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Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes: Wes Brings The Whimsy in ‘Phoenician Scheme' Press Conference
Leave it to Wes Anderson to bring a touch of whimsy to the Trump tariff war. Asked about Trump's proposal to introduce a 100 percent tariff on 'foreign-made movies,' at the Cannes press conference for his new feature, The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson played perplexed. More from The Hollywood Reporter In Cannes, It All Happened at the Carlton 'Splitsville' Director Michael Covino on Making Bawdy Comedy That Looks Like Arthouse Cinema: "It Can Be Both" Cannes: 'Corsage' Director Marie Kreutzer Wins Investors Circle Prize for 'Gentle Monster' 'I'm not an expert in that area of economics, but a 100 percent tariff? I feel like that means he's (Trump's) going to take all of the money, and then what do we get?' the director mused. 'Can you hold up the movies in customs? I feel it doesn't ship that way. I want to know the details, so I'll hold off my official answer.' Anderson and a busload of stars crammed into the Cannes press conference room to answer questions on his latest feature, which premiered in competition in Cannes Sunday night. Anderson was joined by a good chunk of the Phonecian Scheme ensemble cast, including Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, and Richard Ayoade. Frequent Anderson collaborator Bill Murray, was also in attendence, in the audience, and jumped to his feet when Anderson and the rest of the cast entered, leading the crowd in welcoming applause. The presser had the feeling of an Anderson film: Light, whimsical and full of laughs. Asked about the film's themes of family, Anderson singled out his co-writer, Roman Coppola, and his daughter, sitting in the audience, and noted it was her 14th birthday. Murray quickly got both Coppolas to stand up and led the crowd in singing 'Happy Birthday.' The Phoenician Scheme stars del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, a shadowy 1950s industrialist who, after surviving another assassination attempt, begins contemplating his legacy. His solution? Install his estranged daughter Liesl (Threapleton), a novice nun, as heir to his corrupt empire — a proposition she warily accepts under strict conditions. Set in the fictional Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, the film blends Anderson's signature visual stylings with a narrative that delves into inheritance, redemption and the moral ambiguities of power. THR's review said the film marked a return to form for Anderson after the meta misfires of The French Dispatch and Asteroid City. 'The Phoenician Scheme…won't have true haters reconsidering their options,' writes reviewer Lovia Gyarkye, but it will entice those who've been feeling alienated to rejoin rank.' Anderson said he initially intended the film to be 'rather dark' but that it 'ended up somewhere else.' Threapleton said she was stunned when she was cast, in her first major starring role. 'I asked my agent to call them back,' she said. 'She called me back and said 'No, it's not a mistake.' Then I sat down [and had] a long cry.' The British actress, daughter of Oscar-winner Kate Winslet, said it has been a dream to work with Anderson since she was a kid. 'I went back to my journals and I found, in 2013: 'Watched Moonrise Kingdom again. I bloody love this film. I really wish I could work with Wes Anderson someday.' U.K. comedian and actor Richard Ayoade, another Anderson newbie, joked he assumed it was 'a clerical error' that he was cast in the film but that when he 'discovered he he intend to make the mistake, I showed up…He is evidently one of the greats.' And it won't be the last time the pair work together. Anderson announced he is co-writing his next, as-yet-untitled, film with Ayoade, alongside Coppola. Anderson also indicated he was open to work again with Cera, even shaking on the deal in front of the gatherered journalists. Cumberbatch said seeing Anderson work with the Canadian Superbad actor 'was like God discovering water. [Michael] is such a natural element [for Wes] to have in his arsenal.' This is Anderson's fourth film to premiere at the festival after Moonrise Kingdom (2012), The French Dispatch (2021), and Asteroid City (2023). Focus Features is releasing The Phoenician Scheme wide on June 6. 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
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes: Wes Brings The Whimsy in ‘Phoenician Scheme' Press Conference
Leave it to Wes Anderson to bring a touch of whimsy to the Trump tariff war. Asked about Trump's proposal to introduce a 100 percent tariff on 'foreign-made movies,' at the Cannes press conference for his new feature, The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson played perplexed. More from The Hollywood Reporter In Cannes, It All Happened at the Carlton 'Splitsville' Director Michael Covino on Making Bawdy Comedy That Looks Like Arthouse Cinema: "It Can Be Both" Cannes: 'Corsage' Director Marie Kreutzer Wins Investors Circle Prize for 'Gentle Monster' 'I'm not an expert in that area of economics, but a 100 percent tariff? I feel like that means he's (Trump's) going to take all of the money, and then what do we get?' the director mused. 'Can you hold up the movies in customs? I feel it doesn't ship that way. I want to know the details, so I'll hold off my official answer.' Anderson and a busload of stars crammed into the Cannes press conference room to answer questions on his latest feature, which premiered in competition in Cannes Sunday night. Anderson was joined by a good chunk of the Phonecian Scheme ensemble cast, including Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, and Richard Ayoade. Frequent Anderson collaborator Bill Murray, was also in attendence, in the audience, and jumped to his feet when Anderson and the rest of the cast entered, leading the crowd in welcoming applause. The presser had the feeling of an Anderson film: Light, whimsical and full of laughs. Asked about the film's themes of family, Anderson singled out his co-writer, Roman Coppola, and his daughter, sitting in the audience, and noted it was her 14th birthday. Murray quickly got both Coppolas to stand up and led the crowd in singing 'Happy Birthday.' The Phoenician Scheme stars del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, a shadowy 1950s industrialist who, after surviving another assassination attempt, begins contemplating his legacy. His solution? Install his estranged daughter Liesl (Threapleton), a novice nun, as heir to his corrupt empire — a proposition she warily accepts under strict conditions. Set in the fictional Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, the film blends Anderson's signature visual stylings with a narrative that delves into inheritance, redemption and the moral ambiguities of power. THR's review said the film marked a return to form for Anderson after the meta misfires of The French Dispatch and Asteroid City. 'The Phoenician Scheme…won't have true haters reconsidering their options,' writes reviewer Lovia Gyarkye, but it will entice those who've been feeling alienated to rejoin rank.' Anderson said he initially intended the film to be 'rather dark' but that it 'ended up somewhere else.' Threapleton said she was stunned when she was cast, in her first major starring role. 'I asked my agent to call them back,' she said. 'She called me back and said 'No, it's not a mistake.' Then I sat down [and had] a long cry.' The British actress, daughter of Oscar-winner Kate Winslet, said it has been a dream to work with Anderson since she was a kid. 'I went back to my journals and I found, in 2013: 'Watched Moonrise Kingdom again. I bloody love this film. I really wish I could work with Wes Anderson someday.' U.K. comedian and actor Richard Ayoade, another Anderson newbie, joked he assumed it was 'a clerical error' that he was cast in the film but that when he 'discovered he he intend to make the mistake, I showed up…He is evidently one of the greats.' And it won't be the last time the pair work together. Anderson announced he is co-writing his next, as-yet-untitled, film with Ayoade, alongside Coppola. Anderson also indicated he was open to work again with Cera, even shaking on the deal in front of the gatherered journalists. Cumberbatch said seeing Anderson work with the Canadian Superbad actor 'was like God discovering water. [Michael] is such a natural element [for Wes] to have in his arsenal.' This is Anderson's fourth film to premiere at the festival after Moonrise Kingdom (2012), The French Dispatch (2021), and Asteroid City (2023). Focus Features is releasing The Phoenician Scheme wide on June 6. 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
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Chronology of Water' Review: Kristen Stewart Makes a Boldly Assured Directing Debut, Starring a Transformative Imogen Poots
There's a beguiling dichotomy in Kristen Stewart's accomplished first feature as writer-director — between the dreamlike haze and fragmentation of memory and the raw wound of trauma so vivid it will always be with you. Adapted from the influential 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water is challenging material, an unflinching account of childhood sexual abuse followed by years of vanishing — into addiction, sexual experimentation and self-destruction before the author found her voice by channeling her pain into writing. Stewart also appears to have found her voice, announcing the seriousness of her intentions not with auteurist self-importance but with unimpeachable commitment to honoring her subject's story. More from The Hollywood Reporter Cannes: 'Corsage' Director Marie Kreutzer Wins Investors Circle Prize for 'Gentle Monster' Strong Festival, Soft Market at Cannes Enters Final Stretch Chie Hayakawa on Revisiting the Pain and Wonder of Childhood in Cannes Film 'Renoir' That subject, Lidia, played by Imogen Poots in a daring high-wire act, represents not just herself and her fellow-survivor sister Claudia (Thora Birch) but countless women shamed into silence or damaged beyond repair by violations of their bodies. It's a visceral, densely textured film, shot on grainy 16mm and splashed with disorienting color washes and lens flare and light that deliberately obscures as much as it illuminates. It cuts deep even while washing over you with soothing images of water, as the title suggests. 'Come in. The water will hold you,' says Lidia at the end, which is exactly what the movie invites us to do, in ways that may be triggering, but perhaps also cathartic. Dispensing with exposition, establishing shots and specific time indicators, and shooting much of the movie in intimate closeup, Stewart shapes The Chronology of Water into a scrappy collage, almost like pictures pasted into a journal. The narrative is ragged and nonlinear but rendered as stream-of-consciousness poetry in Olivia Neergaard-Holm's nervy and yet somehow liquid edit. Stewart and Poots thrust us into the molten core of Lidia's experience, forcing us — with emotional candor rather than manipulation — to know her pain. While the approach is entirely different, more than once I was reminded of Su Friedrich's landmark 1990 experimental memoir film Sink or Swim, which reflects in a more detached but no less personal way on a young girl's upbringing and her experience of emotional and physical abuse from an aloof, hard-to-please father. Lidia's father, Mike (Michael Epp), is the kind of firm-jawed, handsome man who looks like he just stepped out of a Brylcreem commercial. But his cruelty is on full display when he sits her down to read her college acceptance letters and rejects the half or three-quarter scholarship offers, all but gloating over her failure to secure a full ride. 'If they don't want you then you don't belong there,' he sneers. In her depiction of his abuse, Stewart shows sound judgment and maturity, keeping the sexual violence almost entirely off-camera. But it's shocking, nonetheless. In one scene, the family drives to the woods to cut down a Christmas tree. The young Lidia (Anna Wittowsky) waits in the car with her mother, Dorothy (Susannah Flood), who is absent even when she's present and has perfected the art of not seeing. Mike instructs teenage Claudia (Marlena Sniega) to grab the saw and go with him. They come back to the car in silence, without a tree, and even with the fuzzy perception of a child, Lidia seems to intuit what took place from the deadened look in her sister's eyes. When she's older, Mike warns Lidia about the disgusting things college boys will want to do to her. Corey C. Waters' camera stays on Lidia through the whole conversation, keeping Mike outside the frame. But the words and sounds we hear make it clear that he's touching her inappropriately, probably doing exactly what he says those imagined college boys will do, but in Mike's case, he acts with entitlement. Stewart makes extensive use of voiceover narration, which embraces the film's literary roots while also endowing it with first-person immediacy. Lidia's words guide us from her childhood in 1970s San Francisco through her escape from home via competitive swimming; the death of her Olympics dream when drugs and alcohol got her kicked out of a program; the flailing sexual excesses of her college years, flipping between men and women, slugging vodka from a flask that's always with her and snorting endless lines of blow. 'My own drugs. My own sex. My own friends. My own freedom,' she intones like a mantra, trying to convince herself those are the keys to moving forward. Long after Lidia's swimming career fizzles, water remains inextricably linked for her with memory. Water is also where she can imagine herself in whatever altered state she believes will quiet her tormented mind — oblivion, erasure, salvation, purification, transformation, or just simply being able to feel a sense of self, which remains elusive. 'In water, like in books, you can leave your life,' she says at one point. Later, when she has published her first collection of stories and won an award from Poets & Writers Magazine, she's invited to give a public reading. The piece she chooses begins with a starter's call at a race: 'Swimmers, on your marks.' She goes on to describe wanting to emerge from the chlorinated water like something amphibious, without gender. But her tenuous self-confidence leaves her shaken, unable to absorb the compliments of organizers or audience, or to react to the interest of a publisher in seeing more of her work. Her relationships run from saddening to toxic. Still trying to shut out the sound of her father's voice, she allows herself to be charmed by gentle-natured, guitar-strumming folkie Phillip (Earl Cave, son of the musician Nick Cave), confessing that she treated him badly and wishes she could go back and apologize. She's put off by his sweetness, his refusal to respond to her meanness and his unfailing encouragement, expressing pride in her tiniest recovery wins. Even if Phillip's niceness chafes, she asks him to marry her, which they do in a sweet, goofy ceremony on a beach. But when she gets pregnant, she goes to stay with Claudia, both sisters still carrying around the dead weight of their childhood legacy. The tragedy that results from that pregnancy yields a return to the same beach with Phillip in a funny-sad scene that lurches from awkwardness to wrenching loss. In the wake of Phillip, Lidia takes up with the opposite of nice, Devin (Tom Sturridge), a cocky fuckboy who steers her into heavier drug use and slams her against walls in sex that seems more punishing than pleasurable, which is maybe what she thinks she needs. A relationship with a photographer played by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon gives her a taste of BDSM, her arms bound to her torso while she's spanked hard with a paddle. No matter how messed up Lidia gets, writing remains her life raft. A friend gets her into a creative writing workshop in Oregon with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey. He's played in a lovely turn by Jim Belushi as a rambling acid head, whose thorny charms give the movie a welcome lift. The group works with Kesey on his collaborative novel Caverns, and he's quick to spot Lidia's talent, his mentorship helping to steer her in the right direction. But it's when she starts teaching a writing class that hope and purpose and some kind of stability finally appear within reach. Unsurprisingly, Stewart gets fine work from her actors, even those who appear only in a few fragments. Cave has the most fully developed secondary character and the most screen time, and he brings aching sensitivity to the kind of naïve young man who believes he can fix a broken person. Birch also has strong moments, the misplaced guilt showing on her face over leaving years earlier to save herself and abandoning Lidia to their father. Inviting Lidia into her home and caring for her while she's pregnant seems like the older sister's way of atoning. But Poots is the transfixing fulcrum around which the entire cloudy but still clear-eyed movie spins. Stripped to the bone and flayed by her ugly experiences, both during and for years after, Lidia is emotionally naked, unable even to ask for or accept help. For the longest time she appears to believe she's a void, equipped solely to be that damaged girl from her childhood. It's a remarkable performance. The film's running time stretched by almost 40 minutes between the first program details on the Cannes schedule and the premiere, and it must be said that its sheer intensity often becomes draining, to the point where you wonder who its audience will be. Further tinkering would help and appears a given, since it was rushed to Cannes pretty much straight from the lab. But whatever its future, it seems clear that Stewart has made exactly the movie she wanted to make, establishing a visceral connection with her subject and never letting go. 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
