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In Cannes, Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen, best known for the Oscar-nominated The Broken Circle Breakdown and his Hollywood debut film Beautiful Boy, presented his latest film The Eight Mountains, alongside his real-life partner/actor Charlotte Vandermeersch, who also co-directed and wrote the film. Intimately shot by Ruben Impens in the 4:3 aspect ratio, this touching story about friendship is set in the breathtaking and wonderfully photographed Italian Alpine valley of Aosta.

Weeks before arriving in Cannes for my first Cannes Film Festival experience, I understood that sleep was going to be off the table. The festival (which this year returned to a traditional, in-person event for the first time in two years) had implemented a new online ticketing system to avoid day-of lines.

They say Morgan Freeman plays characters with a calm and reassuring demeanor: well he's also the voice of God! Since Bruce Almighty (2003), Freeman has added this honor to his many accolades. “I gravitate towards gravitas”, Freeman was quoted to say to Variety at the time, with his distinctly ironic tone.

For the past century, LGTBQ+ themed has been part of Spanish and Latin American cinema, addressing sexual diversity as a central focus. On the one hand, condemning homophobia and discrimination that is still present in the lives of many people and, on the other hand, proposing crucial turning points in the process toward tolerance and inclusion.

Tom Cruise was the top gun during the four-day Memorial Day weekend. Top Gun: Maverick flew high in the box office stratosphere, becoming the biggest Memorial Day opening in history and the biggest bow in the actor’s career.

As expected, there was no stopping the Top Gun sequel's steep blastoff: it broke the speed barrier all over the world, and the German-speaking countries were no exception. After a more or less stagnant four weeks in the German charts, there were lots of shake-ups this last weekend, most coming from domestic films.

Jurassic World: Dominion will open in China on June 10, 2022. But Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t have a release date and probably will not get one.

In case you were living in a cave with no internet (and the lack of internet does feature prominently in this podcast), you might have missed the return of the in-person Cannes Film Festival with all the pomp and pageantry one would expect from the preeminent European festival that celebrates both the world’s filmmaking elite, from Tom Cruise to David Cronenberg, to foreign indie directors who took home big prizes again this year. Check out the list of winners and more coverage on www.

Ed Harris, twice Golden Globe winner and five-time nominee for his acting, spoke to the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press several times, in 1996, 1998, 1999 and in 2000, about Pollock, his directorial debut, where he portrayed painter Jackson Pollock.   Marcia Gay Harden played artist Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, and Amy Madigan, Harris’ wife, played art collector Peggy Guggenheim.

The 75th Cannes International Film Festival is over. While the festival celebrates the return to relative normalcy following a global pandemic, there is a new global threat just three hours away from the sunny beaches of the Cote d’Azur—Putin’s devastating war in Ukraine.