Latest news with #Ducournau
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Julia Ducournau's ‘Titane' Follow-Up ‘Alpha' Gets Thunderous 11.5-Minute Cannes Ovation After Premiere Sees Attendee Carried Out on Stretcher
'Titane' director Julia Ducournau made a triumphant return to Cannes Monday evening with her new feature 'Alpha.' The mother-daughter infection thriller earned an enthusiastic 11.5-minute ovation after its premiere — one of the most glowing in-person receptions thus far at this year's film festival. As the applause raged on, Ducournau grew visibly emotional, wiping tears away and making a heart with her hands as a sign of gratitude. The premiere of 'Alpha' faced a brief interruption when, about an hour into the film's runtime, attendees in the balcony began waving their phone flashlights. Some audience members shouted for a doctor in French, asking for the screening to be halted. Paramedics eventually arrived and, shortly after, one audience member was carried out on a stretcher. The screening of 'Alpha' continued without pausing as the incident unfolded. More from Variety 'Alpha' Review: A Potentially Infected Tattoo Sparks a Tortured AIDS Allegory in Julia Ducournau's Rotten Follow-up to 'Titane' 'My Father's Shadow' Review: Nigeria's First Ever Cannes Selection Marks a Miraculous Gem of Autofiction Rihanna Stuns Cannes Red Carpet in the Rain to Support A$AP Rocky at 'Highest 2 Lowest' World Premiere It remains unclear what the cause of the medical emergency was. The incident did not appear to be related to the content of Ducournau's film, which had not yet depicted any particularly shocking material by that part in its storyline. Variety has reached out to the festival press office for more information. 'Alpha' stars Cannes regulars Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim opposite 'Sex Education' favorite Emma Mackey and Finnegan Oldfield. The plot centers on the title character, a troubled 13-year-old living with her single mother. Per the Cannes synopsis: 'Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.' Ducournau is already a Cannes history-maker thanks to her last directorial effort, 'Titane.' The body horror psychological drama was one of the most provocative titles at the 2021 festival and was awarded the Palme d'Or by the Spike Lee-led jury. Ducournau became only the second female director to win Cannes' top prize. 'Alpha' marks the director's third feature. Her debut, the 2016 cannibal adolescence thriller 'Raw,' premiered at Cannes in the Critics' Week sidebar. When Ducournau accepted the Palme d'Or in 2021, she recalled her joy watching the Cannes awards each year as a child : 'At that time, I was sure that all the films awarded must have been perfect because they were on the stage. And tonight, I'm on that same stage, but I know my film is not perfect — but I think no film is perfect in the eyes of the person who made it. You could even say mine is monstrous.' 'Alpha' marks Ducournau's second Cannes competition title. Neon, which distributed 'Titane,' has teamed up with the filmmaker once again for the 'Alpha' release. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Alpha' Review: 2021 Palme d'Or Winner Julia Ducournau's AIDS-Era Horror Parable Is Arrestingly Original and Numbingly Over-the-Top
Four years ago, French writer-director Julia Ducournau came to Cannes with her sophomore feature, Titane, a movie that both shocked and dazzled audiences, then shocked a few more people by walking away with the Palme d'Or. It was only the second time a woman won the festival's top prize, after Jane Campion did so 30 years earlier. And it was certainly the first time that a film featuring a girl getting busy with a Cadillac, which winds up impregnating her, ever accomplished such a feat. Titane kicked off with orgasmic automobile intercourse and only got crazier from there, if such a thing is possible. It felt like three or four movies at once, all told simultaneously and as loudly as possible. And while Ducournau's excellent coming-of-age debut, Raw, was at once half-crazy and half-contained, Titane was like a set by a DJ doing everything she can to hold down the dance floor, raising the volume to the max at all times, switching up records midway through each song to keep folks on their feet. More from The Hollywood Reporter Spike Lee's 'Highest 2 Lowest' Rocks Cannes With Star-Studded Premiere, Warm Reception After Surprise Honor for Denzel Washington 'Highest 2 Lowest' Review: Denzel Washington and Spike Lee Reunite in Dazzling Thriller Suffused With Lush New York City Vibes Denzel Washington Surprised With Honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes The director applies that same approach to Alpha, a numblingly over-the-top AIDS-era parable that dishes out tons of fresh ideas, serving them with ample gore, VFX, pounding musical interludes and acting that's turned up several notches. It can impress with its utter originality and technical know-how, but there's so much going on for so long that many viewers will be exhausted by the midway point, if not earlier. You've got to give Ducournau credit for refusing to settle down or take the Hollywood route after winning the Palme, but you also have to wonder if her latest feature will please anyone but her. Which isn't to say that Alpha doesn't try to tackle a whole bunch of serious themes many of us can relate to. But again, there are too many themes crammed together into one giant metaphorical sandwich — albeit a sandwich that's served on a tasty French baguette — to the point that the flavors all cancel each other out. First and foremost, the movie is a period piece revisiting the horrors of the AIDS epidemic with actual horror, transforming HIV-positive patients into humans whose bodies gradually turn to marble, like X-Men crossed with the Greek antiquities wing at the Louvre. It's a powerful visual idea, taking the famous images of sores plaguing AIDS sufferers in the '80s and transforming them into hauntingly beautiful works of body horror. But it's also so overcooked that it seems kind of silly: Why not just show the real thing, which is more horrible than anything the special makeup effects department could come up with? (Though credit goes to makeup artist Olivier Afonso for making the marble look great.) Second, or perhaps first as well — there are only firsts in Ducournau's films, all of them screaming for attention — the film is a coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old girl, Alpha (the arresting Mélissa Boros), who gets a tattoo with a dirty needle in the opening scene and therefore may have contracted the deadly disease herself. We spend much of the story wondering if she's sick or not, leading to numerous instances of Alpha bleeding out of different wounds and scaring everyone around her. Highlights include two standout school sequences: one involving a bloody volleyball game, the other a swimming class in which Alpha bumps her head badly and clears the water like the shark in Jaws. And finally, Alpha is a tragic family story about drug addiction and loss. The girl's hardworking mom (Golshifteh Farahani) is a doctor both publicly, in a dingy hospital ridden with marbleized patients, and privately to her brother, Amin (Tahar Rahim), a cadaverous junkie who shows up on their doorstep jonesing for another fix. He winds up never quite leaving, oscillating between friendly respites in which he plays the fun uncle to Alpha and scenes in which he nearly overdoses and has to be resurrected with adrenaline by his sister. Between all the shooting up, blood tests and other injections, there are more syringes on display here than in Panic in Needle Park. Medical queasiness and gory bodily intrusions have been a specialty of Ducournau (both of whose parents are doctors) since Raw, which turned a veterinary school into a feeding ground for two cannibal sisters. In Alpha, she combines the trauma of Amin's habit, which may or may not have given him the marble disease, with the fear and suffering experienced by kids growing up when AIDS came into existence. (It's worth noting that in France, it took several years for the government to officially recognize the epidemic.) These are worthy ideas, but there are so many of them that we begin to lose count. At some point we realize that the skeletal Amin may be a product of the hallucinations (a scaffolding tearing apart in the wind, a ceiling crashing down on a bedroom) that Alpha has been experiencing since the start of the film. Without warning we're jumping between past and deeper past, between hairstyles from the 1980s and 70s, as if Alpha also needed a time-hopping scenario added to everything else it's already tossed at us. Ducournau is definitely talented when it comes to craft and execution, jarring us with hyper-realistic horror that's equal parts Cronenberg, Carpenter and Gaspar Noé. But she doesn't know when to stop or just sit down for a moment and let the viewer breathe. Too much of a good thing, whether it's marbleized body parts or blood dripping onto an overhead projector in a classroom, can become a bad thing when we have no time to take it all in. She deserves credit, though, for thinking outside the box and having the skill to visualize such thoughts. Teaming up for the third time with Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens, the director creates startling images from the very first shot, when the opening title transforms into a needle wound, to the last, when Alpha emerges in a stirring urban dust storm. Production designer Emmanuelle Duplay (Emilia Perez) gives all the interiors, whether bedrooms or hospital wards, an eerie claustrophobic feel, while costume designer Isabelle Pannetier recreates the carefree, punkish looks of the epoch. Of the three leads, Rahim is the most unrecognizable, having gone full Jared Leto-in-Dallas Buyers Club to portray a druggie at the very end of his tether. He hardly needs makeup to look terrifying, though his warmth comes across as well whenever Amin puts on a smile. The always good Farahani has a lot of screaming and shouting to do, pulling it off convincingly but then overdoing it in too many scenes of the same thing. And finally, newcomer Boros impresses as a combative young woman who gets repeatedly put through the wringer, barely coming out of the movie unscathed. She joins two other actresses — Garance Marillier in Raw and Agathe Rousselle in Titane — whom Ducournau brought to light, slathered in blood and then transformed into the unlikely heroines of her freaky cinematic universe, which grows more outlandish with each new work. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
News18
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
Cannes 2025: Julia Ducournau Returns To Competition With 'Alpha'; Poses With Cast At Premiere; N18G
The cast of Alpha, directed by Julia Ducournau, premiered the film at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival on May 19. Stars including Emma Mackey, Tahar Rahim, and Golshifteh Farahani walked the red carpet alongside Ducournau. Set in 1980s New York, Alpha follows the story of an 11-year-old with a parent diagnosed with AIDS. Ducournau, a past Palme d'Or winner, returns to the competition with this emotionally powerful drama, presented by NEON. Watch the video for more. news | entertainment news live | latest bollywood news | bollywood | news18 | n18oc_moviesLiked the video? Please press the thumbs up icon and leave a comment. Subscribe to Showsha YouTube channel and never miss a video: Showsha on Instagram: Showsha on Facebook: Showsha on X: Showsha on Snapchat: entertainment and lifestyle news and updates on:
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Julia Ducournau's ‘Alpha' Overcomes Disruption At Cannes Premiere, Gets 12-Minute Ovation
Four years after winning the Palme d'Or for Titane, Julia Ducournau is back on the Croisette, debuting her latest Cannes Film Festival Competition entry Alpha. Inside the Palais late Monday local time, the genre-bending movie received a 12-minute ovation. The response came after a disruption mid-screening, when some audience members in the gallery section began shouting to stop the movie. It turned out that a person was having a medical emergency. The movie continued, however, and the shouts abated after a minute or two. The person later was carried out on a stretcher. More from Deadline 'Alpha' Review: Squalor And Sublime Performances Dominate Julia Ducournau's Follow-Up To Palme d'Or Winner 'Titane' – Cannes Film Festival Cannes Film Festival 2025: Read All Of Deadline's Movie Reviews Spike Lee's Denzel Washington Pic 'Highest 2 Lowest' Scores Six-Minute Ovation At Cannes Premiere Ducournau thanked all who supported her film after the screening, saying the team 'all put a lot into the film.' Alpha centers on 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros), a troubled girl who lives with her single mom. Their world collapses the day Alpha returns from school with a tattoo on her arm. The film is set in the 1980s and '90s. Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield and Louai El Amrousy also star and were in attendance tonight. After serving as the U.S. distributor for body horror Titane, Neon is back in business with Ducournau as the North American distributor for Alpha. When Titane was awarded the Palme d'Or in 2021, Ducournau became only the second woman ever to take the top prize (Justine Triet became the third with 2023's Anatomy of a Fall). In a lost-in-translation mix-up at the time, Spike Lee, who was jury president in 2021, prematurely and inadvertently unveiled Titane as the winner early during the closing awards ceremony. Fast forward to tonight: Lee's own film, Highest 2 Lowest, running out of competition, premiered just ahead of Alpha at the Grand Théâtre Lumière. Diaphana releases Alpha in France while Charades and FilmNation Entertainment are handling sales in the rest of the world. Producers are Jean des Forêts and Amelie Jacquis of Petit Film and Eric & Nicolas Altmayer of Mandarin & Compagnie, with Frakas Productions co-producing. Best of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies In Order - See Tom Cruise's 30-Year Journey As Ethan Hunt Denzel Washington's Career In Pictures: From 'Carbon Copy' To 'The Equalizer 3'
The Hindu
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
‘Alpha' teaser: Palme d'Or winner Julia Ducournau's Cannes 2025 competition entry
The first teaser trailer for Alpha, Julia Ducournau's latest feature, has been released ahead of the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film screened in the festival's main competition, marking Ducournau's return to Cannes after winning the Palme d'Or in 2021 with Titane. The film stunned audiences at its festival premiere, earning a 12-minute standing ovation following its Competition debut. The emotional response came despite a brief mid-screening disruption, when a few audience members shouted for the film to stop. Afterward, Ducournau thanked her cast and crew, saying they had 'all put a lot into the film.' Palme d'Or winner Julia Ducournau returns to @Festival_Cannes with ALPHA and stars Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim, Mélissa Boros, Finnegan Oldfield & Emma Mackey ahead of a 12-minute standing ovation. # — NEON (@neonrated) May 20, 2025 Set in the 1980s and '90s, Alpha follows a 13-year-old girl, who lives with her single mother, portrayed by Golshifteh Farahani, whose life unravels after returning home with a tattoo. The film also stars Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, and Louai El Amrousy. Produced by Jean des Forêts and Amelie Jacquis of Petit Film, along with Eric and Nicolas Altmayer of Mandarin & Compagnie, Alpha is co-produced by Frakas Productions. North American distribution is being handled by Neon, who also distributed Ducournau's Titane, while international sales are managed by Charades and FilmNation Entertainment. Known for her genre-defying and visceral storytelling, Ducournau is once again blending psychological drama with body horror elements. The early buzz from Cannes places Alpha as one of the festival's more talked-about competition titles. Alpha is expected to hit U.S. theaters this October, following its Cannes debut.
