‘Last Summer’ Review: Catherine Breillat Makes Her Comeback With a Thorny Affair Between a Teen and His Stepmom

Nicki Minaj has revealed that after previously discussing the possibility, she has gone ahead and had a breast reduction.

, with hype-girl, , arguably the trend's loudest fan. Then came , the pearlescent that's topped nail trends for the past year or so.

Early life in Ely On growing up in Ely, he said: “I had a good schooling, although I am public in saying one teacher didn’t see the talent there and was a bit down on me going to law school. ”But why would a teacher provide such a negative, even without foundation, prognosis?Mr Mills said: “I think it was just about how people thought about people in Ely. ”Could there have been a racist overtone?Mr Mills responded: “It wasn’t a race thing that I was aware of, but the two could have been working together.

The value of IP, franchise building and packaging was on the agenda at Seriencamp in Germany here today.

Sean Penn is seemingly ready to put himself out there again.

It would be nice to think that desires are nothing more than preferences, springing organically from a fixed identity and unaffected by outside circumstances such as personal history and societal norms. The reality is, of course, much thornier, and trying to disentangle the many different factors influencing our tastes and longings can quickly cause a lot of suffering.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic I reckon there are more ideas per second of screentime in “Elemental” than any other Pixar movie to date. So why does this imagination-teasing opposites-attract rom-com feel like a misfire? No one can accuse director Peter Sohn (“The Good Dinosaur”) or his team of under-thinking the ultra-creative studio’s latest high-concept feature, which takes the four elements as identified by various ancient cultures — Fire, Water, Earth and Air — and reimagines them as uneasy neighbors in a crowded modern metropolis. But fun as it can be to soak in the movie’s cheeky sense of detail (from flame-retardant costumes to blink-and-you-miss-them background puns), the whole scenario seems forced: so much world-building to tell a story better suited to flesh-and-blood human characters.

The Little Mermaid” is making quite the splash at the domestic box office this weekend, with an opening day total of $38 million. The fantasy, which is opening in 4,320 theaters, is expected to gross between $120 million and $130 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend. The musical remake, starring Halle Bailey as the mermaid princess Ariel, took in $10.3 million in previews on Thursday, ranking as the seventh-highest haul for a movie rated G or PG. That puts the film on track to gross well over $100 million over the holiday weekend. With a $250 million production budget, “The Little Mermaid” must bait box office success in order to make a reasonable return.

French director Catherine Breillat has been breaking taboos throughout her career and her new Cannes Palme d’Or contender Last Summer is no exception.

Still breaking boundaries at the age of 74, French filmmaker Catherine Breillat returns to the Cannes competition with a film that squarely confronts the one taboo that is still ring-fenced from liberal tolerance: sex between adults and children. In the past, she has worked with porn stars, was one of the first to show an erection in an arthouse film and earned herself the moniker “porno auteuriste.” 

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Sooner or later, the lead actor of the movie-within-a-movie being made in “A Brighter Tomorrow” jokes, disgruntled director Giovanni (self-referential cornball Nanni Moretti’s latest on-screen avatar) was bound to make a movie that ended with its protagonist’s suicide — the implication being, the world wouldn’t be so surprised to find the helmer putting a noose around his own neck. Well, he does and he doesn’t go that far in a high-concept meta-comedy that presents its director’s personal disillusion with art, love and the state of the world, before becoming a “just kidding” group hug for his fans. That’s a sizable public in Moretti’s native Italy, where this welcome return-to-form has already been a commercial success. The director’s not nearly as big a deal abroad, however, to the extent that few may care whether the Cannes regular (who won the Palme d’Or for “A Son’s Room” in 2001) has got his groove back.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic What The Weeknd wants, The Weeknd gets in “The Idol,” a skintastic, dark-side-of-showbiz fable that perpetuates the myth that pop stars are corporate puppets with no say in their own image-making, even as it allows hit-maker The Weeknd to call the shots (and reshoots, apparently, since the five-part HBO series was overhauled late in production to suit him). Picture “Blonde” as Joe Eszterhas might have written it, but with better music. After making a toe-dip cameo as himself in A24’s “Uncut Gems,” the R&B phenom-turned-TV producer plunges head-first into acting here, teaming with “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson to imagine a shady super-predator just looking to corrupt an unsuspecting young pop singer. The edgy, high-gloss HBO series, which premiered the first two of its five episodes at the Cannes Film Festival, demands a lot of star Lily-Rose Depp. She plays “rags-to-riches, trailers-to-mansions” Jocelyn, a mono-monikered Britney or Miley type who seems empowered one moment, impressionable the next.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Tudor, or not Tudor. That is the question in “Firebrand,” a revisionist royal portrait of Henry VIII’s last wife, Katherine Parr (played here by Alicia Vikander), that features all the pageantry you’d expect from a lavish costume drama, while showing the ahistorical audacity to call “Time’s Up” on the gluttonous king (Jude Law). Never mind that Henry VIII died — of very different causes than the movie depicts — all of 476 years ago. When it comes to art, there’s no statute of limitations on taking toxic masculinity to task, which can be both encouraging (since history has excused no shortage of monsters) and frustrating. There’s a big difference between exposing the truth and rewriting what came before to suit a contemporary political agenda, the way this movie does. Liberally adapted from Elizabeth Fremantle’s fast-and-loose historical fiction “The Queen’s Gambit,” director Karim Aïnouz’s tony British production needn’t try hard to demonstrate that Henry was a notoriously bad husband.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Depending on where you come down on the question of its main character’s guilt or innocence, Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” could be seen as a kind of “Gone Girl” in reverse: A frustrated writer dies of suspicious causes, leaving behind clues that implicate his wife (Sandra Hüller). If the man’s death was a suicide — and the bilingual (half-English) movie strongly points in that direction — then there’s a terrible cruelty to what follows, as his grieving wife is hauled into court and tried for his murder. Their 11-year-old son is obsessed with trying to make sense of what happened, whereas it’s the death of the marriage, not the husband, that preoccupies Triet. Can any couple’s relationship withstand the kind of scrutiny this one is subjected to, as old fights and infidelities are dragged into the open?

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In the experimental montage that opens “Persona,” a bare-chested teenage boy caresses a screen upon which the faces of two women slowly morph back and forth. It’s easy to imagine Todd Haynes being tempted to start his deep-as-you-want-to-go rabbit-hole drama “May December” the same way, seeing as how this endlessly fascinating movie focuses on the blurring of the lines between a Hollywood star (Natalie Portman) and her Heartland subject (Julianne Moore), who was caught in a sexual relationship with a 7th grader at the age of 36. The movie wants to know: Can playing this Mary Kay Letourneau-like tabloid sensation really answer what makes such a woman tick? A heady director whose entire oeuvre feels ripe for film-studies dissertations, Haynes makes movies not merely to be watched, but to be analyzed and deconstructed after the fact. From the rich Douglas Sirkian pastiche of “Far From Heaven” to the queer twist on classical “woman’s pictures” provided by “Carol,” his style can be chilly and distancing. Not so “May December.” As layered and infinitely open-to-interpretation as any of his films, it’s also the most generous and direct, beginning not with Ingmar Bergman references (those come later), but with footage of monarch butterflies. They’re symbols of transformation, too, but also something nice to look at (and listen to, underscored by a lush reworking of the piano theme from “The Go-Between”) before these two women meet.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Taking a cue from the movie’s soon-to-be-infamous spanking scene between Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, someone ought to paddle whoever let Martin Scorsese take three and a half hours to retell “Killers of the Flower Moon.” You could read David Grann’s page-turner — about an audacious 1920s conspiracy to steal resources from the Osage people by marriage and murder — in less time, and you’d learn a whole lot more about how J. Edgar Hoover and the newly formed FBI used this case to establish their place in American law enforcement. Granted, this is cinema legend Martin Scorsese we’re talking about. For years, he fought studio execs telling him what to cut, going head-to-head with Harvey Weinstein on “Gangs of New York” (a movie that probably would’ve been better longer). Now he’s earned the right to tell stories as he sees fit. Trouble is, at 206 minutes (still four shorter than “The Irishman”), “Killers of the Flower Moon” isn’t an epic motion picture so much as a miniseries. Nothing wrong with that, except it’s intended for the big screen — where Apple has committed to release it this fall. Closer to two hours, “Killers” would make a killing, whereas longer than “The Longest Day,” most folks will wait to watch at home.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In film after film, from “Nobody Knows” to “Shoplifters,” Japanese master Kore-eda Hirokazu has proven himself to be among the medium’s most humanistic directors, inclined to see the best in people, especially children. So how to reconcile the way “Monster” makes us feel? Returning to his native Japan after helming two relatively disappointing features abroad (“Broker” and “The Truth”), the 2018 Palme d’Or winner opens his latest Cannes competition entry with a building on fire — a “hostess bar” where lonely men seek female company — and fifth-grade Minato (Kurokawa Soya) watching the inferno from a nearby balcony. Kore-eda will return to this scene three times over the course of the film, folding the narrative back upon itself from a different angle each time, before finally revealing who set the blaze.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Every time two cowboys point their guns at one another on screen, there’s something homoerotic at play. Hollywood Westerns may be loath to admit as much, but not so Pedro Almodóvar, who casts Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as lonesome cowboys reunited after 25 years in “Strange Way of Life.” Commissioned by Saint Laurent Productions (which is also premiering a Jean-Luc Godard short at Cannes), this half-baked half-hour serves as a sexy showcase for creative director Anthony Vaccarello’s latest designs, while barely delivering on the promise that an Almodóvar-made “gay cowboy” movie conjures in the imagination. At the Cannes premiere, the Spanish director described “Strange” as his response to a question posed by “Brokeback Mountain”: What can two men do on a ranch? Silva (Pascal) gives Jake (Hawke) his answer in the final seconds of the short, and it’s sweet, though it turns out Almodóvar is misremembering Ang Lee’s 2005 Western. The scene he’s thinking of is probably the one where Heath Ledger’s character tells Jake Gyllenhaal how his father made a point of showing him an old rancher’s corpse, gay-bashed with a tire iron and then “drug … around by his dick.” With an image like that in their minds, no wonder the couple decide to keep their forbidden love on the down low.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic While the world was grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, French director Thomas Cailley was imagining another kind of coronavirus, one he’d cooked up before the crisis, but which suddenly took on new real-world relevance. In “The Animal Kingdom,” a mysterious malady is sweeping France, unlocking something at a genetic level that causes people to transform into hybrid creatures. The mutations are slow and somewhat unpredictable: One person might sprout feathers, observing over weeks as their arms develop into wings, while another grows scales and winds up slithering like a snake. Through it all, 16-year-old Émile (Paul Kircher) and his father, François (Romain Duris), are just trying to stay calm, which isn’t easy when something akin to a zombie apocalypse has left the entire country jittery and suspicious. What’s causing the mutations? Is it contagious? Can the creatures be trusted, or are they a threat to others? A scar on Émile’s cheek, acquired during the early days of his mother’s infection, offers a hint of the risk. People are understandably frightened of the unknown, but scarier still is the possibility that the same could happen to them.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Every race needs a finish line. For the “Fast & Furious” franchise, the studio keeps shoving it farther down the road, at least according to Vin Diesel, who suggested at the world premiere of the 10th installment — a brainless but action-packed thrill ride billed as “Fast X” — that Universal might split the “finale” over three movies. Why not seven? Or 20 more, for that matter? That might allow Diesel to merge these increasingly desperate sequels with his other running-on-fumes franchise, “XXX.” The producer-star has a way of mouthing off around the release of each new “Fast” movie (remember hints that an all-female spinoff might be coming?), which feels counterproductive, considering that a key part of Diesel’s appeal comes from the rumbling-Harley-voiced actor’s capacity to reduce complex thoughts to terse catchphrases. He’ll squint his eyes, crack that sideways smile and spout something inane (“I don’t have friends, I got family”), and it will sound profound. Gearhead philosophy, or “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” served up with popcorn.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic They instructed her no one must turn their back to the king, but she did so anyway. They warned that she was not to look Louis XV directly in the eyes, lest others take it as “an invitation,” but she ignored Versailles’ advisers on this point as well, defiantly meeting the king’s gaze. Jeanne Bécu was not the type of woman to do as she was told. In this respect, divisive French actor-director Maïwenn can relate, casting herself as the courtesan-turned-comtess in “Jeanne du Barry,” a sensitive and surprisingly low-key portrait of the French monarch’s last mistress. That Maïwenn saw fit to engage tabloid-embattled Johnny Depp as “her king” is just one of the many hurdles she set for herself — but then, no one embarks on such a project with the intention of pleasing her critics.