Ryoo Seung-wan has been a pillar of the South Korean film industry for over 20 years, respected there for his keen social observation and thrilling action. But Europe’s great film festivals have feted him conspicuously less than some of his more internationally well-known peers. The Cannes Film Festival recently took a step toward correcting that
Cannes 2024
The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the new film from Iranian dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof, may or may not be honored tonight when the Cannes jury hands out its awards. But at the press conference for the film on Saturday, Rasoulof displayed his own heroism. The director used his press conference to call out Iran’s
Oliver Stone has always had one eye pointed south of the U.S. border. It began with his phenomenal script for Brian De Palma’s Scarface, which transformed the famous Chicago gangster into a hardened Cuban refugee. After that, Stone directed the photojournalist saga Salvador, about the deadly civil war that gripped El Salvador in the 1980s.
When asked to name her organization’s biggest accomplishment so far, Charlene Deleon-Jones, the executive director for Film AlUla and Saudi Tourism leadership board member, doesn’t hesitate to name-check Norah, the first Saudi film to crack the Cannes lineup. The Tawfik Alzaidi-helmed indie movie, which will compete in the fest’s Un Certain Regard section, was shot in
There’s no point in hiring Nicolas Cage if you’re not going to let him rip with a wackadoodle, OTT performance, and he duly delivers in the sly psychological thriller The Surfer. Calibrating his character’s descent into mental and physical disarray so that it happens by evenly distributed degrees, Cage is in only moderately demented form
Like one of those fiendish knots that tighten the more you squirm, director Magnus von Horn’s Cannes competitor The Girl With the Needle builds to a devastating climax, taut as piano wire. Danish actress Vic Carmen Sonne (Holiday, Godland) offers an understated but multi-layered performance as Karoline, a vulnerable but resilient seamstress living in post-WWI/early-1920s
In his short but prolific acting career, 17-year-old Finn Little has covered a lot of terrain, from desolate shorelines to U.S. ranchlands. And his latest, The Surfer, took him to the idyllic beaches of Western Australia. From director Lorcan Finnegan (2019’s Vivarium), The Surfer centers on a man (Nicolas Cage), who takes his son (Little) to the beach where he used to surf
The 2024 Cannes Film Festival competition jury, led by president Greta Gerwig, met the international press Tuesday — and it didn’t take long before the assembled stars were urged to address the various fraught political issues swirling around this year’s edition of the world’s most glamorous film fest. On the eve of the 77th festival, Cannes artistic director
Chinese sales company Parallax Films has notched a batch of sales deals for director Qiu Jiongjiong‘s Locarno 2021 jury prize-winning historical drama A New Old Play. The acclaimed Chinese indie film has sold to France’s Carlotta Films, Japan’s Katsuben Cinema Club, and Singapore’s Cineaste Production House for distribution across all Southeast Asian territories, excluding Indonesia and Vietnam.
The Cannes Critics’ Week, the parallel film festival sidebar organized by the French film critics’ union, has unveiled its 2024 selection. The psychological thriller Ghost Trail, the first feature from acclaimed French shorts director Jonathan Millet, will open the 2024 sidebar. Adam Bessa (star of 2022’s Un Certain Regard winner Harka) plays the lead in