscar winner agreed on the spot. “The conversation lasted seven minutes before I said, ‘I’m your man. Now, please, show me a picture of what the Colonel looks like.’ Then he showed me. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, What have I done?!?’”  

The biggest hurdle Luhrmann faced was winning the approval of the Presley family. Before he started production, he met with Elvis’ widow Priscilla, daughter Lisa Marie, and granddaughter Riley Keough (who, in a twist of showmanship—albeit accidental—that would have thrilled Colonel Tom Parker, was in Cannes this week with her directorial debut, the bittersweet Native American drama War Pony). When Luhrmann had a rough cut ready, he shared it with them. “I can’t tell you how long those two hours were,” he said. And once it was over, he heard that Priscilla was in tears. “I thought, ‘What have I done?’” he admitted. But all was well: he received a glowing text from her a few days later that said the film had really captured his spirit. “She said, ‘If my husband were here today, he would look Austin in the eye and say, ‘Hot damn, you are me.’” 

Luhrmann’s main concern was making a 20th century musician feel relevant today. Having already anachronistically used the modern sounds of alt-rock and hip-hop in his soundtracks for Romeo + Juliet and The Great Gatsby, he works the same trick again with Elvis. “I don’t do it make a groovy album,” he said. He wants people to understand what a jolting difference Elvis’ music felt like at that time. “So as Austin is walking down the street, Doja Cat is translating it into rap so that younger audiences who really don’t know Elvis understand how edgy that music was.”

Luhrmann also wanted to communicate that Elvis’ music felt dangerous. He pointed to a 1956 concert at Russwood Park that’s a major inflection point in the film, where Elvis flaunts the authorities with lewd defiance, even licking a prop hound dog onstage. “He did, in fact, hump that plastic dog,” he said. “He used to spit at the audience, roll on the ground. He was the original punk rocker. And the music was so much more aggressive and feedback and louder and scratchy and crazy. That’s real. He did that. I just want a younger audience to feel what it was like to be there.”