1. Cate Blanchett strikes back
Cate Blanchett says Hollywood hit the brakes on #MeToo with undue haste. Speaking during a forensic public interview at Cannes film festival, the Australian star claimed the movement “got killed very quickly”, adding that film sets are still overwhelmingly male nearly a decade later. Blanchett said she still walks on to productions where there are “10 women and 75 men”, remarking that the same old male-driven environment gets “boring for everybody”. The double Oscar winner, long outspoken about gender equality, also revealed that she’s teaming up with the director Brady Corbet for a new “X-rated” 1970s-set film alongside Selena Gomez and Michael Fassbender. The film will span 150 years.
2. Jordan Firstman kisses
Cannes film festival: US director and screenwriter Jordan Firstman and Mexican actor Diego Calva. Photograph: Valery Hache/Getty Images
The outlandishly queer and funny provocateur Jordan Firstman has, inevitably, made an outlandishly queer and funny autobiographical film. Fresh from his recent scathing takedown of Heated Rivalry (that’s “not how gay people f**k”), he writes, directs and stars in Club Kid, the hottest ticket of the festival’s opening days. Firstman shared a playful kiss with his costar Diego Calva during the new film’s photocall, making headlines (and TikToks) around the world. After a reportedly testy bidding war, A24 acquired Club Kid for $17 million.
3. Halsey jets in
Cannes film festival: Halsey at the screening of Her Private Hell. Photograph: Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Halsey, the alt-pop superheroine, has doubled down on her Helen of Troy-styled entrance at last year’s Venice film festival. Arriving with her fiance, Avan Jogia, Halsey took Cannes by storm with a series of co-ordinated outfits and a big announcement. The planet’s prettiest couple are making a psychosexual horror, starring Halsey as a Montreal DJ. Executive producer Lilly Wachowski is comparing Jogia’s script to “the films I grew up on: David Cronenberg, Alex Cox, Tony Scott, John Carpenter”.
4. Adam Driver dodges
Cannes film festival: Adam Driver, who stars in Paper Tiger. Photograph: Valery Hache/Getty Images
Adam Driver might have played Kylo Ren in Star Wars, but the press conference for James Gray’s excellent thriller Paper Tiger suggests he might have fared better as one of the boring politicians in The Phantom Menace. He responded to Lena Dunham’s explosive allegations in Famesick, her memoir, the most Adam Driver way possible: with real-life emotional unavailability. Asked about claims involving screaming, chair-throwing and trailer-wall punching, Driver calmly joked that he was “saving” his side for his own memoir. There are no plans for an Adam Driver memoir.
5. Gillian Anderson’s curls
Cannes film festival: Gillian Anderson at the La Vie D’Une Femme screening. Photograph: Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Prepare for a wave of perms not witnessed since Liverpool FC’s 1978 line-up. For decades the kink-haired community have been promised that their time will come. Deliverance has arrived in the cascading form of Gillian Anderson’s disco curls. The 1990s poster girl for ceramic straightening irons walked – or rather bounced – to the photocall for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s delirious metahorror, generating a flurry of fashion headlines.
6. John Travolta cries
Cannes film festival: John Travolta is going all out to fit in with the locals. Photograph: Aurore Marechal/Getty Images
John Travolta has officially entered his “mysterious French art teacher” era, and Cannes seems delighted. Sporting first a white beret, then a black one, he’s going all out to fit in with the locals. But it was his tears that really stole the spotlight. After receiving an honorary Palme d’Or at the premiere of his family film, Propeller One-Way Night Coach, the Hollywood star appeared genuinely overwhelmed, telling the crowd: “This is the last thing I expected.” Fans on social media were instantly heartstruck. Seeing Grease’s Danny Zuko cry in France is too much.
7. Michael Fassbender returns
Cannes film festival: Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. Photograph: Olivier Chassignole/Getty Images
After roles in Kneecap and Black Bag, Na Hong-jin’s Hope confirms Michael Fassbender’s return to acting as a day job. The former Le Mans racer walked the red carpet with his wife and Hope costar, Alicia Vikander, on Sunday night. It’s their first project together, albeit playing gigantic CGI alien monsters in the (reportedly) most expensive Korean movie ever made. It’s the Kerry actor’s first science-fiction role since bowing out of the X-Men franchise, in 2017. Speaking at the press conference, Fassbender attributed the development to marital duty: “Alicia told me to do it.”
[ Cannes First Look review: Hope – Na Hong-jin’s sci-fi horror has an astonishing opening hourOpens in new window ]
8. Cantona Cantonas
Cannes film festival: Eric Cantona and David Tryhorn. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Cantona, the much-admired new documentary portrait of the former Manchester United star, predictably opens with quotes from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and soon after cuts to Eric Cantona speaking to camera in a church. Its British directors, David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas, get great insights into the odd bromance between King Eric and Alex Ferguson. But Cantona’s duality is the real star, as he lunges from Baudelaire’s Spleen et Idéal (“I am the wound and the knife”) to the infamous karate kick at Selhurst Park: “I should have kicked him even harder,” he says of the crowd member he aimed at, “because he deserved it.”
9. David Lean: Great film-maker, rubbish husband
Barnaby Thompson has an absorbing new documentary in Cannes. Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean provides a thrilling primer into the life and work of the director of The Bridge on the River Kwai and Great Expectations. Celine Song, Denis Villeneuve and Francis Ford Coppolla are among the starry cast rightly paying tribute. But if you thought that the films were grandiose, sit tight for the sheer scale of Lean’s disastrous home life. His co-writer and producer, Norman Spencer, estimated that Lean “had almost 1,000 women”. He was married six times, had one son and two grandchildren, and appears to have cut ties with them all. “Anything that is finished is finished,” he wrote, justifying his abandonment of his first family. One letter, dismissing his longest-serving mistress – a stint coinciding with his longest and unhappiest marriage, to Leila Matkar – would make the toughest HR executive blush. “There must be a better way to treat you than this letter.” Apparently he couldn’t think of any. As a film-maker? Unequalled. As a romantic prospect? More red flags than a May Day parade.