In Bi Gan’s ambitious alternate reality, where humans can live indefinitely, a reincarnating dissident dreamer travels through history in different guises

Bi Gan’s new movie in Cannes is bold and ambitious, visually amazing, trippy and woozy in its embrace of hallucination and the heightened meaning of the unreal and the dreamlike. His last film Long Day’s Journey Into Night from 2018 was an extraordinary and almost extraterrestrial experience in the cinema which challenged the audience to examine what they thought about time and memory; this doesn’t have quite that power, being effectively a portmanteau movie, some of whose sections are better than others – though it climaxes with some gasp-inducing images and tracking shots and all the constituent parts contribute to the film’s aggregate effect.

Resurrection is, perhaps, a long night’s journey to the enlightenment of daybreak; it finishes at a club called the Sunrise. It is also an episodic journey through Chinese history, finishing at that historic moment which continues to fascinate Chinese film-makers whose movies are a way of collectively processing their feelings about it: New Year’s Eve 1999, the new century in which China was to bullishly embrace the new capitalism while cleaving to the political conformism of the old ways.

It might look like a platform for the films ‘produced in foreign lands’ that Donald Trump despises. But a surprising number of pictures at this year’s festival side with the locally rooted over cosmopolitan elites

If Donald Trump really wants to save Hollywood, maybe he needs to venture outside his comfort zone and watch more European art house cinema.

The Cannes film festival, which closes on Saturday, is in many ways the very definition of the “globalism” that the American president’s Maga movement despises. Walk past the queues snaking alongside the Palais des Festivals and you hear languages and accents from every corner of the globe. The Marché du Film, where industry professionals strike their deals, is brimming with smart people from all over the world beckoning US producers with irresistible tax incentives – resulting in the kind of movies “produced in foreign lands” that the US president earlier this month proposed punishing with 100% tariffs. At the opening gala, Cannes gave Trump arch-enemy Robert De Niro a platform to rally the world of cinema against the US president, “without violence, but with great passion and determination”.

Cannes film festival
Saeed Roustaee’s new film takes aim at a slippery, entitled male who thinks he can lord it over a widow he plans to marry

A strange, sad, sombre movie from Iranian director Saeed Roustaee whose last entry at Cannes was the family drama Leila’s Brothers in 2022. This is a story about the randomness of life in the big city, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV soap feel to its succession of escalating crises. Like Leila’s Brothers, it is about the entitlement of Iran’s menfolk, and how a man – however shiftless, casual and low-status – can somehow pull rank on a woman in the marriage market.

Payman Maadi (from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) plays Hamid, an ambulance driver in his late 40s with a certain roguish ladies-man charm whose unmarried status raises eyebrows among some of his acquaintances, but who is now engaged to Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar). She is a smart, hardworking hospital nurse who is widowed and lives with her sister Mehri (Soha Niasti) and mum (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaee), and her two kids. Teen son Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) is always in trouble at school and has a breezy way of sweet-talking his mother into forgiving him and younger sister Neda (Arshida Dorostkar).

Ritchie’s derivative yarn whisks John Krasinski off to picturesque spots on an uninspired search for treasure and excitement – neither of which arrive

Trying to make John Krasinski happen may be a misguided endeavour, but the campaign to mould him into a new Harrison Ford is bananas. After starring as Jack Ryan on TV, he now plays Luke Purdue, an Indiana Jones knock-off and son of an adventurer-archaeologist (named Harrison, no less) in Guy Ritchie’s soulless business-class yarn. Despite plucky work from Natalie Portman as Luke’s disapproving sister Charlotte, this hodgepodge of plundered elements adds up to nothing more than Indiana Bourne and the Thomas Crown Da Vinci Code.

Bankrolled by dying billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), Luke and his dad’s old team are on the trail of the mythical Fountain of Youth. He even has a PowerPoint presentation to show how he intends to find it: hidden on the backs of six paintings by artists such as Caravaggio and El Greco are clues which will lead to this fabled source of immortality. Charlotte cautions against the whole enterprise but is soon whisked along, apparently persuaded by her brother’s bumper-sticker slogans (“Life is about adventure!”). It’s almost as if she can’t see that he is an obnoxious bully, chiding her for her life choices, puckering up creepily for kisses from Esme (Eiza González) who is trying to prevent him from finding the fountain, and given to knocking women unconscious with a disabling spray. Nice.

In Cannes to promote The History of Sound, the actor said ‘I don’t see the parallels at all, other than we spent a little time in a tent’

The actor Paul Mescal has hit out at critics who have drawn comparisons between The History of Sound, a gay romance in which he stars opposite Josh O’Connor, and Ang Lee’s landmark western Brokeback Mountain.

Speaking at a press conference in Cannes the day after the film’s premiere, Mescal – who followed a supporting performance in Andrew Haigh’s acclaimed gay ghost story All of Us Strangers with playing the lead in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II – said he believes cinema is “moving away” from alpha male roles.

Cruise does things his way in this eighth and last Mission: Impossible, as his maverick agent Ethan Hunt takes on the ultimate in AI evil

Here it is: the eighth and final film (for now) in the spectacular Mission: Impossible action-thriller franchise, which manifests itself like the last segment jettisoned from some impossibly futurist Apollo spacecraft, which then carries on ionospherically upwards in a fireball as Tom Cruise ascends to a state beyond stardom, beyond IP. And with this film’s anti-AI and internet-sceptic message, and the gobsmacking final aerial set piece, Cruise is repeating his demand for the echt big-screen experience. He is of course doing his own superhuman stunts – for the same reason, as he himself once memorably put it, that Gene Kelly did all his own dancing.

Final Reckoning is a new and ultimate challenge (actually the second half of the challenge from the previous film) which takes Cruise’s buff and resourceful IMF leader Ethan Hunt on one last maverick, deniable mission to exasperate and yet overawe his stuffed-shirt superiors at Washington and Langley. And what might that be? To save the world of course, like all the other missions.

Close attention is required for this sombre but impressive Taiwanese feature debut about exploited illegal staff, and their patients and gangmasters

Taiwan-based Chiang Wei-liang and Yin You-qiao have made this feature directing debut in the Directors’ Fortnight selection at Cannes. It evokes an almost Zen state of suffering and sadness – a feeling that penetrates the film’s fabric like months of steady rain in a rural landscape.

If that sounds like a daunting prospect, it is, and this movie requires patience and attention, a calibration of your viewing expectations to match its stasis. Yet it’s an andante tempo that makes its moments of drama, and even sensation all the more striking. The film’s executive producer is Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien: his influences are there, and there is also something of the work of Tsai Ming-liang.

Benicio Del Toro and Michael Cera are essentially wingmen to Kate Winslet’s daughter, making a breakthrough big screen turn in Anderson’s enjoyable yet airless ensemble romp

Wes Anderson has contrived another of his elegant, eccentric, rectilinear comedies; as ever, he is vulnerable to the charge of making films that stylistically resemble all his others, and yet no more, surely, than all those other directors making conventional films that resemble all the rest of their own conventional work.

The Phoenician Scheme is enjoyable and executed with Anderson’s usual tremendous dispatch, but it is somehow less visually detailed and inspired than some of his earlier work; there is less screwball sympathy for the characters, and it is disconcerting to see actors of the calibre of Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe and Scarlett Johansson phoning in tiny, deadpan, almost immobile cameos. But there is a likable lead turn from Mia Threapleton, an eerie visual and aural echo of her mother, Kate Winslet.

The studio’s new attempt to generate more money from the same property hits an instant roadblock in ghastly misfire

This year, Disney may have gone too far, turning perhaps its single greatest animated film into a heavily CG-augmented quasi-live-action monstrosity. No, not the already-infamous box office bomb Snow White; the animated basis for that movie is a monumental achievement in the medium, but it’s ultimately a famous version of a timeless fairy tale that seems fair game for reinterpretation. Lilo & Stitch, however, is the rare sui generis piece of Disney animation – one that somehow emerged during a tumultuous time for the animation studio to become a substantial hit back in 2002.

The film has endured because it’s a triumph of mixing techniques: old-fashioned ultra-expressive hand-drawn animation and watercolor backgrounds; dashes of newfangled computer animation to assist with some of its sci-fi-heavier scenes; and a story about a stranded alien befriending a misfit little girl that crosses ET with Looney Tunes anarchy.

A rerelease of the documentary about the German film-maker’s operatic adventure in the Peruvian jungle is a compelling portrait of an artist obsessed

In 1982, film-maker Les Blank released this sombre, thoughtful, quietly awestruck documentary account of Werner Herzog’s crazy sisyphean struggle in a remote and dangerous Peruvian jungle location, making his extraordinary drama Fitzcarraldo, which came out the same year. Fitzcarraldo was Herzog’s own bizarre and brilliant story idea, crazily amplifying and exaggerating a case from real life.

Early 20th-century opera enthusiast Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, played with straw-hair and mad blue eyes by Klaus Kinski, goes into the rubber trade to make enough money to realise his dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian port town of Iquitos; he works out that the steamship needed to transport materials can only be brought into the required stretch of water by dragging it across land between two tributaries. This is a crazy, magnificent and operatic obsession, more grandiose than anything that could be presented on stage, for which he will need Indigenous peoples as slave labour to haul the ship. By playing these tribes his Caruso records on an old gramophone player, he persuades them he is a white god who must be obeyed.

After meeting at a wedding, Su-hwan and Yeong-gyeong plunge into a desperate relationship fuelled by alcohol, and powered by tremendous performances

Seventeen years after her debut feature Let the Blue River Run, Korean director Kang Mi-Ja returns with this devastating tale of love and addiction, adapted from Kwon Yeo-sun’s novel. The film’s lo-fi aesthetics – unvarnished digital cinematography, minimally edited static shots – strips the already compact narrative down to pure, elemental passions. After a chance encounter at a wedding party, lonelyhearts Su-hwan (Kim Seol-jin) and Yeong-gyeong (Han Ye-ri Minari) cling on to each other for emotional shelter, their connection simultaneously fuelled and imperilled by the latter’s debilitating alcoholism.

The shared baggage of romantic betrayals and financial uncertainty is revealed rather swiftly in a rare dialogue-heavy scene; the rest of the film prioritises body language over words. After this hasty introduction, to ask viewers to immediately plunge into the depths of the characters’ sufferings is quite a demanding request. And yet the extraordinary performances from the lead actors, along with Kang’s eye for framing, beautifully fill out the missing gaps. The world around the couple is a void of indifference, filled with nondescript apartment buildings and forlorn bars. Together, these outsiders soften the harsh edges of city life; trained in dance, Kim Seol-jin and Han Ye-ri imbue their every gesture with a stunning physicality. A recurring composition of the doomed lovers locked in a nurturing embrace grows overwhelmingly moving with each episode, as external forces pull the pair apart.

Post apocalyptic fantasy in which London is in ruins after the release of a chimp-borne virus, with Cillian Murphy as one of the survivors

Danny Boyle’s exhilarating new film is in the spirit of the classic small-screen post-apocalypse fantasies from the 1970s and 1980s: dramas such as Threads and Survivors. A fatal virus is released when animal rights activists release chimps infected with “rage”. Twenty-eight days later, a terrified bike messenger called Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a London hospital, the city in ruins and apparently deserted, the infected populace rampaging around somewhere like vampiric mad dogs. It is when he teams up with some of the few uninfected people - played by Brendan Gleeson, Naomie Harris and Megan Burns - and heads for a supposedly safe army encampment that the horror begins.

Boyle’s use of locations – bleak countryside, gaunt motorways and weird deserted London streetscapes – is aided by fast, fluent shooting on digital video, which also facilitates some creative special effects (you can see more ambitious examples in the digitally ruined Warsaw in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist at the beginning of next year). The verminous “infected” are satisfyingly horrible: there’s a good scene in which Jim and companions are shin-deep in swarming rats actually running away from these viral un-dead. It flags during the encampment scenes, with some redundant gore, but this is a muscular, virile piece of film-making from Boyle.

Ferreira is charm personified in this drama about a young woman who becomes friends with a man who has the same name as her louse of a father

This low-budget, low-key comedy-drama is a little saccharine at times, especially in the final stretch, but it’s hard to fully resist its charm offensive. It wages an aggressive lovebombing campaign led by very likable lead Barbie Ferreira who shines as put-upon but good-hearted Lily, a home-help assistant first met bawling her eyes out when a misaddressed text reveals that the guy she’s been dating has cheated on her. Instead of following her (natural) first instinct to chew him out, she just chokes down her anger and texts “no problem!” in response to his feeble apology. Soon, it becomes clear that this is poor Lily’s usual modus operandi, especially when it comes to her louse of a father, Bob Trevino (French Stewart), who drags her along on his dates in order to make himself look more parental and nurturing than he actually is.

When one such date goes badly, Bob shuns Lily, going so far as to effectively ban her from visiting the trailer park where he lives. (The story unfolds around the Kentucky-Indiana border, and precisely evokes the midwestern vibe without either patronising or pandering to the region.) While trying to reach him through Facebook, Lily ends up befriending an entirely different Bob Trevino (John Leguizamo), a construction industry manager who at first is just being polite but who comes to enjoy chatting with lonely Lily via the app messaging platform; this Bob Trevino “likes” some of her corny memes and posts, hence the title. The two develop a genuine but strictly platonic friendship that moves eventually to the real world, somewhat to the baffled bemusement of Bob’s wife Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones).

Elín Hall gives a quietly intense performance as a young woman privately grieving her secret boyfriend’s untimely death

What happens when the unthinkable happens? This Icelandic drama begins when an art student in his early 20s is killed in the country’s worst-ever road traffic accident, one of at least a dozen fatalities. The rest the film follows his dazed girlfriend around Reykjavik for the next 12 or so hours: first the hospital, then to a bar downing shots with friends, and later to a hastily arranged memorial for the dead. Director Rúnar Rúnarsson is more interested in the emotions rolling over her than plot; his delicate wisp of film feels true to life with a quietly intense performance by Elín Hall as the girlfriend, Una.

Actually, Una is not the actual girlfriend. She goes to college with the man who dies, Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), and they’re in a punk band together. But Diddi has got a girlfriend in his hometown. For a few months Una and Diddi have been sleeping together. We see them at the start, in bed, sunlight artily catching the downy hairs on her neck and dust motes in air. Diddi is driving to tell his girlfriend it’s finished when he’s killed.

Zara Zerny’s lucid and compassionate study gathers moving, candid interviews with bereaved partners remembering their lost loves

The Marvel bromide about “What is grief, if not love persevering?” comes to mind watching this metaphysically charged Danish documentary in which nine senior citizens discuss their departed life partners. Director Zara Zerny works hard in defining the miracle of lifelong companionship, and the ineffable essence of that significant other which persists after death. So much so that, in one final, oddly encouraging section, some of the interviewees here suggest that their loved one still watches over them, Patrick Swayze-style.

Awkward beginnings and lovestruck thunderclaps: it’s all here. Finn-Erik recalls his first sighting of Kirsten as a 17-year-old with ballet-dancer grace. Ove was rescued from a hotel-room orgy with multiple Norwegians by strapping six-footer Bent, who tells him: “You’re coming home with me.” Then there’s Elly, the trauma of whose first violent marriage “vanished like the dew before the sun” when she met her new partner Aksel. In Zerny’s intimate interviewing environment, nothing is off the table: sex and infidelity, domestic bliss and disaffection, partnerships that outlast passion, the pain of outlasting your partner.

Shot almost entirely inside their car, Pike and Rhys play a splintering couple trying to save their terrified teenager

How encouraging that whatever state our film industry is considered to be in, it can still find space for a crackingly good script from a supersmart, disciplined first-timer who’s clearly been working on it for a while, planing down the edges and trimming away the fat through successive drafts. Hallow Road is the kind of property that often emerges after a spell on Hollywood’s “Black List” of much admired but as yet unproduced screenplays. It is a gripping, real-time suspense thriller with a twist of the macabre, a film about family guilt and the return of the repressed, written by National Film and Television School graduate William Gillies, a scary-movie enthusiast who here makes his feature script debut. British-Iranian film-maker Babak Anvari directs and Matthew Rhys and Rosamund Pike give forthright, excellent performances as the two leads.

Rhys plays Frank, a stressed executive married to Mads (Pike), a paramedic. They have one child, Alice, a troubled and vulnerable student played by Megan McDonnell who only appears in the film as a terrified voice on the end of the phone – that being a jarring contrast to her perky leave-a-message voice which her anguished parents keep reaching. Her smiling face which comes up on their phone is also, we can assume, a jarring contrast to her actual face.

Lily Collias is outstanding as 17-year-old Sam, who goes hiking with her dad and his best buddy in India Donaldson’s feature debut

Road movie and coming-of-age are accepted genres; maybe hiking-through-the-forest deserves equal status. It’s a distinctive US indie type, coloured by the sun-dappled green foliage, flavoured by the unemphatic presence of both beauty and danger. And heading for … what? An escalating series of scary moments, or just a low-key crescendo of epiphanies or emotional confrontations? Middle-class New Yorkers can journey through the wilderness in the movies but, unlike in John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance, they may encounter only the inner hillbillies of their own anxiety and discontent.

This excellent film from first-time director India Donaldson is a smart, sympathetic and terrifically acted drama about 17-year-old Sam – an outstanding performance from Lily Collias – who agrees to go on a hiking trip in the Catskill mountains with her gloomy divorced dad Chris (played by James Le Gros) and his buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy), a failed actor who shares his friend’s marital status (divorced), his portly body type, his receding hairline and his habit of exhaustedly cracking wise about the awful way their lives appear to have worked out.

The Oscar-winning actor will bring The World of Tomorrow to the Shed in New York later this year

Tom Hanks is set to co-write and appear in an off-Broadway play.

The Oscar winner will bring The World of Tomorrow to the Shed’s Griffin Theatre in New York in October through December.

Speaking during his first visit to Cannes in 22 years, Panahi who has previously been imprisoned in Iran said he wasn’t doing ‘anything heroic’

Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, who has previously been arrested and jailed and whose films have been banned in Iran on multiple occasions, has said “even my closest friends had given up hope that I would ever make films again”.

Panahi was speaking at a press conference before the premiere of his new film A Simple Accident at the Cannes film festival, his first visit in 22 years since bringing Crimson Gold to Cannes in 2003. Panahi was released from jail in Iran in 2023, having been detained in 2022 after attempting to support fellow film-maker Mohammad Rasoulof and subsequently going on hunger strike.

To raise money for lymphoedema research, the actor sat before an audience for artist Frances Segelman, who admired her youthful, ‘pixie-like’ face while rendering it in clay

It began as a blob: a 12kg lump of clay the size of a watermelon. Three hours later, it had become Judi Dench’s head, 50% larger than usual, twinkle-eyed even in terracotta.

At Claridge’s hotel in London on Monday evening, Frances Segelman hosted her latest ticking-clock sculpt: paying guests watch as she kneads a celebrity bust on stage, the subject sitting quietly beside her. In the past, Segelman has done Simon Rattle, Joan Collins, Joanna Lumley, Boris Johnson, Mr Motivator and major-league royals, almost always for charity.

Director says his fifth movie with the actor will probably be their last project together as Washington ‘has been talking about retirement’

The collaboration between Spike Lee and Denzel Washington has spanned four decades and tackled many aspects of African American life. But Lee feels their latest venture, the kidnap drama Highest 2 Lowest, will probably be the duo’s swansong.

“This is the fifth one we’ve done together,” Lee said after the picture’s premiere at the Cannes film festival. “It has been a blessing, this body of work between us, doing films that people love. And I think this is it. He’s been talking about retirement. But five films together: that’s good, they stand up.”

As The Final Reckoning hits cinemas, Guardian writers pick their favourites of the action-packed series

Mission: Impossible’s slick and sensuous surface bears no trace of the drama behind the scenes making it. During production, the screenwriters of Jurassic Park (David Koepp) and Chinatown (Robert Towne) sent in duelling script pages for director Brian De Palma and producer Tom Cruise to wrestle over. The magnificent outcome is an intense tango between the modern blockbuster and a classic film noir, circling each other warily, and beautifully, like no Mission: Impossible that would follow. De Palma’s original is a sexy wrong-man thriller, a Hitchcockian affair that comes disguised as an action-heavy corporate product (or maybe the mask is worn the other way around?). In it, Cruise’s coiled IMF agent, framed for the murder of his entire team and surrounded by slippery allies, is constantly trying to play it cool through the plot’s knotty parlor games, all while feeling the noose tightening around him. If Cruise’s career up to this point was all about often leaving his relaxed boyish middle-American charm on the surface, Mission: Impossible pushed him to try on layers – not just the latex ones – while also pulling off those incredible high-wire stunts, which would only escalate but never improve on the hair-raising tension the first time out. Radheyan Simonpillai

As Spike Lee’s neo-noir crime thriller Highest 2 Lowest debuts at Cannes film festival, we index the most ravishing Hollywood redos of all time

Jeff (Kiefer Sutherland) obsesses over the fate of his missing girlfriend in George Sluizer’s American remake of his own 1988 Franco-Dutch psychochiller. Is it as devastating as the original? Absolutely not! But Jeff Bridges has never been creepier, and at least the dumb Hollywood ending won’t give you nightmares.

One day I set myself the project of watching all of his movies, and finished about three months later. There was one film I really hated – and I wish he’d do more romcoms

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When I was growing up, I always told my parents, “Don’t expect me to become a doctor.” But in high school I really liked the TV show House and I really liked solving problems. So I never knew what else I wanted to become except for a doctor. I’ve been a practising GP for years now.

This means that, for a lot of my life, I’ve been science-focused. And I wasn’t always a film watcher. I only really started watching movies seriously when I was living in the Gold Coast and studying for my fellowship exams during Covid.

As the wrestler turned action hero turns 53, we count down his best movies – from Baywatch to Jumanji to that time he played the Tooth Fairy

Dwayne Johnson is about to violently switch gears. His next films include a Benny Safdie drama about an MMA fighter battling addiction and a true-crime drama produced by Martin Scorsese. The reason for this abrupt handbrake turn towards grownup film-making seems to be Red One; a duff Christmas action film. During its production, tales of Johnson’s backstage behaviour leaked out: the star was said to frequently be late, and would habitually hand his assistant bottles of urine rather than walk to the toilet. It was the biggest knock to The Rock since his career began. But onwards and upwards.

Jonathan Pryce was humorous, O’Toole capricious, Liv Ullman secretly female and Jude Law memorably Speedo-clad – onscreen pontiffs have come in all forms

Everything about the papacy is cinematic – especially picking a new one, as shown in the wildly popular movie Conclave, with Ralph Fiennes as an unwilling contender for the top job. There is the mystery, the ritual, the vestments; the spectacle of a lone, fragile human being poised over an abyss of history and good and evil; the elevation of one flawed man to a position of supreme authority, an exaltation whose parallel to the crucifixion is sensed but not acknowledged.

Discussing the onscreen representation of the pope in Conclave would risk the blasphemy of spoilerism but there have been many popes on screen, some cheekily fictional, many factual. Many a heavyweight British thesp has turned in a gamey cameo as some hooded-eyed Renaissance pontiff. Peter O’Toole was the lizardly and capricious Paul III in TV’s The Tudors (2007), presiding over a simperingly submissive 16th-century court of cardinals. Jeremy Irons was a small-screen Alexander VI in The Borgias (2011), a family member whose face radiated sensual refinement and hauteur.

Ryan Coogler’s ambitious box office hit combines genres to come up with something wholly original and fascinatingly complex

• This article contains spoilers for Sinners

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners just notched the biggest opening weekend for an original movie since the start of the pandemic, which means the Michael B Jordan-starring, period-set vampire movie will be seen and talked about for weeks (and more) to come. Here are some absolutely spoiler-packed discussion points (seriously, multiple endings are spoiled!) for the film’s variety of layers, genres and readings.

Starring Peter Weller as a gunslinging brain surgeon alongside Jeff Goldblum and John Lithgow, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a weird time

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There are several surefire ways to reveal someone’s character. Do they like pineapple on pizza? Do they think it’s acceptable to talk in the cinema? And finally, how do they feel about the 1984 cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension?

This misshapen, esoteric and utterly magical science-fiction romp made less of a splash on release than it should have, but since then it has become a kind of celluloid speakeasy; a real “if you know, you know” kind of movie. It all revolves around one man: Buckaroo Banzai, played by Peter Weller.

Some will argue the actor’s legacy of landmark film roles should not be tainted by his conviction for sexual assault. But it will

It seems strangely appropriate that 76-year-old French movie star Gérard Depardieu was found guilty of sexual assault and given an 18-month suspended prison sentence on the eve of the 78th edition of the Cannes film festival. Both Cannes and Depardieu, born in the 40s, belong to an old world, but it seems only one of them has managed to adapt to the times we live in, especially since the #MeToo movement.

For anyone who followed the trial closely, it was never in doubt that justice would prevail and that a French monument was about to fall. Once the accusers, two female technicians who worked as set-dresser and assistant director on the film Les Volets Verts in 2021, had pressed charges and the facts been exposed in court, there was little doubt as to the dignity of the victims and the veracity of the sexual assaults. But what was particularly striking was how Depardieu behaved throughout the trial. His attitude was an aggravating factor for the public but also the court. Unrepentant, uncomprehending, lamenting that he didn’t understand this new world, Depardieu pretended to be physically frailer than he was, and lacked gravitas.

From put-upon backroom schlubs to everyone-knows romances, the franchise reflects modern work culture, especially the collective banter

With Tom Cruise’s reckoning upgraded to “final” in the imminent instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, it seems a strong probability that the curtain is about to fall on cinema’s leading daredevil. Unless his Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt expires mid-battle like 007 in No Time to Die, it seems likely the character will be gracefully retired. Cruise, now 62, can’t reasonably be expected to suction-cup himself to landmark architecture for much longer. Which begs the question of his IMF colleagues: what to buy the departing espionage hotshot? There’s always the trusty carriage clock (fitted with disarmable neutron bomb, just to keep his skills ticking over).

The office comparison isn’t just fanciful. Along with envelope-pushing stunts and concierge-class glamour, part of the reason for the Mission: Impossible franchise’s resurgence over the last 15 years is something far more relatable: how it reflects modern office dynamics. Compared with lone wolves Bond and Bourne, the series was always more of a team endeavour, rooted in the collective ethos of the 60s TV series. Since 2011’s fourth film Ghost Protocol, Hunt’s collaborators have stabilised into a dependable unit: the stalwart Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) present since the original 1996 reboot, wisecracking techie Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), rogue MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and, to a lesser extent, Jeremy Renner’s analyst/agent.

The retail chain that filed for bankruptcy in 2017 believes a film starring mass produced kids’ merch will be a good way to refresh its brand relevance. Let’s all blame Barbie …

Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ show The Studio has a compelling character at the centre; a studio executive who loves cinema but is forced to churn out endless soulless dreck based on increasingly miserable IP. In real life, however, it would be silly to assume that someone would be creatively barren enough to make a film based on Kool-Aid. And this is because in real life people are creatively barren enough to make a film about Toys R Us.

Variety has reported that a live-action Toys R Us movie is in the works, made by Toys R Us Studios which is apparently a real thing that exists in the world. The movie is said to be a live-action film, along the lines of Night at the Museum and Big, which “aims to capture that childhood wonder in a modern, fast-paced adventure that taps into the Toys R Us brand’s relevance across its more than 70 years in the toy industry.” And quite frankly this couldn’t have come soon enough, because if my children have been crying out for anything, it’s a film about the brand relevance of a shop.

Ryan Coogler’s wildly ambitious period vampire movie is set around the great migration and uses supernatural and real-life horrors to smartly make its point

• Sinners – discuss with spoilers

When it comes to centering the Black experience on film, director Ryan Coogler has carved a fruitful and unprecedented niche. Fruitvale Station reconstructs the final hours in the life of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Oakland man killed by a transit cop on New Year’s Day. The Creed franchise tarries in the space between Black athletic genius and fatherlessness. The Black Panther franchise meditates on the relationship between Black Africans and the global diaspora. Now comes Sinners, a Jim Crow period piece that frames the Black experience in America as a horror show – complete with real scars.

The film, which made its theatrical debut over the weekend, follows Sammie – a young guitar hero (played by newcomer Miles Caton) itching to break away from his preacher father and the family church to play the blues for the unsaved masses. He gets his big break when his twin cousins (both played by Michael B Jordan) open a juke joint in their Clarksdale, Mississippi, home town with the ill-gotten gains they acquired during their stint working for Al Capone’s organized crime syndicate in Chicago. The pop-up grand opening, a major attraction for Clarksdale’s hard-working community of sharecroppers, offers them a hard-earned night-time catharsis until a trio of bloodthirsty vampires appears. That they also happen to be white is no accident.

She hid in the toilets during the Trainspotting shoot – yet became a screen sensation. As the star plays a police therapist in new Netflix thriller Dept Q, she explains why today’s young female actors leave her in awe

One of the good things about playing a therapist, says Kelly Macdonald with a laugh, is that you get to sit down a lot. There’s a fun scene in the new Netflix thriller Dept. Q in which her character, Dr Rachel Irving, weary of her client DCI Carl Morck, plants herself down behind her desk to eat her packed lunch in front of him. Morck may be the kind of troubled detective we’re used to seeing in police dramas, but Irving isn’t a typical therapist. She’s blunt, antagonistic even. It’s a “shitty” job working with police officers, she tells him. Another time she describes him as “doolally”, which in my experience is not something a typical therapist would say; Macdonald, who has had therapy, “but not regularly”, may agree.

In the show – adapted from novels by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen and brought to the screen by Scott Frank, who was also behind the Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit – Morck is made to see Irving after he survives a shooting. Brilliant but sidelined, Morck is tasked with reviewing cold cases, and moved to a shabby basement office that becomes known as Department Q. The first case for his small crew of misfit detectives is the disappearance of a lawyer four years earlier, who everyone thinks is probably dead. The truth, it soon emerges, is absolutely terrifying.

He’s been jailed, gone on hunger strike and been forced to sell his house for bail. In his first newspaper interview for 15 years, the great director explains why every film is worth the consequences

In February 2023 Jafar Panahi walked free from Iran’s Evin prison after nearly seven months behind bars. Friends and supporters had gathered to greet him, but the moment of release felt bittersweet and he struggled to adjust back to civilian life afterwards. In the weeks that followed he developed a habit. He’d drive his car back and forth on the road that paralleled the high prison walls, pining for those who were still inside. “These people had become my people,” he says. “I thought, ‘How could I go and leave them behind?’”

Panahi makes humane, heartfelt pictures about life in Iran. He refers to these as “social films”, although this definition cuts no ice with the Iranian government, which has ruled them to be “propaganda against the system” and therefore hazardous, offensive material. He has to date been imprisoned twice, undergone a hunger strike and sold his house to make bail. Panahi is officially banned from making movies, although he continues to make them all the same. This is his first press interview in more than 15 years. Technically, he’s not allowed to do this either.

The star had just finished shooting Poison, about parents torn apart by grief, when his own son died. He remembers their last days together – and what truths he learned from the darkly moving film

Tim Roth reclines in his chair and exudes an unexpected lightness, as if the Atlantic Ocean is casting a summer spray over this corner of Galway. He is upbeat about life, film and even acting, which he once called a nightmare profession he would not recommend to anyone.

“Oh, did I say that?” he asks, surprised. “I don’t feel that way at all, actually. I must have been having a bad one, but that’s OK.” He shrugs and smiles. “I actually love it more and more at the moment.”

Abel Tesfaye is arguably the world’s biggest pop star – so why is he thinking of wrapping up the Weeknd? As he releases soul-baring film Hurry Up Tomorrow, he charts his path through drugs, heartbreak and abandonment

Walking out to perform in front of 80,000 people and finding that your voice has gone: it’s the type of stress dream you have the night before a big work presentation. But for Abel Tesfaye, AKA the Weeknd, it happened for real at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium in 2022. “I ran backstage to find my vocal coach: I can’t sing, it’s not coming out,” he says. “And what I found out later on is that I was having a panic attack. It wasn’t a physical injury. It was more up here” – he gestures to his head – “than it was here” – his throat.

The concert, which had to be called off and rescheduled, was the final night of a US stadium tour happening while Tesfaye was also wrapping up his painfully gestated – and eventually widely lampooned – TV series The Idol, which he starred in, co-wrote and co-produced. As production overran, he fitted in shoots around his tour; his own home was the main filming location. He began experiencing sleep paralysis.

As the actor receives an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes film festival, he talks about why he couldn’t look at himself if he didn’t speak out about the US president and politics

On the opening night of the Cannes film festival, Robert De Niro takes the stage to accept an honorary Palme d’Or. He embraces Leonardo DiCaprio, turns to the mic and lets fly: celebrating the event as a haven for art, democratic, inclusive and therefore a threat to autocrats and fascists. His speech is fiery and combative, but the adoring response leaves him shaken: he has to blink and regroup. At one point, I think, he might have even welled up. “Yeah, I got sentimental,” he admits the next morning. “How could I not be?”

We’re upstairs at the Cannes Palais des Festivals, with the windows thrown open and sunlight on the walls. The hosts rush to provide him with a hot cup of coffee and then – when he leaves that untouched – swoop back to furnish him with another. His voice is still hoarse from the night before and risks being drowned out by the cheering masses outside. Tom Cruise, it transpires, has just appeared on the terrace. “Different type of actor,” De Niro says ruefully. “Mission: Impossible, that’s a franchise. But I understand that. I’ve done franchises myself.”

He is a transfixing screen presence – but he lives for the raw thrill of the stage. As he takes over the Venice theatre biennale, the star lets us know what to expect: cut-up plays and a Pinocchio unlike any other

Sitting in his house in Rome, an overstuffed bookcase and a distressed wooden door behind him, Willem Dafoe scrunches his hair as though kneading the thoughts in his head. The 69-year-old, Wisconsin-born actor could pass today for any genial, bristle-moustached handyman in checked shirt and horn-rimmed specs. (Perhaps he even built the bookcase and distressed the door himself.) But it’s that hand that is the giveaway: it keeps scrunching as he talks until the hair is standing in jagged forks. As a visualisation of what is happening in his brain, it is second to none.

We are speaking in April on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth (and death), which feels apt given that it is Dafoe’s two-year appointment as artistic director of the international theatre festival at the Venice Biennale that has occasioned our video call today. He looks sheepish when I point out the significance of the date, then reverts to his usual wolfish expression. “Ah, Shakespeare doesn’t care,” he says with a wave of the hand. Dafoe has never had much of a relationship with those plays. “There’s a lot of pointing and indicating when people perform them. A lot of leading the audience. Those are things I don’t think are very vital. But it’s such beautiful writing, and I’ve become interested in doing Shakespeare in my dotage.” Could there be a Lear on the horizon? “Why not?” he says with a goofy wobble of the head.

As her tape-recorder adventures are brought to the screen by Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw, the 90-year-old remembers how she got the NY art crowd – from Peter Hujar to Chuck Close – talking about drugs, orgies and psychoanalysis

There is a series by Peter Hujar in which the photographer shot groups of friends, collaborators, lovers and other members of the New York avant garde, from the 1960s to 80s. In one image – including the artists Paul Thek and Eva Hesse – the writer Linda Rosenkrantz stands near the centre. “That was mostly people that I had gotten together, some who became very well-known,” Rosenkrantz tells me by phone from California. “Five or six of us would go ice-skating or dancing on Friday nights.”

Rosenkrantz grew up in the Bronx in the 1930s. After university she moved to Manhattan to work in the publicity and editorial department of the Parke-Bernet auction house, becoming enmeshed in the city’s art scene. “I met Hujar in 1956. We hit it off immediately,” she says. Hujar and Rosenkrantz remained close until his death from Aids-related complications in 1987.

The film version of A Pale View of Hills, the Nobel-winner’s tale of loss, exile and a pregnant radioactive bride, is about to premiere at Cannes. The writer explains why this story is so personal to him

Kazuo Ishiguro still remembers where he was when he wrote A Pale View of Hills: hunched over the dining room table in a bedsit in Cardiff. He was in his mid-20s then; he is 70 now. “I had no idea that the book would be published, let alone that I had a career ahead of me as a writer,” he says. “[But] the story remains an important part of me, not only because it was the start of my novel-writing life, but because it helped settle my relationship with Japan.”

First published in 1982, A Pale View of Hills is a charged family story that connects England with Japan and the present with the past. Now along comes a film version to provide a new frame for the mystery, a fresh view of the hills. Scripted and directed by Kei Ishikawa, it is a splendidly elegant and deliberate affair; a trail of carefully laid breadcrumbs that link a mothballed home in early 80s suburbia with wounded, resilient postwar Nagasaki. Middle-aged Etsuko is long settled in the UK and haunted by the fate of her displaced eldest child. Her younger daughter, Niki, is a budding writer, borderline skint and keen to make a name for herself. Niki has a chunky tape-recorder and plenty of time on her hands. She says, “Mum, will you tell me about your lives before, in Japan?”

The Oscar-nominated actor talks about her new role playing equal pay advocate Lilly Ledbetter and why the Trump administration should be careful

Patricia Clarkson, who portrays late equal pay activist Lilly Ledbetter in a biopic released this week, has a wish.

The Oscar-nominated actor hopes her fellow American women collectively withhold sex from their partners – especially men in power – if the second Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives ever takes aim at the gains won by the subject of her new film.

Co-directors Alex Garland and former US Navy Seal Ray Mendoza recreate a 2006 battle with almost unbearable intensity – and a dazzling ensemble cast

It’s up there with the first 23 bruising minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Elem Klimov’s harrowing and relentless Come and See. This is film-making that doesn’t just show you the horrors of war; it forces you to taste the dust and the choking panic, smell the fear and the cordite and the tinny metallic tang of spilled blood. Warfare, by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, is the most forceful and unflinching depiction of combat since Edward Berger’s 2023 Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s also one of the boldest and most formally daring.

There are certain conventions at play in most war movies. Among them is the unwritten rule that however blisteringly hellish the depiction of combat, there’s a mitigating audience sop in the form of a flag-waving message about the nobility of the cause. Or, at the very least, some attempt at sentimental string-pulling to knit an emotional attachment to the characters. But Warfare, a forensic, close to real-time re-enactment of a 2006 battle fought during the Iraq war, rejects all that. Co-written and co-directed by Garland and former US Navy Seal Mendoza, the film’s radically stripped-back approach gives us next to no background on the characters, a platoon of Seals, or the operation, a surveillance mission in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Nor does it take a stance on any moral questions about the Iraq war. Instead, it focuses on evoking, with almost unbearably visceral intensity, the experiences of a group of highly trained professionals who have been hired to do a job. And they are having a really bad day at work.

Gia Coppola’s drama starring Pamela Anderson peers behind the glamour of ‘the fun capital of the world’, but sin city has long seduced film-makers from Scorsese and Soderbergh to Sean Baker and Baz Luhrmann

(There’s a reason why film-makers are routinely drawn to the glaring, garish lights of Las Vegas: in its spangliest strips, it feels more movie set than city, the kind of place it’s hard to imagine people living everyday lives 24/7. Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl – streaming on Mubi from 18 April – is quite rare in its focus on one such person: Shelly, a dancer in a long-running revue on the Vegas strip, now pushing 60 and at a crossroads when said revue announces its imminent closure. Short and light on plot, it’s a character study built on a poignant night-and-day contrast, as Shelly literally performs a glitzy Vegas dream that all looks a bit shabby by daylight in her modest bungalow in the desert suburbs. Pamela Anderson affectingly brings her own career baggage to the role of someone who takes her art more seriously than anyone takes her, in a film intent on stripping the city of some varnish.

It certainly gives Vegas showgirls a better name than, well, Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s tacky (and, despite the critical mauling it received in 1995, vastly entertaining) tale of a young dancer intent on working her way up a slippery pole – with all manner of exploitative svengalis and sharp-clawed rivals standing between her and her showgirl dream. If she saw Coppola’s film, she might not be so keen.

Far from 1978’s morally noble colossus, Gunn’s Man of Steel is a flawed being – but perhaps he can allow us to hope for a better world

In the 1960s, Marvel comics made its name by dragging superheroes down to street level. Peter Parker worried about his homework. The Fantastic Four bickered like flatmates. Even the Hulk, a walking nuclear tantrum, was really just a green and muscular guy having a bad day. Over at DC, though, the heroes remained clean, polished and largely unbothered – moral titans gazing down from above, solving problems without ever really having any of their own.

Superman was the prototype of that ideal: an all-powerful alien whose only weakness was a glowing space rock and an unshakable sense of duty. He wasn’t like us – he was better than us. And that was the point. When Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane first meets the man of steel in 1978’s Superman, she is almost impossibly awestruck by the presence of this walking, talking, flying god. Lois’s wide-eyed vulnerability is a stark contrast with the condescension she doles out to his alter ego, Clark Kent. The two sides of the Last Son of Krypton might be exactly the same person, but it’s virtually impossible for anyone to recognise them as such, because one radiates impossible power while the other can barely hold on to his briefcase.

Cinematographer and visual effects artist who shot the destruction of the Death Star in the first Star Wars film

The visual effects artist Bruce Logan, who has died aged 78 after a short illness, was barely out of his teens when he supplied the finishing touch to what is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time: 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The director, Stanley Kubrick, asked the greenhorn technician, then working under Kubrick’s VFX supremo Douglas Trumbull, to supervise the title sequence in which the sun rises above the Earth and moon, to the fanfares of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Cannes film festival
Foster plays a psychoanalyst who suspects her client may not have killed herself, and sets out to investigate with ex-husband Daniel Auteuil

Rebecca Zlotowski serves up a genial, preposterous psychological mystery caper: the tale of an American psychoanalyst in Paris, watchably played by Jodie Foster in elegant French, who suspects that a patient who reportedly committed suicide was actually murdered. Zlotowski is perhaps channelling Hitchcock or De Palma, or even late-period Woody Allen – or maybe Zlotowski has, like so many of us, fallen under the comedy spell of Only Murders in the Building on TV and fancied the idea of bringing its vibe to Paris and transforming the mood – slightly – into something more serious.

Foster is classy shrink Lilian Steiner, stunned at the news that her client Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira) has taken her own life. She is also furiously confronted by Paula’s grieving widower Simon (Mathieu Amalric), who believes she bears some responsibility for her death, having prescribed antidepressants which were apparently taken in overdose. But a tense visit from Paula’s daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) leads her to suspect foul play. Soon, she and her tolerant ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) are putting people under surveillance and generally staking them out; then someone breaks into Lilian’s private office and steals the minidiscs on which she records analysis sessions.