Stephen Spielberg’s The BFG, featuring Mark Rylance as the voice of the titular Big Friendly Giant, will screen out of competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
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Sean Penn will be competing for the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or award at this year’s (16) prestigious movie event. Fresh from his very controversial Rolling Stone article about Mexican drug dealer Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Sean Penn will be unveiling his new feature, The Last Face, starring Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem.
The official selection is a mix of big surprises and Cannes regulars, with veteran British director Ken Loach making the final cut despite rumours that his “I, Daniel Blake” might be left out.
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Besides Penns’ film, Danish horror movie “The Neon Demon” by Nicolas Winding Refn has also received much attention.
Woody Allen, who has never screened a film in competition, will open this year’s festival with new film Café Society, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart. By contrast, he hopes that repeating the Palme victor on closing night might bolster the slot’s profile and trigger more interest in it.
On the out of competition slate, there’s just one film from a woman, Jodie Foster’s “Money Monster”. He won the Best Director award in the 2009 Cannes for his movie Kinatay. Now his “Elle”, which sounds like a French “Death Wish” only with Isabelle Huppert (or, even more skeezily, Neil Jordan’s misjudged “The Brave One”, starring Jodie Foster), is set to make its splashy, French Riviera debut.
Other special, out of competition screenings including The Last Resort from Thanos Anastopoulos and Davide Del Degan; Hissein Habre, A Chadian Tragedy from director Mahamet-Saleh Haroun of Chad; the Cambodian film Exil from director Rithy Panh; The Last Days of Louis XIV from Albert Serra and Paul Vecchiali’s The Cancer. The film also stars Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose), Léa Seydoux (Spectre, The Grand Budapest Hotel), Vincent Cassel (Black Swan), Nathalie Baye (Laurence Anyways) and Gaspard Ulliel (Saint Laurent, Hannibal Rising).
The festival has previously been criticized for its limited offerings of films by female directors.
Adam Driver stars as the title character in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, depicting a week in the life of a bus driver named Paterson in Paterson, New Jersey. “Whores everywhere”, one of the characters in Irwin Shaw’s novel Evening In Byzantium says of the festival.
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Fremaux and his team watched 1,869 films before shortlisting 49, 20 of them included in the main competition, whose jury will be presided by Mad Max director George Miller.
