‘La Chimera’ Review: Josh O’Connor is a Grave Robber Seeking More Elusive Treasure in Alice Rohrwacher’s Enchanting New Film

EXCLUSIVE: Rebel Wilson has signed with Warner Music and will have her own highly personalized label: Rebellionaire. “Take the ‘b’ out of billionaire and replace it with an ‘r’ for Rebel,” she quipped.

Actor Jodie Comer halted today’s matinee of Broadway’s Prima Facie due to New York City’s bad, smokey air, telling audience members she was having difficulty breathing.

Dahmer – Monster may have been a dark series about a serial killer, but Michael Learned thinks she got the role as the cannibal’s grandmother by showing off her wry sense of humor.

Justin Bieber’s dad Jeremy has been slammed for sharing a homophobic meme during Pride Month.

Shannen Doherty recently shared the heartbreaking news that the stage 4 breast cancer she has been battling for the last few years has spread to her brain. In a somber Instagram post, the star revealed the emotional roller coaster she went through while being placed under a machine for radiation treatment.«My fear is obvious.

Jennifer Aniston is taking it easier these days.

Chrissy Metz is keeping hope alive for a This Is Us reunion movie!

It doesn’t sound like Tom Sandoval will be winning fans back over any time soon.

The Kardashians is now airing, and there are some strong feelings among the sisters.

Jodie Comer has been getting rave reviews for months for her performance in Prima Facie on Broadway.

Leonardo DiCaprio arrives at his hotel in London, England on Tuesday (June 6).

Niall Horan is opening up about his career.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Jack Lee, who co-fronted the influential L.A. band the Nerves in the late 1970s and saw his songs turn into major hits for Blondie and Paul Young, died May 26 in Santa Monica, Calif. at age 71. His death was revealed Wednesday in a press release, which revealed Lee died after battling colon cancer for three years. Although Lee had not had much public visibility in recent years, “he never gave up on his music,” his family said in a statement, “to the very end. His guitar, right by his side. He lived his songs. One by one they told the story of his life. Some dreams die. His never will.” His greatest success as a musician came with a pair of high-profile covers. Blondie recorded an extremely faithful cover of the Nerves’ “Hanging on the Telephone” in 1978 that remains one of the group’s most instantly identifiable signature songs to this day. (Blondie’s version went to No. 5 in the U.K., although, as an FM hit, it never charted in the U.S.) Paul Young found success in 1983 with “Come Back and Stay,” a song the Nerves wrote but never recorded; it first appeared on a Lee solo project a couple of years before Young had the hit. (The cover reached No. 4 in the U.K. and No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100.) Young recorded a total of three Lee songs for his Euro-chart-topping debut album that year.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer The first time Jesse Garcia (“Quinceañera,” “Narcos: Mexico”) learned about Richard Montañez — the former Frito-Lay executive who’s said that he invented the wildly successful Flamin’ Hot Cheetos brand when he was working as a janitor for the company — the actor immediately thought, “That would be an awesome movie.” Years later, Eva Longoria cast Garcia to play Montañez for her feature directing debut, “Flamin’ Hot,” which premieres June 9 on Hulu and Disney+. The film, produced by DeVon Franklin (“Breakthrough,” “Miracles From Heaven”), covers Richard’s life from his difficult childhood to his marriage to his high school sweetheart Judy (Annie Gonzalez) to his rise at Frito-Lay. For Garcia, it was an all-too-rare opportunity to depict the real-life story of a Latino family in a mainstream feature film.

The X Factor star Rebecca Ferguson has claimed that ITV allegedly "refused" her request to investigate allegations of mistreatment towards contestants on reality shows. In a series of tweets posted on her Twitter account this week, the singer (who was a runner-up on the ITV show back in 2010) alleged that she sent an email to the network in 2021 asking for a review into conduct and aftercare procedures for reality show contestants.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Amazon’s Prime Video greenlit a new documentary from Nascar Studios that will chronicle NASCAR’s special “Garage 56” entry at the 100th anniversary of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The documentary will premiere exclusively on Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide, and comes as streamers — not always able to spend the billions required for actual sports rights — see traction from offering in-depth documentary looks at various sports. Netflix has found success with a look inside Formula 1 Racing while Prime Video in January announced the launch of “The Ride,” an inside look at the Professional Bull Riders tour.

Jordan Moreau Jay Johnston, an actor on “Bob’s Burgers,” “Arrested Development” and more, was charged for participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S.

Thania Garcia Mathew Knowles and Emmy-nominated executive producer Tamra Simmons (“Surviving R. Kelly” and “Casey Anthony: Where The Truth Lies”) have joined forces to launch a new media company called Music World TV, Film & Media. Knowles will serve as CEO and Simmons as president, while executives Jasmine Murray and Krystal Rascoe join as head of development and business liaison (respectively). “I can’t wait to see what this next generation of women can accomplish,” said Knowles, whose long and storied career as a music manager has included developing acts like Destiny’s Child and daughters Solange and Beyoncé. “I’m excited for this new journey. I’ve always believed in giving back and what greater gift can you give than the gift of knowledge.”

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Ruth Carter doesn’t need the prefix “costume designer” in front of her name; she is a household name. Carter made Oscar history when she became the first Black woman ever to win two Oscars,thanks to her work on the “Black Panther” films. With credits that include “Selma,” “Malcolm X,” “Coming 2 America” and being Spike Lee’s go-to, Carter has stories to tell.

Jennifer Aniston is 54 years old and still looks just as beautiful as when she first rose to international fame filming Friends in the ‘90s. Even when she was in her forties a decade ago, the TV and film star had no problems showing off her fit body performing a strip tease in We’re the Millers or seducing Charlie Day’s character in nothing but a lab coat and underwear in Horrible Bosses. In order to maintain in great shape, Aniston has been consistently working out, but admits the downside to doing too much cardio is experiencing burnout and how it “broke [her] body.

Academy Gold Rising career development program. Gold Rising teams up with several studios and organizations to aid students and young professionals from underrepresented communities develop their careers in the film industry. This year’s slate includes 90 students and 21 film and entertainment companies. The eight-week program kicked off on Wednesday with a two-day orientation process, consisting of a presentation on the Academy Film Archive and tours of the Margaret Herrick Library and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.  The Gold Rising program will commence with a graduation ceremony on August 10. After completion of the program, participants will be matched up with an Academy member for an eight-month mentorship experience. 

A 'trail of blood' was left outside a Manchester city centre bar after a 'man with a gun' fled a fight which saw someone stabbed in the leg, according to the police. The Lawn Club in Spinningfields has been closed since the incident on Sunday night (June 4) and its licence has now been temporarily suspended.

British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe will get his hands on "the one thing he doesn't have" if his proposed Manchester United takeover goes through.

Guests can now book an overnight stay in a quirky and historic lodge nestled in Manchester's Heaton Park.

Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera” flits between languages (English, Italian, French, German) as fluidly as it does mediums (35mm, Super16mm, and 16mm cinematography) and styles (jerkily sped up Chaplin-esque scenes, clinical CCTV footage, audacious 180-degree camera flips). Rohrwacher uses this mosaic of disparate approaches to hone in on other kinds of incongruous and unpredictable interplay: modern Italy and its ancient past, heartbreak and new love, and the real world and its spiritual mirror realm.

Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera absolutely charmed the Cannes Film Festival audience at its world premiere in competition this afternoon, receiving a 9-minute standing ovation inside the Palais’ Lumière theater. For those keeping score, that ties for the longest of this year’s event with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon which played out of competition.

A Chimera is something one tries to achieve but alas, never manages to find. It is the heart and soul of a quest in life, in different ways, for the cast of characters in writer/director Alice Rohrwacher’s beautiful new film La Chimera premiering today as one of the last entries in competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. It also happens to be one of the best.

In less than 10 years, Alice Rohrwacher has carved out a formidable reputation for herself, notably by gatecrashing the boys’ club that is traditionally the Cannes competition, and the fact that she did so in 2014 with only her second film, The Wonders, is further proof of a distinctive talent. One competition slot doesn’t guarantee another, yet Rohrwacher was back in 2018 with the follow-up, Happy as Lazzaro. Both films won prizes — Grand Prix and Best Screenplay, respectively — which means that expectations are high for the Oscar-nominated 41-year-old Italian, whose new film, La chimera, makes it three in a row.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Before you ask, yes, Lou Reed’s rock standard “Perfect Day” does indeed make an appearance in Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days”: on the protagonist’s stereo as suitably ideal sunlight pours into his small, neat Tokyo apartment, before swarming the soundtrack as we head out into the city on a calm weekend afternoon. If that sounds a little obvious, basic even, said protagonist Hirayama — a mellow, soft-spoken toilet cleaner beautifully played by Kōji Yakusho — would probably agree with a shrug. He’s into simple pleasures, not deep cuts. His solitary life is built around the things that make him happy and the work that keeps him solvent. He’s not inclined to wonder what other people make of it. Wenders’ film, in turn, is sincere and unassuming, and owns its sentimentality with good humor.

Guy Lodge Film Critic All of life, including death, is in the lengthy, unbroken shot that opens Thien An Pham’s bewitching debut feature “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” We begin on the sidelines of a local soccer match in Saigon’s city center, observing the play from a cool distance before following a shuffling mascot, dressed in a wolf suit, to the adjoining bar. There, crowds watch a 2018 World Cup fixture while a group of young men, turned from the TV, drink and discuss matters of faith, existence and ennui. Thien (Le Phong Vu) is quiet and morose, only half-invested in a conversation already beset with distractions: the sales pitch of a bubbly beer rep, the burst of a sudden summer thunderstorm, a metallic screech and grim thump as the camera again drifts serenely over to reveal the aftermath of a fatal motorcycle crash. In the ensuing rhubarb of bystander concern, Thien stays put.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s 11 years since Anurag Kashyap’s electrifying five-hour crime opus “Gangs of Wasseypur” jolted Cannes audiences, triggering renewed global interest in Indian genre cinema and vaulting Kashyap to auteur status with several subsequent films granted A-list festival premiere status — even if none quite matched his breakout feature for ambition or execution. Following a run of lower-profile potboilers in a range of genres that saw him through the pandemic era, Kashyap’s elaborately conceived, brashly violent policier “Kennedy” aims to return him to the art-pulp elite, starting with an obliging premiere slot in Cannes’ Midnight section. The result is a declarative but somewhat disappointing return to underworld territory. Enlivened by some propulsive action, a hip-hop-inflected song score and a combative streak of anti-institutional protest — in a COVID-era context that proves one of the script’s more interesting specifics — “Kennedy” is ultimately weighed down by hit-or-miss performances and convoluted plotting that isn’t always ahead of its own twists. Internationally, the film is likely too lurid for crossover arthouse interest, though it would be a good fit for major streaming platforms.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the rose-gray light of dawn, Juliette Binoche strides through a verdant kitchen garden, wearing a straw hat as wide and undulating as an ocean wave. She plucks a majestically large, gnarled celeriac from the earth and sniffs it deeply and fondly, as if inhaling mythical ambrosia, and takes it back to the house. This is how Tràn Anh Hùng’s “The Pot au Feu” opens, which is to say on a note of sensory reverence and a hint of kitsch, in knowing thrall to one of the less pretty vegetables in nature’s cornucopia. There are people — this critic included — who will watch this scene and immediately sense with a hungry tingle that the film to come has been made expressly for their palate, and there is everyone else. “The Pot au Feu” is not for everyone else, and that’s just fine.

Guy Lodge Film Critic On the mean streets of Casablanca dartingly navigated in “Hounds,” all life is shown to be casually disposable; an actual human body, however, is another matter. Taking place over one sleepless night of mounting misfortune in the Moroccan metropolis, writer-director Kamal Lazraq’s first feature is a trim, unsparing crime tale that pits social desperation against a nagging spiritual conscience. Its gig-economy gangsters may follow almost any grisly orders for a quick buck, but are equally bound to Muslim creeds and customs, glumly shrugging off any disparity between these two authorities. Following an impoverished father-son duo as an ostensibly rote criminal errand goes bloodily awry, the film is briskly told and humidly atmospheric, though a little tonal variation wouldn’t have gone amiss amid an overriding air of hardscrabble, stomach-knotted discomfort. As its central crisis deepens and darkens, Lazraq’s script keeps teasing a gear-shift into mordant farce to which it never quite commits, leaving both the characters and the drama a bit stymied. Still, this is a notably punchy debut, both visceral and confidently cavalier in its depiction of everyday underworld brutality, with a sharp, streetlit sense of place — and just enough genre-film vigor to hook distributor interest after its Un Certain Regard premiere at Cannes.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Alice Rohrwacher is in the Cannes competition for the third time with “La Chimera,” in which “The Crown” star Josh O’Connor plays a young British archeologist named Arthur who gets involved in an international network of stolen Etruscan artifacts during the 1980s. For Rohrwacher, the film is connected to growing up in Umbria, once the center of the Etruscan civilization. But it’s also the final piece of a triptych on a territory that she started with her previous Cannes entries: “The Wonders” and “Happy as Lazzaro.” Three works that, as she has put it, pose a central question: “What to do with the past?”  

Guy Lodge Film Critic Anyone seeking to describe “How to Have Sex” for potential American viewers is liable to land on the term “spring break” in the process: It is, after all, a story about hard-partying teenagers heading to a sunny coastal resort for several nights of boozy, horny, wholly unsupervised antics. Yet the teens here are British, the destination one of those grisly Mediterranean club hubs geared entirely toward British tourists, and the partying so distinctly British in its aims and etiquette that the translation hardly applies. The vacation presented here is as much like a quintessential spring break as Molly Manning Walker’s fresh, head-turning debut debut feature is like Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” — superficially similar in its pile-driving social chaos and eye-searing fluorescent visuals, but with a very different, damaged heart beating underneath it all.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The new boy doesn’t get a name, and he doesn’t give one. Arriving at an isolated orphanage in rural South Australia in the early 1940s, he’s taken in with brisk kindness by the two nuns who oversee the place, but privileges like names are for children a little further along in their understanding and acceptance of this establishment’s firm Christian principles: Until he’s ready for baptism, the shirtless, mostly wordless Aboriginal newcomer will be acknowledged but not identified. It’s a limbo state that evocatively represents the tension between Australia’s Indigenous population and even the most notionally inclusive of their colonizers; in Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable “The New Boy,” spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.