Peter Debruge: Last News

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.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic A year after collecting his second Palme d‘Or for “The Triangle of Sadness,” Ruben Östlund finds himself on the other end of the equation at the Cannes Film Festival, overseeing the official competition jury awarding this year’s prizes. Östlund is co-presenting the awards with fellow jurors Paul Dano and Brie Larson, Moroccan director Maryam Touzani, French actor Denis Ménochet, British-Zambian writer-director Rungano Nyoni, Afghan author Atiq Rahimi, Argentinian writer-director Damián Szifrón and “Titane” director Julia Ducournau (another Palme d’Or winner). Full list of prizes below.

Variety‘s critics pick the most notable dozen. Distributor: Neon One of seven women filmmakers in competition, Justine Triet has taken a familiar genre (the court- room drama) and turned it on its head. A frustrated writer dies of suspicious causes, leaving behind clues that implicate his wife (Sandra Hüller).

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.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It began in the son’s room, when father was away on business. L’enfant thought it was l’amour, but for her, 30-odd years his senior, the sex, lies and audiotape were a mistake. Wild at heart, she’d yielded to the taste of … oh, never mind. Competing for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer” echoes films that have come before — most notably, 2019 Danish drama “Queen of Hearts,” on which it’s based — but it proves most daring in the ways the film departs for its more conventionally moralistic source, and especially in Breillat’s refusal to call either party a parasite. Yes, the affair between a lawyer and her 17-year-old stepson is a betrayal — of her marriage, of her parental responsibilities, of everything she stands for as an attorney — but that’s nothing compared to how the 50-ish woman deals with it when word gets out in this thought-provoking domestic drama. In reviewing the original, Variety’s Guy Lodge wrote, “you can practically envisage a Robin Wright-starring U.S. remake” — which isn’t far from the truth. Backed by fearless producer Saïd Ben Saïd (“Elle”), Breillat gives us the great Léa Drucker (who played far more responsible moms in “Close” and “Custody”) in the role of Anne, who’s introduced representing an underage girl in a sex-crimes case.

The Little Mermaid” cast did their best at playing Variety’s “Name That Fish” on the red carpet at the movie’s premiere in Los Angeles Melissa McCarthy (Ursula), Jacob Tremblay (Flounder), Noma Dumezweni (Queen Selina), Daveed Diggs (Sebastian) and Javier Bardem (King Triton) were put to the test by Variety’s Marc Malkin to see just how much they know about life under the sea. When quizzed with images of various fish, answers included “basketball with spikes,” “sad fish,” “not Spongebob,” “swordy-thing” “not edible” and “definitely a fish.”

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.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Neon has acquired Justine Triet’s Hitchcockian courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall.” The U.S. distributor has been “aggressively pursuing” the competition title, which premiered in Cannes on Sunday to rapturous reviews, and has beat out competition. In the 150-minute film, a frustrated writer dies of suspicious causes, leaving behind clues that implicate his wife (Sandra Hüller) of his murder. Much of the film is focused on the ensuing trial, and features German star Hüller, known to international audiences for “Toni Erdmann,” delivering a powerhouse performance as a woman fighting to clear her name while protecting the couple’s young son. (Hüller previously teamed with Triet for psychological drama “Sibyl,” which also competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019.)

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.

Sophia Scorziello editor Joaquin Phoenix is taking it up another notch after Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid,” teaming up with Todd Haynes for an NC-17-rated gay romance film. Haynes spoke to IndieWire at the Cannes Film Festival following the Saturday premiere of his romantic drama “May December,” starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. In the interview, Haynes teased an upcoming project he co-developed with Phoenix. “The next film is a feature that’s an original script that I developed with Joaquin Phoenix based on some thoughts and ideas he brought to me,” Haynes told IndieWire. “We basically wrote with him as a story writer. Me and Jon Raymond and Joaquin share the story credit. And we hope to be shooting it beginning early next year. It’s a gay love story set in 1930s L.A.”

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.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. After hitting theaters in September of last year, and receiving some of the best film reviews of 2022, Ti West’s most recent horror slasher film is finally available to stream from home. “Pearl” arrives on Showtime on Tuesday, May 16. “Pearl,” the prequel to West’s retro slasher “X,” sees Mia Goth reprise her role as the eponymous Pearl in 1918 Texas as she tends to her ailing father on an isolated farm under the watch of her mother. After failing to escape the mundane for the glamorous life she dreams for herself, she spirals into madness, committing a series of gruesome murders before her husband returns from war to face the horrific aftermath.

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.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic From “Saved!” to “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” Sundance movies tend to paint fundamentalist Christians as severe, cult-like zealots, hellbent on brainwashing the next generation. While such portrayals can certainly be cathartic for those scarred by conservative upbringings, it’s a refreshing change to see this milieu treated with the level of nuance that Laurel Parmet brings to “The Starling Girl.” Set in a small Kentucky town where morality is strictly enforced, Parmet’s promising, evenhanded debut focuses on a religious teen (“Little Women” star Eliza Scanlen) who’s never had reason to question her faith, until a crush on her handsome youth pastor (Lewis Pullman) awakens her sexuality and scandalizes the community. For the adults in this repressive rural enclave, organized religion seems to provide the discipline and structure they seek. But for 17-year-old Jem Starling, their values are starting feel like a straitjacket.