Latest news with #TaharRahim
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Julia Ducournau Stuns Cannes With ‘Alpha'
Count on Julia Ducournau to leave Cannes speechless. The French director, who shocked and stunned the world's biggest film festival in 2021 when her body horror masterpiece Titane won the Palme d'Or, returned with her latest genre-mash up, Alpha. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Étoile' Actors on Challenges of Finding "Rhythm" for Bilingual Comedy 'Alpha' Review: 2021 Palme d'Or Winner Julia Ducournau's AIDS-Era Horror Parable Is Arrestingly Original and Numbingly Over-the-Top Spike Lee's 'Highest 2 Lowest' Rocks Cannes With Star-Studded Premiere, Warm Reception After Surprise Honor for Denzel Washington Ducourau walked the red carpet with her cast, including Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani and Emma Mackey, with Cannes jury president Juliette Binoche and actress Vicky Krieps also in attendance. The Cannes crowd gave Ducournau and her team enthusiastic applause and quite a few cheers for the AIDS-coded horror drama about a mysterious virus and the fear and social exclusion it evokes. While considerably less violent and provocative than her Palme d'Or winner Titane, Alpha proved just as moving, with several of the castmembers drying their eyes as the house lights came up. There was particularly loud applause for Melissa Boros, who plays the titular Alpha, for Farahani as her mother, and Rahim as her uncle, a junkie infected with the virus. But the loudest cheers were for Ducournau. The home crowd continued to cheer her on through a solid 11-minute standing ovation. The '80s set Alpha imagines a fictitious epidemic closely inspired by the AIDS crisis, following Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old who lives with her single mom, who is rejected by her classmates because of a rumor spreading that she's been infected with a new disease. One day, she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm and her and her mother's world collapse. Newcomer Mélissa Boros plays Alpha, with Golshifteh Farahani as the mother. Tahar Rahim and Emma Mackey co-star. Neon, which released Titane (part of its 5-year unbroken run of picking the Palme d'Or winner), picked up North American rights to Alpha last year, shortly before the film began shooting. 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
Globe and Mail
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Extreme French thriller Alpha turns Cannes upside down, while Denzel Washington comes out on top
A mysterious virus that slowly turns its victims into marble statues, their spines and legs hardening and cracking. A timeline-hopping narrative whose twin strands majestically cross over to the mournful soundtrack of The Mercy Seat by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. And more shots of hypodermic needles being jabbed into arms and chests than an endless loop of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. These are the indelible elements that make up French filmmaker Julia Ducournau's new horror-drama Alpha, which made an explosive landing at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday night, blowing all previous competitors out of the French Riviera water. The follow-up to Ducournau's 2021 pretzel of a body-horror movie Titane, which walked away with Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or, Alpha sent the black-tie audience inside the Palais into a polite frenzy during its world premiere. So much so that an audience member in the balcony had to be tended to in the midst of the screening due to a medical emergency, echoing the moment when, in 2016, several moviegoers passed out during a Toronto International Film Festival screening of Ducournau's debut feature, Raw. (This time around, the moviegoer thankfully turned out to be fine, and the screening continued uninterrupted.) At once a metaphor for the AIDS crisis and a meditation on the million little traumas that are inherited across families for generations, Alpha follows three characters in various states of distress: heroin addict Amin (Tahar Rahim), his physician sister (Golshifteh Farahani) and her troubled 13-year-old daughter Alpha (Melissa Boros), who one day comes home from a disreputable house party with a tattoo whose imprint sets off a chain of cataclysmic events. While Titane proved that Ducournau was a devoted student of David Cronenberg, Alpha reveals the director has also been studying at the tomb of Clive Barker, especially when it comes to imagining the victims of the unnamed disease, their beautiful but tortured bodies resembling both the creatures of Nightbreed and the Cennobites of Hellraiser. There is, to put it lightly, a lot going on inside of Alpha's apocalyptic world, not nearly all of which is digestible upon first viewing – especially one that didn't get started until close to 11 p.m. But as the crowd rose to its feet to award an emotional Ducournau a rousing standing ovation – no one needs to time these things to the minute, but it lasted far longer than any other reception at Cannes so far – it was clear that Alpha had hit a nerve. Which, by this deep into the festival, needed to happen one way or another. While a few in-competition films have found admirers across the board, most notably the Brazilian thriller The Secret Agent, before Alpha hit the screen, there haven't been too many in-competition titles to get animated about, either on the pro or con side. Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, which screened Sunday night, is an emotionally empty exercise in fussiness, a steep drop-off from Asteroid City. And Egyptian director Tarik Saleh's political satire Eagles of the Republic, which screened Monday afternoon, failed to deliver on its incendiary promise of roasting Cairo's corrupt class. Instead, the best bets as Cannes began to enter its final leg were found outside of the 'official competition' films competing for the Palme d'Or. In the sidebar Directors' Fortnight program, Canadian director Lloyd Lee Choi delivered a knockout with his drama Lucky Lu. In his feature-length debut, the director, who was recently named the winner of this year's TIFF-CBC Films Screenwriter Award, traces a disastrous 48-hour period for a New York delivery driver (Chang Chen) as he anticipates the arrival of his wife and young daughter from overseas. A potent mix of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and the Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems, Choi's film (not technically a Canadian title given it was produced in the U.S.) is excellent high-anxiety cinema. Also causing heart palpitations, in a good way, was Spike Lee's out-of-competition thriller Highest 2 Lowest. An extremely loose remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1958 drama High and Low, the Denzel Washington-starring film premiered Monday just a few hours before Alpha, a nice bit of festival symmetry given that Lee's jury awarded Ducournau her Palme d'Or in 2021. Once Lee pushed his new film's unbearably melodramatic score to the background and let Washington do what he does best – devour the screen with an unmatched ferocity – the film offered a sometimes silly but ultimately electric ride. Especially once Washington was able to pair off against hip-hop star A$AP Rocky, who plays an aspiring rapper to Washington's record-biz mogul. Alpha, meet Omega.
Daily Mail
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Emma Mackey debuts new bob hairdo as she promotes Alpha during Cannes Film Festival - before premiere is interrupted by 'medical emergency'
Emma Mackey ensured all eyes would be on her as she attended the Alpha premiere during Cannes Film Festival on Monday. The French-British actress, 29, exuded glamour in a glittering silver gown that clung to her toned figure and was adorned with thousands of sequins. Yet it wasn't just her stunning gown that was a talking point but her striking new hairdo - with Emma debuting a chic bob. The Sex Education star looked in good spirits as she joined co-stars includingTahar Rahim and Melissa Boros and Palme d'Or-winning director Julia Ducournau on the red carpet before attending the premiere. Alpha was well-received at the festival, receiving a 12-minute standing ovation but the screening nearly came to a halt after an audience member suffered a medical emergency. According to Variety, about an hour into the film, attendees in the balcony began waving their phone torches and calling out for a doctor. Paramedics then arrived, and despite calls for the screening to be paused, carried an audience member out on a stretcher while the movie continued to play. No further details have been released but the medical emergency is not thought to be related to the content of the body horror film, which had not shown anything graphic by that point. MailOnline has contacted Cannes Film Festival for comment. Alpha follows the tale of a troubled teenager (Mélissa Boros) and her single mother whose 'world collapses after Alpha one day returns from school with a tattoo on her arm'. The film will be released in France on August 20. Emma burst onto screens in 2019 as wild child Maeve in Sex Education. The headmaster's daughter, who had a 'sheltered' upbringing as a 'bookish' Catholic schoolgirl, was working as a translator before landing her breakthrough in the racy Netflix series. Emma was born in northwest France to a French father, a headmaster, and an English mother, a charity volunteer, moving to the UK aged 17 to study English Literature at Leeds University where she took part in amateur theatre productions. The day before graduating, Emma made the decision to apply for drama schools in London and landed an agent a year later. Six months after that she was cast in Sex Education after five rounds of auditions. At the time Emma was working as a translator and living with friends and family to save money. 'When I got off the phone I burst into tears and did a clichéd squeal,' she previously revealed. 'I called my mum and pretended to be very, very cool. Like, "Yeah, got this role, it's no big thing".' Emma went on to land roles in Death on the Nile and Barbie. In 2023, Emma won the EE Rising Star Award at the British Academy Film Awards.
