Cannes

Killers of the Flower Moon could be Scorsese’s best film yet

There are a few things in this world that you can truly count on: death, taxes and Taylor Swift’s love life attracting headlines. To their number can be added the certain knowledge that, when Martin Scorsese collaborates with either of his two muses, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, the results are somewhere between fascinating (Gangs of New York; New York, New York) and stone-cold cinema classics (Goodfellas; The Wolf of Wall Street). Yet apart from a droll promotional film for a Macau casino (The Audition), the three men had never worked together. This has, finally, changed, as the trio unite for what looks like another Scorsese crime classic in the form of the

Cannes 2023: 10 films to watch out for

This year’s Cannes Film Festival promises to be interesting viewing, with a record number of female directors in contention (a stark contrast to the 2023 Academy Awards) and a greater than usual representation of old-guard auteurs (including Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach and Finnish maverick Aki Kaurismäki). Fans will no doubt be enthused by the return of Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) with his first picture since 2013’s acclaimed Under the Skin. I can’t say Glazer’s choice of material – Martin Amis’s 2014 concentration camp novel Zone of Interest – particularly grabs me, but the director’s work is always worth checking out. This year’s blockbuster spot, meanwhile, will be taken

Pure scorn without wit or insight: Triangle of Sadness reviewed

The latest film from Ruben Ostlund received an eight-minute standing ovation after its screening in Cannes and also won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and this has left me entirely baffled: what, the film I’ve just seen? The one where every scene is far too long? The one billed as a ‘satirical black comedy’ even though the targets are easy and it doesn’t say anything and I didn’t laugh once? That film? I should add, it’s not for the emetophobic. One of the scenes that goes on far too long involved so much vomiting that I could only watch the bottom 5 per cent of the screen. Ostlund

The elusive adventures of Catherine Dior

When Catherine Dior, one of the heroic French Resistance workers captured by the Nazis, came face to face with her torturer at his trial in 1952, to receive the suggestion from his lawyer that it was a case of mistaken identity, she burst out furiously to the judge: ‘I know what I’m saying. This affair cost people their lives.’ It is one of the very few vivid glimpses we get of her in Justine Picardie’s book. The respected former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar has tackled what is the most difficult subject for any biographer: a person about whom virtually nothing is known. Claire Tomalin brought it off in The Invisible

My nights of passion with Juliette Gréco

Gstaad Juliette Gréco’s recent death in her nineties brought back some melodramatic memories. In 1957 Gréco was one of France’s premier chanteuses of torch songs, a very sexy young woman dressed in black with auburn hair and very white skin who sang of doomed love and romantic longing. Darryl F. Zanuck, the legendary one-time head of Twentieth Century Fox, fell rather hard when he saw her perform in a Parisian Left Bank bistro and decided to make her a film star. While casting The Roots of Heaven, the movie that would be her introduction, Zanuck and La Greco moved to the French Riviera where Zanuck gambled very large sums at