‘Smoking Causes Coughing’ Review: Quentin Dupieux Returns With A Zany Horror Anthology [Cannes]

“The Stars at Noon” finds the French filmmaker Claire Denis shooting in Panama doubling for Nicaragua; directing a cast of Yanks, Brits, and assorted Central Americans; and working from a script switching between Spanish and English. Internationally coproduced Towers of Babel such as this aren’t at all uncommon at the Cannes Film Festival, but the errors in translation all over this disappointing foreign-relations drama run deeper than simple differences of ethnicity or language.

There’s really no overstating the sociocultural impact of Elvis Aaron Presley, whose music and celebrity cleaved the twentieth century in half as an Ozymandias colossus foretelling the future of fame: merchandising, overexposure, descent into self-parody. That’s all in Baz Luhrmann’s new biopic “Elvis,” though mostly because he’s jammed everything he possibly can into its million-millennia run time.

It’s a Cannes Film Festival legend. Supposedly, at the 1999 festival, when David Cronenberg headed the competition jury, he swayed his jury cohorts to award the Palme d’Or to the Dardennes’ “Rosetta” over Pedro Almodóvar‘s festival favorite, “All About My Mother.” Now, at this year’s festival, “Crimes Of The Future” star Viggo Mortensen put the myth to bed, stating that it’s a “bullshit” rumor and that the jury’s choice for “Rosetta” was unanimous.

Anne Hathaway is being crowned the haute couture queen of the Cannes Film Festival. And fans of the brunette bombshell are digitally reveling over the early-2000s diva’s fashionable resurgence. “Can we all take a moment to appreciate Anne Hathaway looking like a goddess in Cannes,” tweeted an admirer of the Oscar winner, alongside a snapshot of her in a sequin, floral-print two-piece ensemble by Schiaparelli. “I love this Anne Hathaway renaissance we’re going through,” chimed another. Making her debut at the annual silver screen soirée over the weekend, Hathaway, 39, repeatedly turned heads in high-fashion finery for the premiere of her feature flick “Armageddon Time,” starring Anthony Hopkins, 84, and Jeremy Strong, 43. And immediately after touching down in France on Wednesday, the blockbuster beauty transformed the Nice Côte d’Azur Airport into a virtual runway, sashaying through in a chic, loose-fitting pantsuit.  From there, Hathaway ditched her trendy traveling togs to don a white strapless Armani Privé gown, reminiscent of her “Princess Diaries” glamor, on the film festival’s star-studded red carpet Thursday. The flawless fashion plate continued to outdo herself throughout the duration of the weekend, rocking a blue mini dress by Gucci Friday, stunning in a coffee-colored Louis Vuitton number Saturday and beaming in a hot pink piece by Valentino Sunday. And the luxe looks sent Hathaway enthusiasts into a full-on Twitter tizzy. “Anne Hathaway at the cannes film festival.

Cannes Film Festival.Members of the production team for “Butterly Vision,” by Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechni, protested the ongoing war in Ukraine while on the red carpet Wednesday.In front of Salle Debussy, the second-largest theater in Cannes, the team — including producers Darya Bassel and Yelizaveta Smit, plus actress Rita Burkovska — held a banner that read, “Russians kill Ukrainians. Do you find it offensive or disturbing to talk about this genocide?”The sirens heard on the red carpet stairs were meant to symbolize air raids in Ukraine, while the protestors held signs that read “sensitive content” over their faces.Not only were they demonstrating the ongoing devastation in Ukraine, but they were also attempting to show the extent of Russian censorship.The film “Butterfly Vision” explores a similar idea, albeit in a fictional world.

In the late 19th century, two French psychiatrists coined the term “folie à deux,” literally translated as madness for two, to describe what is now widely referred to as shared psychotic disorder, or when two — or more — people transmit delusional beliefs and occasional hallucinations to one another. The condition is most common in people closely related, who live in intimate proximity, and has been lengthily dissected by academics.

As countries go, Iceland is probably one of the most fast-changing in terms of its biological make up, its intense volcanic activities reshaping its surface and contours at a speed fast enough to be perceived within a single generation. Paradoxically, it is also a place where time appears to stand still, with the sun omnipresent for half the year and absent for the rest.

Based on her own time spent in the acting school Les Amandiers, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” aims to recreate a very specific time and place both in her life and in France, more than it cares to inform her audience about what, exactly, was so special about this school. Funded in the 1980s by Patrice Chéreau, a successful and daring director of theatre, opera and film, Les Amandiers did not last very long but for a few years it was considered to be one of the most exciting places in France and even Europe for young actors to develop their crafts, and for directors to find new talent.

Observed in isolation, detached from the body or in extreme close-ups, organs and other vital viscera resemble moist masses of soft tissue plucked from alien landscapes in the unflinchingly immersive medical documentary “De Humani Corporis Fabrica.” Alternating between footage from cameras inserted into patients for the purpose of treating ailments and grisly shots from the operating room, directors Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the team behind the striking non-fiction film on fishing “Leviathan,” apply their fascination for uncanny imagery with relativist intent to the inner workings of French hospitals and, in turn, the human body.

“Tori and Lokita” opens on a tight close-up on the teenage Lokita (Joely Mbundu) as she struggles with the questions delivered by an immigration officer. She has fabricated a story about how she found her brother, Tori (Pablo Schils) in an orphanage, but no one believes her.

Deadline’s studio at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival kicked off at the American Pavilion by hosting fest-goers such as Joel Edgerton of The Stranger, Jesse Eisenberg and Julianne Moore of When You Finish Saving The World, and many more. Click on the photo above to launch the gallery.

A documentary with no guardrails, “The Natural History of Destruction” (“NHD”) lurches through its 105-minute runtime with no concern for its audience’s bearings or balance. Commendable in its own way, eschewing as it does the omnipresent talking head and clip art formula so pervasive on the documentary scene, it is also devoid of context and narrative challenges.

A balloon shaped like a heart flies from the open window of a taxi. It is late at night and the woman (Leila Hatami) who this gift was bestowed upon simply couldn’t care less about the useless trinket, far more interested in comparing the quality of the accompanying chocolate boxes dispensed by a handful of men who wish to have her as a Valentine.

sickened by horrific scenes in “Crimes of the Future” reportedly walked out of the premiere at Cannes Film Festival on Monday.The film — starring Kristen Stewart, Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen — is filled with scenes of child autopsies, bloody intestines, body mutations and people orgasming while licking open wounds.  The majority of the exits reportedly occurred within the first five minutes of the film but a specifically grotesque scene of Seydoux licking an open wound sent others out the door further along in the film. Both Variety and the Daily Mail reported walkouts, but Entertainment Weekly claimed there were none.New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan tweeted from the theatre that he counted 15 people who walked out of the cinema during the screening due to “notably gross plot developments.” Despite being too much for some, the movie directed by David Cronenberg received a seven-minute standing ovation from the remaining audience members at the end.

It’s the plight of the plightless: a kid from a comfortable, upper-middle-class background wants to be some manner of artist, except that he’s (and it does seem to be a he more often than not) bereft of the experience, grit, or outsider credibility that define the role models he hopes he could one-day call influences. He ventures out into the big bad world in search of something to put a bit of hair on his creative chest, only to face the spiny question of whether this effort to get real is just class tourism, a jaunt in the gutter that one phone call to Dad could prevent.

It’s the plight of the plightless: a kid from a comfortable, upper-middle-class background wants to be some manner of artist, except that he’s (and it does seem to be a he more often than not) bereft of the experience, grit, or outsider credibility that define the role models he hopes he could one-day call influences. He ventures out into the big bad world in search of something to put a bit of hair on his creative chest, only to face the spiny question of whether this effort to get real is just class tourism, a jaunt in the gutter that one phone call to Dad could prevent.

The 2022 Cannes Film Festival is finally here, and with the event comes many premiers of extraordinary talent. Movies like “Decision To Leave” by Park Chan-Wook or documentaries like “Moonage Daydream” by Brett Morgen have premiered at the event, already sparking good reviews.

The great majority of us could only aspire, before “Moonage Daydream,” to step into the mind of David Bowie — the persona, the artist, the entity not yet proven terrestrial. Eclectic, unashamedly maximalist, and variously philosophical: all true of both the man himself and Brett Morgen’s feature-length docu-odyssey, which borrows its title from the 1976 hit, and just debuted as part of Cannes’ Midnight slate.

“Decision To Leave” deals in illusions. Is Song Seo-rae’s dress blue or green? Is she really the innocent wife she claims to be? In her living room, she sits surrounded by sapphire wallpaper, its lines suggesting the mountains near her Busan home that she so loathes — but they could easily be seen as waves, too.

David Cronenberg has unfinished business with the future, which is tricky, seeing as it already constitutes a significant slice of his past. His new film — titled “Crimes of the Future,” as in committed by rather than during that span of time — finds the master on the other side of his extended sojourn in high-minded literary adaptation, biopic quasi-prestige, and Tinseltown satire, back to playing the body-horror hits on which he made his name.

A drastic departure from his prior films “Border” and “Shelley,” Ali Abbasi’s newest film, “Holy Spider,” draws inspiration from the 2000-2001 crimes and subsequent trial of Saeed Hanaei (played here by Mehdi Bajestani), a war veteran-turned-serial killer in the Iranian city of Mashhad who murdered 16 sex workers, claiming that he was cleansing the holy city of sinners and corruption in the name of Islam.