Cannes 2025: Julian Assange makes for unlikely new star, walkouts at warts-and-all Shia LaBeouf film - and Brigitte Bardot is back

Irish Times

22-05-2025

Julian Assange: Unlikely new Cannes star
Julian Assange
, the
WikiLeaks
founder, attended the
Cannes film festival
for the screening of a documentary about WikiLeaks and his prolonged legal battles, titled The Six Billion Dollar Man. Arriving on the Croisette, he walked up the steps of the Palais du Festival wearing a T-shirt listing the names of 4,986 children under five killed in Gaza.
He spoke only two words – 'thank you' – at the end of a lengthy ovation following Eugene Jarecki's thorough and terrifying new film, which Assange attended with his family, WikiLeaks colleagues, long-serving legal representative Jen Robinson, and the former Ecuadorean president, Rafael Correa. The latter, who granted the WikiLeaks founder asylum at Ecuador's London embassy in 2012, met Assange for the first time at Cannes.
It may be the scariest film of 2025.
In 2010, Assange was accused of raping two women in Sweden, which sought his extradition. He later took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. The sexual assault investigation ended in 2019, but Assange spent the next five years in prison in Britain as he fought extradition to the US in relation to prosecution over leaked confidential information.
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The film traces how, after Assange was granted asylum and entered the Ecuadorean embassy, new CCTV cameras were installed by security personnel working for the Spanish company, UC Global. A former UC Global employee turned 'Deep Throat' discusses the extent of the surveillance, including claims about making sex tapes of Assange.
It also features Sigurdur Thordarson, a convicted paedophile, hacker and the scheduled 'star witness' in the US indictment against Assange, who talks about fabricating claims that Assange asked him to hack into Icelandic parliamentary systems. When quizzed, Thordarson – known as Siggi the Hacker - claims he can't remember.
Is Shia LaBeouf playing a character called Shia LaBeouf?
Shia LaBeouf attends the premiere of The Phoenician Scheme in Cannes. Photograph: Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA
Serious question. Is
Shia LaBeouf
playing a character called Shia LaBeouf? There were walkouts during the premiere screening of Slauson Rec, director Leo Lewis O'Neil's warts-and-all portrayal of Shia LaBeouf's experimental theatre collective, the Slauson Recreational Centre.
Slauson Rec – as the co-operative was commonly known – was founded in 2018 in South Central Los Angeles as a free, community-driven workshop for aspiring actors and filmmakers. Or at least that was the plan, until 2020, when the collective became a focal point of controversy due to LaBeouf's confrontational teaching methods. O'Neil, who began as the group's archivist, spent three years capturing footage that documents LaBeouf's volatile behaviour, including instances of verbal and physical aggression towards mentees. Pity one woman juggling theatre work with tending to her dying mother; LaBeouf fired her after her mother died. There are escalating tensions with Zeke, another acting hopeful who lands a role on Netflix's On My Block, provoking the wrath of LaBeouf. They end up in a fist fight.
And the punchline? Shia LaBeouf is hugely supportive of the doc and director O'Neil. The actor even came to Cannes and walked the red carpet to help publicise the project. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, LaBeouf said: 'Yes, I look like a fucking asshole. Yes, my boy (O'Neil) got into Cannes. I can be both disgusted with myself and happy as fuck for my guy. Have I done horrible sh*t in the past that I'm going to have to make amends for the rest of my life? Yes. Does this movie change any of that? No. Does it also allow my people to get a foot into this f***ing industry? Yes. So gas pedal down, green light go.'
Bardot is back in Cannes. Kinda
Brigitte Bardot is a French actress, singer, commendable animal rights activist and holder of some dodgy opinions who rose to international fame as the 1960s bombshell in And God Created Woman (1956) and Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963). Initially trained as a ballet dancer, Bardot transitioned to modelling and acting in her teens but quickly grew disillusioned with the entertainment industry. She retired from acting in 1973 at the age of 39.
Since leaving film, Bardot has dedicated herself to animals, founding the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986. While celebrated for her advocacy, she has also sparked controversy for her outspoken views on immigration and religion in France. Last week, she appeared on the TV channel BFM to defend Gérard Depardieu. The actor was sentenced to an 18-month suspended prison sentence on May 13th, after two women accused him of sexual assault. 'Feminism isn't my thing. I like guys,' Brigitte Bardot declared on Monday, May 12th, in an interview with BFMTV, her first on television in 11 years.
The former star returns to the Croisette as the narrator and subject of Bardot, a feature-length portrait from filmmaker Alain Berliner, featuring contributions from Naomi Campbell and Stella McCartney. 'I don't care if people remember me,' she tells Berliner in the film, 'I want them to remember that animals deserve respect.'
Review: Alpha
Julia Ducournau speaks on stage during a press conference promoting Alpha at the Cannes Film Festival. Photograph: Clemens Bilan/Pool/Getty
Alpha
    
Director
:
Julia Ducournau
Cert
:
None
Genre
:
Science Fiction
Starring
:
Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield
Running Time
:
2 hrs 8 mins
All eyes were on Palme d'Or winner Julia Ducournau's return to Cannes. All eyes were swiftly averted. The much-derided Alpha, the filmmaker's obtuse third feature, joins a growing club of Cannes 2025 titles that are commendably ambitious and impossible to enjoy. (Looking at you, Die, My Love.) Alpha is a visceral, daring, and often maddening exploration of generational trauma, told through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl (newcomer Mélissa Boros in a firecracker performance). An opening scheme features the girl joining the dots – made by needle marks – on her uncle's arm. For the audience, there are maybe too many dots to join in this angry marriage of contagion, Berber mythology, intergenerational trauma, shifting timelines, and fever dream.
The title character is five when her junkie uncle Amin (a gaunt Tahar Rahim) comes to crash with Alpha and her emotionally overwrought mother (Golshifteh Farahani). For most of the run-time, she is a teenager. There are reasons behind this temporal juggling.
Ducournau's pièce de résistance is an Aids-adjacent virus that calcifies sufferers into marble bodies who heave and exhale frosted vapours. When Alpha gets a backstreet tattoo at a drunken adolescent party, her terrified doctor mother confines her to her room, but not before her teen peers have ostracised her in an indelible swimming pool incident that makes one think that Carrie had it easy at the prom. The contagion allegory is heavy-handed, the themes wander from vaguely sketched to head-hitting blunt, and editor Jean-Christophe Bouzy's fragmented timeline requires close attention. The central triumvirate of actors is impactful and all turned up to 11. It may not fully cohere, but it's emotional and leaves an impression. For fans hoping for the new Raw, that emotion may be: baffled.
Review: Highest 2 Lowest
US director and executive producer Spike Lee poses during a photocall for the film Highest 2 Lowest in Cannes. Photograph: Julie Sebadelha/AFP/Getty
Highest 2 Lowest
    
Director
:
Spike Lee
Cert
:
None
Genre
:
Action
Starring
:
Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, ASAP Rocky, Ice Spice
Running Time
:
2 hrs 13 mins
Spike Lee
's Highest 2 Lowest reimagines Akira Kurosawa's High and Low for the modern era. Sadly, it reimagines the classic police procedural as a lesser film. Lee injects energy and plenty of black cultural references into this crime thriller, yet he loses the moral complexity and emotional gravity that made Kurosawa's 1963 film so enduring.
Denzel Washington
, magnetic as ever, is trapped in a one-note role. His character, David King, remains too powerful, too self-assured, and too emotionally remote for a man whose teen son is kidnapped. But wait! It's not his son, but the son of Paul (Jeffrey Wright), his chauffeur and confidant, who has been taken by mistake. Unlike Toshiro Mifune's conflicted protagonist in High and Low, Washington's King never seems truly shaken by the central moral dilemma – whether to pay a ransom for someone else's child. Writing the character as the CEO of a record company who seems to exclusively listen to disco-era classics despite having enjoyed a chart-topping heyday in the 2000s doesn't add up.
Never mind. Lee's pet preoccupations - Puerto Rican Day, Basquiat, and an enduring hatred of the Boston Celtics – enliven the tonally inconsistent action. The charismatic A$AP Rocky should be arrested for scene-stealing. The production is splendid. An opening sequence set to Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' from Oklahoma is ravishing. Conversely, the commentary on fame, capitalism, social media, and – waves fist at cloud – young-people things, fails to land a blow. If nothing else, the film attempts to answer an important philosophical question: who would win in a fight? Denzel, aged 70? Or Rocky in his prime?
Review: Pillion
Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård at a photocall for the film Pillion at Cannes. Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty
Pillion
    
Director
:
Harry Lighton
Cert
:
None
Genre
:
Drama
Starring
:
Harry Melling, Alexander Skarsgård
Running Time
:
1 hr 46 mins
Norman Wisdom, the goofy star of 1950s British comedies, never made a film about BDSM bikers. But if he had, it would surely look like Pillion, the debut feature from writer-director Harry Lighton, adapted from Adam Mars-Jones's novel, and produced by Element Pictures. That's not a criticism. The perennially tremendous Harry Melling plays Colin, a weedy, Barber Shop Quartet tenor who, on a date prearranged by his mum, encounters another prospect: the 'impossibly handsome' Ray (Alexander Skarsgård).
A hastily organised date on Christmas Day involves boot-licking, walking a long-haired dachshund, and unzipping behind the bins. Colin sports a fashion-crime bike jacket that once belonged to his dad. Friends, family and co-workers scratch their heads as Colin becomes the boyfriend, or rather, devoted submissive to Ray's no-carb alpha male. There is laugh-out-loud comedy mined from the culture clash. Date one: Colin's dying mum attempts to send Ray a box of Roses and some soaps. The biker community are more welcoming, but it's flagged early and often; the big-hearted Colin is ill-suited for the emotionally unavailable Ray. No matter. Much like the central hook-up, it's a fun ride while it lasts.