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South China Morning Post
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Cannes 2025: Resurrection movie review – Shu Qi, Jackson Yee in Bi Gan's ambitious drama
3/5 stars Eight years on from his critically acclaimed Long Day's Journey Into Night , a commercial flop, Chinese auteur filmmaker Bi Gan, 35, is back at the Cannes Film Festival with an even more audacious and potentially divisive film. Dedicated to the French film historian and critic Pierre Rissient, Resurrection is a film made by, and for, hardcore cinephiles. For those who appreciate early 20th century silent movies and German expressionist cinema, and are into the sport of counting the minutes during long takes, the 35-year-old Bi's visually dazzling, remarkably ambitious and reference-laden feature will be something to behold. Play With its sprawling, near-indecipherable narrative and a lack of clearly defined cultural signposts, Resurrection will prove to be pretty difficult viewing for the casual film-goer.
BBC News
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Alpha review: This outlandish horror about an Aids-like epidemic is a 'disorientating, maddening whirlwind'
After winning the Palme d'Or for the shocking Titane, out-there French director Julia Ducournau is back at Cannes with another nightmarishly weird film – but it's an unsatisfying watch. One of the most anticipated titles at this year's Cannes Film Festival was Alpha, written and directed by Julia Ducournau. Her last film, the magnificently bonkers Titane, won the Palme d'Or in 2021, so the news that she was returning to Cannes with another fizzing cocktail of icky body horror and traumatic family relationships had festival-goers excited – if nervous – to see what nightmarish weirdness Ducournau had in store. It turns out that there is nightmarish weirdness aplenty. A disorientating, maddening whirlwind of haunting sights, thunderous music and fiercely intense performances, Alpha confirms that Ducournau is a visionary artist. But once you've recovered from the brain-bashing experience of watching her latest film, it comes to seem a lot less satisfying and stimulating than Titane was. Alpha gets its title from its heroine (Mélissa Boros), a 13-year-old girl who lives in an unnamed French town with her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani). She isn't especially rebellious, but one night she comes home from a party with a large capital letter A carved into her arm by a needle the size of a chopstick. Her mother, a doctor, is understandably upset, especially as the amateurish tattoo might have given Alpha a mysterious virus that turns people to stone. As the months pass, patches of their skin harden, they cough clouds of dust, and eventually they atrophy into cadavers made of polished, cracked, creamy white marble. It's a creepy death, but also a strangely beautiful one: in effect, the deceased are transformed into their own gleaming, cathedral-worthy memorial statues. While the doctor diligently looks after patients with this virus in her spookily understaffed hospital, Alpha's tattoo won't stop gushing blood, an embarrassing affliction that prompts her classmates to shun her. (This is presented as a despicable example of prejudice, but, really, don't the children have a point?) But the doctor doesn't just have her daughter and her patients to worry about. One person who definitely has the virus is her estranged brother Amin (Tahar Rahim), a mischievous and charismatic drug addict. Some scenes near the beginning of Alpha promise that it will be Ducournau's version of a zombie apocalypse thriller. Paranoia rises to hysteria at the hospital, where a security guard struggles to keep the infected outside, and at the school, where students flee as a swimming pool is dyed red with Alpha's blood. Set in a rundown alternate reality, in which the harsh light and muted colours suggest that the end is nigh, the film has sequences reminiscent of everything from 28 Days Later to World War Z, but Ducournau gives them their own uniquely unsettling, poetic atmosphere. The disappointing part is that, ultimately, she does so little with the turning-to-stone disease. Flitting between two time periods (you have to keep a close eye on Farahani's haircut to tell which is which), the film unfolds in the 1980s and the 90s. The virus is associated with gay people and shared needles. And the people who have the virus, or who are suspected of having it, are treated with homophobia and ignorance. In short, the scenario is an analogy for the Aids epidemic, as Ducournau has acknowledged. There is nothing wrong with that, per se. Films often use fictional illnesses to comment on real ones. The issue with Alpha is that the fictional illness doesn't shed any new light on its non-fictional counterpart, nor does it expand upon it to build a more resonant and universal myth. The metaphor isn't a rich one. The virus is Aids by another name, and that's about it. Indeed, for much of the running time, the film drifts away from the magic-realist aspects of the condition altogether, which is a waste of such a fabulously conceived and executed visual effect. The characters seem to forget that they're turning to stone, no one ever discusses the virus's origins or potential cure, and the overcrowding and panic it caused at the hospital just evaporate. What we're left with is an intimate drama about three family members who are rocked by addiction and illness. This raises the niggling question of why Ducournau bothered with the film's science-fiction elements at all. If Alpha is essentially a film about a doctor tending to her addict brother, and the teenage girl caught between them, why disguise it with magic realism? In an early scene, Alpha's teacher reads out Edgar Allen Poe's poem, A Dream Within a Dream, and soon afterwards, Terry Gilliam's fantastical The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is shown on television, so Ducournau gives us fair warning that her own narrative shouldn't be taken literally. But she seems oddly unwilling to commit either to the fantasy or the reality, which is why, for all of the sound and fury of its hallucinatory imagery, it doesn't signify all that much. The muddled story of Amin's addiction is short of insight and plausible detail, and yet the spine-tingling story of the supernatural epidemic is skated over, too. Ducournau has jumped between different genres within her work before, but Alpha might have been more powerful if she had stuck to one. Considering that she has been rightly celebrated for her fearless choices, it feels slightly cowardly that she didn't attempt a film about Aids without any outlandish horror trappings wrapped around it. ★★☆☆☆ -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Bloomberg
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
French Producer Woos Hollywood With Epic That Inspired Game of Thrones
Dimitri Rassam was destined to make movies. The son of Bond girl and Cesar-winning actor Carole Bouquet and French film producer Jean-Pierre Rassam, he's been immersed in cinema since birth. Francis Ford Coppola is his actual godfather. Last year, Rassam's The Count of Monte Cristo was one of the top-grossing films in France. Now he has big plans to produce global blockbusters in English, with a French twist.
CBC
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
A dystopian animated short featuring Jay Baruchel leads Canadian films at Cannes
Anxiety is the theme at this year's Cannes Film Festival. No, I'm not referring to the Doechii song (though I'm sure that'll be playing at all the afterparties); or the chatter around Trump's proposed 100 per cent tariff on international films; or programming like Ari Aster's Eddington, which taps into post pandemic divisiveness, and the final Mission: Impossible, where Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt wages war on an insidious AI. I'm talking about the Canadian films at Cannes this year, arriving on the Cote D'Azur like a dark cloud. There's Anne Émond's Peak Everything, about a man feeling emotionally crippled by the climate crisis. Its French title is Amour Apocalypse. Félix Dufour-Laperrière's animated feature Death Does Not Exist follows the tumultuous inner-life of a radical activist wrestling with existential decisions they must make to save society from where it's headed. In Martine Frossard's animated short Hypersensitive, a woman's fraught search for emotional healing sends her down a surreal rabbit hole that brings her closer to nature. And Bread Will Walk, Alex Boya's eerie and macabre animated short about two kids on a nightmarish journey, imagines the most fantastical take on what the world would be if we stay comfortable and complacent. The latter features Jay Baruchel, Canada's king of anxiety-riddled comedy, lending his vocals to the two children trying to hide from a world struck by a zombie-like plague caused by biochemically engineered food. People are mutating into bread. They're rounded up into concentration camps and fighting starvation by eating each other. It's a Hansel and Gretel meets Grapes of Wrath kind of story that taps into the same worry over industrial farming, mass production and commodification of our most bare necessities that Baruchel has grappled with in his apocalyptic documentary series We're All Gonna Die (Even Jay Baruchel). "It dovetails with my cynical worldview perfectly," Baruchel says, of his collaboration with Boya. Both are on a Zoom call with CBC Arts to discuss representing Canada at Cannes with a film that Baruchel describes as "Brothers Grimm with a healthy dose of 21st century nihilism." We're a couple weeks out from the festival. Baruchel is calling in from his Toronto home, sporting a Montreal Canadians hoodie and cap, and bringing his boisterous and huggable energy to the conversation. Boya, is at his National Film Board (NFB) desk in Montreal, surrounded by film props and gadgets. Boya hoists up to his camera a creepy animatronic of the main character in Bread Will Walk and a massive, mutated melange of actual bread, which he experimented with when he considered making his film using stop-motion animation. "That's disgusting," Baruchel says. One of the reasons Boya abandoned the stop motion approach is because his attempts at filming an animatronic character turning into bread, by using a translucent oven and actual yeast, risked burning down the NFB. "There's all kinds of biohazardous iterations of the project," says Boya, with a mischievous grin. Boya is an experimenter. He tinkers with all the ways he can push technology for his art. As we're talking, he's got a prototype robotics arm strapped to his wrist, which he's using to study "muscle memory alongside temporality" for a project where robotics meets cognitive science and animation/art. He regularly drops head-spinning concepts into our conversation, which would be intimidating if he weren't so gentle and genuine about it all. "He is whatever the exact opposite of full of shit is," is Baruchel's take on Boya. Bread Will Walk is actually drawn from his graphic novel about a walking bread pandemic, The Mill, which Boya originally published — right before the pandemic had everyone stuck at home baking bread — in NFT form. He says he was exploring "database storytelling" and atomizing his story into a world-building project. When approaching Bread Will Walk, Boya even tried on the latest AI tools, to see if they could push the animation further. "I had an open mind with regards to a lot of these new technologies," he says. "But to do exactly what we were doing, it looked better when a human being does it. "You realize that the authorship of a human being speaking to another one, a lot of that happens in the invisible space between the frames," Boya continues, explaining the relationship to the screen and its audience. "That is really a communication between two people. Can I have two robots talk over a coffee? What's the point, right? You can have a coffee shop with two language models talking to each other and the coffee is going to get cold. There's something existentially innate about speaking as humans that is embedded in storytelling and embedded in filmmaking and animation." Keeping humanity at the centre also happens to be Bread Will Walking 's whole aesthetic. The film's evocative hand drawn animation, all bleeding earthy colours and sinewy lines, moves like one continuous shot, where it appears less like the characters are roaming through the world, and more like the environment is mutating around them. They remain the constant in a dehumanizing landscape. The other constant is Baruchel, who voices not only the two kids but all the other hostile characters who enter their orbit. It's a task that Baruchel admits stretched his vocal talents, even though he's really seasoned at this kind of gig. Long before Baruchal spent a decade behind the mic as Hiccup in the How To Train Your Dragon franchise, he was a voice actor in animation and French to English dubs. In fact, one of his earliest gigs was another NFB animated short called One Divided by Two: Kids and Divorce, a film about how triggering divorce can be, which itself was pretty triggering for Baruchel. "I was a 12-year-old kid whose parents' marriage was imploding before my eyes," he says. "[It] was more of a bummer than even this one." The stretch for Baruchel this time around was the singing during a crucial moment in Bread Will Walk, which he describes as both a scary and humbling proposition. "They were cool enough to say if you don't want to sing you don't have to," he says. "But of course, I am a narcissist and a whore, so I was like, 'of course.' … Everybody there was wonderful but good lord, did I ever feel like a guy stuck on a mountain." For Boya, Baruchel's struggle on that mountain, his anxiety during the process, becomes part of the text, and the humanity between the frames. It also reinforces his reasoning for having one actor voice everyone, as if the whole film was an expression of a singular inner monologue. "You're kind of in this limbic state," says Boya. "The character is almost talking to themselves and having all these characters within themselves." Boya then addresses Baruchel about his performance directly: "The tension of having you defy yourself, define yourself and then fight with yourself in this procedural, adversarial learning of carbon-based matter is quite special to see. And quite special to see documented."
News24
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News24
Gérard Depardieu falls from grace: Paris court sentences actor for sexual assault onset
Gérard Depardieu was handed an 18-month suspended sentence by a Paris court on Tuesday after being convicted of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in 2021. The French cinema icon was also ordered to register as a sex offender. Depardieu, who has acted in more than 200 films and television series, is the highest-profile figure caught up in France's response to the #MeToo movement. A Paris court on Tuesday handed French cinema icon Gérard Depardieu an 18-month suspended sentence after convicting him of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in 2021. The court also ordered that Depardieu, who was not present for the verdict, register as a sex offender - marking a spectacular fall from grace for the 76-year-old who has dominated French cinema for half a century. Depardieu, who has acted in more than 200 films and television series, is the highest-profile figure caught up in France's response to the #MeToo movement. The verdict was delivered on the first day of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, France's most prestigious cinema showcase, where Depardieu won best actor in 1990. The trial related to charges of sexual assault during the 2021 filming of Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters) by director Jean Becker. READ | The plaintiffs were a set dresser, 54, identified only as Amelie, and a 34-year-old assistant director, who accused the actor of sexual assault. Of the two, only Amelie was present to hear the judgment, and she reported feeling relieved after going through 'an emotional rollercoaster'. 'This recognition of the mistreatment in court means a lot to us,' said Carine Durrieu Diebolt, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs. Claude Vincent, another lawyer for the plaintiffs, added: 'Genius does not excuse sexual assault.' Around 20 women have accused Depardieu of assault or inappropriate behaviour, but this was the first case to come to court. The whereabouts of the actor were not immediately clear. The actor, who had complained that he had been out of work for three years, is to star in a film directed by his friend, actor Fanny Ardant. The shooting of his scenes began in April in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores. The actor's lawyer, Jérémie Assous, said Depardieu would appeal. 'The moment you are implicated in a case of sexual assault, you are automatically convicted,' he said. 'Not a monster' Depardieu, a towering figure in French cinema, has often been described by French press as a 'sacred monster'. Commenting on the verdict, actor Juliette Binoche, who presides over the Cannes Film Festival jury this year, said that the expression of 'sacred monster' has always bothered her. 'He's not a monster; he's a man,' she said, adding he had 'lost his aura through actions that were reviewed by the judiciary.' The sentence was in line with the recommendation of prosecutor Laurent Guy, who argued an 18-month suspended jail term 'takes into account the total lack of remorse' shown by the defendant. Amelie testified that Depardieu pinned her down on set in 2021, saying that 'he was very strong'. She also said Depardieu made 'obscene remarks' and suggestions, boasting he could 'give women an orgasm without touching them'. The 34-year-old plaintiff said Depardieu initially assaulted her when she accompanied him from his dressing room to the set. 'It was nighttime,' she said. 'He put his hand on my buttocks,' she said, adding that the actor assaulted her on two other occasions. Depardieu denied sexually assaulting the women. 'I'm vulgar, rude, foul-mouthed; I'll accept that,' he told the court. But he added: 'I don't touch,' while describing the #MeToo movement as a 'reign of terror'. Depardieu has been supported by his daughter Roxane, his ex-partner Karine Silla and actor Vincent Perez. On Monday, he won backing from French film star Brigitte Bardot. 'Those who have talent and put their hands on a girl's bottom are thrown in the gutter,' Bardot told broadcaster BFMTV. 'We could at least let them get on with their lives. They can't live anymore.' ' Change judicial practices' While delivering the verdict, the presiding judge criticised the 'excessive harshness' shown toward the plaintiffs by Depardieu's defence team. During the trial, the actor's lawyer Assous called the two women 'liars' and 'hysterical', arguing that they were working for the cause of 'rabid feminism'. 'These remarks, by their very nature, amount to secondary victimisation,' the presiding judge said, ordering Depardieu to pay each woman 1000 euros ($1 111). The court also ordered Depardieu to pay 4 000 euros to Amelie and 2 000 euros to the second woman in compensation for moral injury. Women's rights group the Fondation des Femmes hailed the ruling. 'We hope this decision will help change judicial practices and finally reduce the impunity that has long surrounded sexual violence,' said the group. In April, French MPs criticised 'endemic' abuse in the entertainment industry after a six-month inquiry. Depardieu has also been indicted in another case following a rape complaint filed by actor Charlotte Arnould, 29. Prosecutors have requested a trial.
