• Lukas Dhont’s WWI queer romance Coward received a 13-minute standing ovation at its Cannes world premiere
• The film was inspired by a real photograph of a Belgian soldier cross-dressed behind the frontlines during WWI
• Newcomer Emmanuel Macchia stars alongside Valentin Campagne in the two-hander romance
• MUBI has acquired the film for the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand
• Critical reception has been divided, ranging from comparisons to Casablanca to charges of emotional artificiality

When the lights came up on Coward at the Grand Théâtre Lumière Thursday night, the Cannes audience didn’t move. For 13 minutes, they stood and applauded — one of the biggest crowd responses to any film in this year’s competition. Director Lukas Dhont, visibly moved, told the room that everyone should share “love, not war.”

It’s a line that cuts right to the heart of what Coward is. Set at the height of the First World War, the film follows Pierre, a young Belgian farmer’s son newly arrived at the front, and Francis, the flamboyant ringleader of a makeshift theatre troupe performing for soldiers behind the trenches. As the violence rages on, the two men find each other — and the film quietly, insistently asks what it actually means to be brave.

The answer Dhont arrives at is not what the war genre has traditionally offered.

A Photograph That Changed Everything

“It’s based on a black-and-white photograph I found four years ago of a young man right behind the frontlines dressed up in a sandbag skirt performing for the other soldiers,” Dhont told Deadline earlier in the festival. “And I thought that it was something so modern in that picture, even though it was black and white, but seeing this young man cross-dressed, smiling in front of all these other men really inspired me to create something.”

At the film’s press conference, he elaborated on what that image meant to him personally. Growing up in Belgium — where WWI cemeteries are woven into the landscape, where school trips to the trenches are a rite of passage — he thought he knew the war. Then he saw a photo he’d never been shown.

“They had turned sandbags into skirts, and they were having fun. To me, that was the ultimate picture of resistance. It was an act of liberation,” he said. “I grew up with the First World War. When you go to school, you learn about it and visit the trenches, but I had never seen those particular images. That’s when I realized that the memory has a kind of politics about it. There are certain images of the war that you are shown.”

That realization became the engine of the film. Dhont discovered that throughout many wars, across many armies, soldiers waiting to fight created small performances for one another. “We have pushed those images to the front, and we have forgotten and made those images of softness and of expression rather invisible,” he told Reuters.

He wanted to push them back into the light.

What the War Film Has Always Got Wrong

Dhont is direct about his frustration with the genre. “This genre of film, for me, has always been a genre in which men are given a very limited space to exist in, and where their value is measured on their ability to hurt and destroy and not necessarily intimately be there for one another,” he said at the press conference. “I think the most tragic part of it is that male friendship, male bonding, has too often been used as a tool to destroy.”

Coward, co-written with Angelo Tijssens, deliberately moves away from trench-based misery to reimagine the front as a place of romantic possibility — and, crucially, of queer desire that the war itself, paradoxically, helped make possible. “These men live in a time where their love had to be unspoken, had to be incredibly silent,” Dhont said. “But weirdly enough, the war at that time brought them together.”

The film’s title carries its own weight. “We named this film Coward because that fear is a topic, but I think also the film questions, what does it actually mean to be brave — not only in relationship to another, but also in relationship to ourselves, in choosing the truest parts of ourselves; in choosing to express ourselves, even when the world around us expects us to behave or to act in a certain way,” Dhont said.

Two Newcomers at the Center

Emmanuel Macchia, in his screen debut, plays Pierre — a farmer’s son drafted to haul shells and retrieve the wounded, quiet and wide-eyed amid the bravado of his unit. Valentin Campagne plays Francis, the troupe’s gaunt, willowy ringleader, a tailor by trade who transforms parachute cloth and hessian sacks into elaborate drag costumes and stages full revues for his fellow soldiers.

Dhont found Macchia by visiting agricultural schools in Belgium. “He was so soft speaking and so tender, and he just moved me,” the director recalled. “He just carries this film, with so much maturity also.”

Variety’s review describes Macchia as “a gently stoic, aptly unformed presence with a stolid sadness in his trudging gait, who can go from boy to man with a slight shift in the light,” and calls his first kiss with Campagne “among the most purely romantic gestures the movies have seen in a minute.” Deadline’s Pete Hammond went further, comparing the romance to Casablanca, Brief Encounter, and The Way We Were — “a classic movie love story for the ages.”

The Wrap noted that Coward is “all but certain to be Belgium’s Oscar submission” — which would make it a successor to Close, Dhont’s 2022 film that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. MUBI, which also released Close, has already acquired Coward for the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. Lumière will distribute in Benelux; Diaphana Distribution in France.

The Critics Aren’t All Singing

The audience in the Lumière gave it 13 minutes. The critics? More complicated.

Variety called it Dhont’s “most satisfying film to date,” praising cinematographer Frank van den Eeden’s work and the chemistry between the two leads as something “visible almost entirely in the different ways their bodies move and balance each other: one still, one quicksilver.” The Wrap framed it as a corrective to historical erasure — “a clear product of its moment,” arguing for queer inclusion “on rah-rah terms” rather than as counterculture.

The Hollywood Reporter was considerably less convinced. Critic David Rooney called the film “self-conscious” and “grandiose,” writing that it “reeks of manneristic affectation and phoniness” and that the leads have “minimal chemistry.” He compared it unfavorably to Oliver Hermanus’ Moffie and Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection as more textured explorations of queer men in the military.

It’s a split that echoes the reception to both Girl and Close — films that drew serious acclaim alongside criticism that Dhont manipulates difficult subject matter for emotional effect. Whether Coward lands as a transcendent wartime love story or a beautifully lit exercise in feeling depends, it seems, entirely on how much you surrender to it.

The Palme d’Or jury will make their call at Saturday’s closing ceremony. Dhont already has a Grand Prix on his shelf from Close in 2022, and a Caméra d’Or from his debut Girl in 2018. This is his third time competing at Cannes, and by the sound of that 13-minute ovation, the crowd at the Grand Théâtre Lumière had already made up their minds.

“For me, the reason to make a film about the past is to say something about the present,” Dhont said at the press conference. Given everything, it’s hard to argue with the timing.

The post Lukas Dhont’s ‘Coward’ Gets 13-Min Cannes Ovation appeared first on Cream.

• Sony Pictures Classics has acquired Rehearsals for a Revolution across North and Latin America, Asia, and other key territories
• The film won the L’Oeil d’Or, Cannes Film Festival’s top documentary prize, chosen from 21 competing films
• It marks the debut feature from Iranian actress-turned-director Pegah Ahangarani, who dedicated the award to the people of Iran
• The documentary spans more than 40 years of Iranian history through five intimate portraits of Ahangarani’s relatives and mentors
• The jury was led by Oscar winner Mstyslav Chernov, who praised its “masterful script and vivid, urgent storytelling”

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired Rehearsals for a Revolution, the Cannes Film Festival’s L’Oeil d’Or-winning documentary from debut director Pegah Ahangarani — and if the reaction at the Croisette is any indication, North American audiences are in for something genuinely extraordinary.

SPC picked up all rights in North and Latin America, Asia (except Japan), New Zealand, Turkey, Portugal, and worldwide airlines. The deal was negotiated between Sony Pictures Classics and The Party Film Sales on behalf of the filmmakers.

The film premiered in the Special Screenings section at Cannes, where it was immediately praised by audiences and critics alike. Then came the prize. The L’Oeil d’Or jury — presided over by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov and including Tabitha Jackson, Géraldine Pailhas, Lina Soualem, and Victor Chastanet — selected it from a field of 21 films drawn from the Official Selection, Critics’ Week, Directors’ Fortnight, and the ACID sidebar.

“This film allows us to enter the intricate and complex reality of contemporary Iran through a braiding of personal, historical, and poetic cinema,” the jury said in their citation. “In its search to find the language to express the truths of the moment, Rehearsals for a Revolution is not afraid to question its own gestures — to doubt itself and to be vulnerable. The jury was struck by the masterful script and vivid, urgent storytelling, and by a filmmaker who carried us through violent waves of history while never losing sight of the value of each individual human life.”

A Debut 40 Years in the Making

Ahangarani, best known as an actress before stepping behind the camera, constructed the film across six chapters drawn from her own life — weaving together personal archives, home videos, street protest footage, newspapers, and recorded voices to retrace more than four decades of Iran’s history. From the early days of 1979 through the war that began in 2026, she pieces together intimate and collective memories: her filmmaker parents, the tragic death of her uncle Rashid, the birth of her daughter.

The title itself carries real weight. Ahangarani told Deadline’s Damon Wise that she was still getting used to it when the festival began.

“What convinced me, I think, is that the word ‘rehearsal’ often refers to art and cinema, which reflects the fact that I myself come from an acting career,” she said. “But it also refers to the voice of Rashid, in the third chapter, when he says that Iran is a country of failed revolutions. This is something that might sound sad and a bit desperate, but at the same time, it’s true. There’s been quite a lot of failed revolutions, but there is also hope. Rehearsal means there’s still time for one final revolution.”

When she accepted the award in the presence of Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux, she dedicated it to the people of Iran.

The Hollywood Reporter called the film “a powerful documentary self-portrait that spans decades of resistance and repression in Iran,” noting that it “looks forward to a time, perhaps not too far in the future, when all the rehearsed revolutions she experienced will finally lead to a real one.” Their review also described it as “a cautionary tale about speaking up in a place where rebellion can cost you your livelihood, and quite possibly your life” — and a portrait of a family that lost loved ones to a regime they once supported, only to find themselves betrayed by it.

The film was written and directed by Ahangarani and edited by Arash Ashtiani, with co-writers Ehsan Abdipour, Amir Ahmadi Arian, Arash Ashtiani, and Majed Neisi. It was made in association with Czech Republic’s Media Nest and Spain’s Fasten Films.

The L’Oeil d’Or prize — now in its 11th year, presented in partnership with LaScam, the French-speaking society for non-fiction authors — comes with a €5,000 award. The jury also gave a Special Mention to Tin Castle, directed by Alexander Murphy, a film about the O’Reillys, a family of Irish Travelers living in a caravan.

“Rehearsal means there’s still time for one final revolution.” That line will stay with you long after the credits roll.

The post Sony Classics Acquires Cannes Doc Winner ‘Rehearsals for a Revolution’ appeared first on Cream.

• Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La Bola Negra earned a 22-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and is a Palme d’Or contender
• The decades-spanning queer drama weaves together three storylines set in 1932, 1937 and 2017, inspired by the life and work of Federico García Lorca
• Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close appear in key supporting roles alongside three openly gay lead actors
• The film is produced with the backing of Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar’s El Deseo production company
• Los Javis are the most celebrated creative duo in Spain, behind hit series Veneno and the Sundance-acclaimed La Mesías

A 22-minute standing ovation doesn’t lie. When La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) — the long-awaited feature film debut from Spanish directing duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known collectively as Los Javis — screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the response was the kind that careers are made of. It’s a sweeping, emotionally gutting, visually audacious queer epic that arrives at the world’s most prestigious film festival like something the cinema has been quietly waiting for.

And if that ovation is any indication, the wait was worth it.

The film weaves together three distinct storylines across three eras — 1937, 1932, and 2017 — with a structural confidence that makes the complexity feel effortless. In 1937, musician-turned-soldier Sebastián (played by singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente in his acting debut) survives an aerial attack on his village and is conscripted into the Nationalist fascist army, where he’s assigned to befriend a leftist prisoner named Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau, best known as a breakout from the hit series Elite) in order to extract information. What happens instead is a queer awakening — urgent, dangerous, and impossible to suppress. The film’s opening sequence alone, in which Sebastián climbs through the bodies of the dead using arrows from a felled sculpture as handholds, announces that you are in the hands of filmmakers who understand how to make spectacle feel sacred.

The 1932 timeline — fictional, and the source of the film’s title — follows Carlos (Milo Quifes), a young man whose confidence crumbles when he is blackballed from his father’s casino on the basis of rumors about his homosexuality. The title refers to the casino’s voting process: a white ball means acceptance, a black ball means rejection. That image of internalized shame takes on surreal, snow-drenched form in one of the film’s most striking sequences — a Sisyphean vision of what it means to carry rejection inside your body across a lifetime.

Then there’s 2017, where playwright-turned-record-collector Alberto (Carlos González) receives word that his estranged grandfather has died — a grandfather he thought had been dead for years. When his mother Teresa (Lola Dueñas) reacts to the news with fury and tells him to stay out of the will, Alberto goes anyway. What he finds in a brown envelope becomes the connective tissue of the entire film: a physical and emotional inheritance that links all three stories across nearly a century.

A Love Letter to Federico García Lorca — and to Every Generation That Carried His Pain

At the heart of La Bola Negra is the ghost of Federico García Lorca, the poet and playwright murdered by fascists in 1936, and arguably the most important queer figure in Spanish literary history. The film is partly inspired by Alberto Conejero’s 2015 play La piedra oscura (Dark Stone) and by an unfinished work by Lorca himself, and his presence — his poetry, his fate, his capacity for love — haunts every frame.

“It’s a tribute to him,” Ambrossi said the morning after the premiere, “and I’m sure this makes it very special. When gay people and queer people watch La Bola Negra, I’m sure they’re going to connect and feel the truth.” He added that Lorca “is so modern” and expressed a hope that young audiences who see the film will go to bookstores afterward to discover his work — and to reckon with what happened to him. “He was killed very young by fascists,” Ambrossi said, “and that cannot happen again.”

The film’s central metaphor — the black ball of the title — extends beyond the casino scene into something more elemental. “There’s a physical inheritance in the movie, like the black ball Federico used as a metaphor, of our fear, the shame you have inside,” Calvo explained. “It’s something we feel we’ve inherited as gay men and LGBT people and queer people. There’s this black ball that comes through generations, and there’s something about that connection that talks about inheritance, talks about the art that survives through time. It’s about the inheritance of the shame and the pain and the black ball.”

That inheritance, and what we do with it, is what the film keeps returning to. Alberto’s 2017 storyline functions as a kind of reckoning — not just with his grandfather’s buried identity, but with the tendency of history to flatten the people who lived it. As Glenn Close’s character Isabelle, a historian, puts it: history is not about facts, but about the people who made those facts. “The work to remember,” she says, “is a way to avenge death.”

Why Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close Said Yes

The casting of two of cinema’s most iconic women in supporting roles was entirely intentional — and the stories of how it happened are almost as good as the film itself.

Cruz plays Nené, a singer-slash-performer in 1932 who delivers what one critic described as a showstopping cameo, schooling Sebastián on the then-nascent form of the modern transgender movement. The character grew out of a very Los Javis kind of dreaming. “If we’re making a war film, why don’t we get a cupletista, a Spanish singer from the ’30s who used to sing those really spicy songs?” Calvo recalled. “And then we kept dreaming. Couldn’t that be Penélope Cruz? And what is she going to do? She’s going to be a godmother who tells this kid you can be gay, you can be queer, you can be trans, you can be whatever you want because we were free in Madrid when we were young, and because of war, we are not anymore. So we kept dreaming until we had her.”

Close’s path to the film was equally unexpected. Calvo noted that there’s a long-standing phenomenon in Spain where it’s often foreigners who study and preserve Spanish and Hispanic history — because, as he put it plainly, “we don’t take responsibility for our history.” That observation shaped the decision to make the historian character American. As for Close specifically: she had already been a devoted fan of Los Javis’s Sundance-acclaimed series La Mesías. “So we sent her an email,” Calvo said. “When she replied, saying she would do anything we wanted because she was a huge fan of ours, it was an ‘Oh my God’ moment.”

Ambrossi was clear that having Cruz and Close wasn’t just about star power — it was about reach. “We wanted to make a big movie. We had enough of this feeling that LGBT stories should be small because LGBT stories can talk to anyone in the world. We wanted to make it big, and to have Penelope is like a dream, because a lot of people will be like, ‘Oh, Penelope is there’ and will connect with the story also.”

A Statement Film, Not Just a Queer Film

The three lead roles — Guitarricadelafuente, Bernardeau, and González — are all played by openly gay actors, a deliberate choice that Ambrossi described as deeply meaningful even if not a hard rule. “I don’t think it has to be mandatory, but I think it’s very special when it happens,” he said. “Gay actors, they know how to express what it’s like to be rejected, what it’s like to be given the black ball in your life, and we wanted to do that.”

Behind the camera, the production was similarly intentional — built with a large contingent of LGBTQ+ crew members. “We tried to make a casting with gay actors, openly gay actors, and behind the cameras, with a lot of LGBT people, making a queer movie,” Ambrossi said.

The film is a superproduction in every sense: hundreds of extras, multiple locations, elaborate costume and production design that recreates wartime Spain and also stages large-scale surrealist sequences. It’s co-produced by Los Javis’s own Suma Content label alongside Movistar Plus, Los Esquiadores A.I.E., Le Pacte, and crucially, Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar’s El Deseo. The Almodóvar connection is more than logistical — the film carries his DNA in its use of melodrama, its convoluted algebra of desire, and its willingness to let the personal become mythological. One critic noted that Almodóvar himself attempted something similar in the closing scenes of 2015’s Parallel Mothers, his own tribute to the missing of the Civil War — and that La Bola Negra not only succeeds where he fell short, it takes the concept of romantic love to an entirely new level.

Ambrossi, asked about competing at Cannes alongside his mentor, was almost disarmingly humble. “I admire Pedro immensely. He is to me our great director, and he inspired me so much professionally but also personally as a gay kid. I don’t feel like I can even say we are competing with Pedro and Sorogoyen because they are better,” he laughed. “I look up to them.”

Spain is only behind France in the number of Palme d’Or contenders across the last two editions of Cannes, and Ambrossi is proud of what that represents. “What we are seeing is the result of several years of work and of continuous investment. These are the fruits of great labor, and I hope it continues for many, many years.”

As for La Bola Negra itself — it’s long, it’s ambitious, and it demands a lot from its audience. The cross-cutting between timelines is masterful more often than not, though the 1932 storyline occasionally feels less fully realized than its counterparts. Lorca’s poetry doesn’t always survive translation. And yes, at Cannes press screenings, the French and English subtitles were sometimes at odds with one another — a reminder that some things resist being carried across languages.

But none of that diminishes what Los Javis have built here. “This country has too many love stories buried in the fields,” one character says near the film’s end. La Bola Negra is, among many things, an act of excavation — and what it unearths is extraordinary.

The post ‘La Bola Negra’ Is the Queer Epic Cannes Needed appeared first on Cream.

• Rami Malek’s new Cannes film The Man I Love earned an eight-minute standing ovation at its world premiere — and Malek cried through it.
• Malek initially feared the role was too similar to his Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury performance in Bohemian Rhapsody.
• Director Ira Sachs’ film is one of only two American features competing for the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2026.
• The film co-stars Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and newcomer Luther Ford — with MUBI holding international rights and U.S. distribution still up for grabs.
• Critics are already calling it Malek’s best performance since Bohemian Rhapsody, with early Oscar buzz building fast.

Rami Malek stood in the Palais at Cannes on Wednesday night, tears running down his face, soaking in eight minutes of sustained applause for The Man I Love — and if you know anything about what it took him to get there, those tears make complete sense.

Before he ever said yes to director Ira Sachs’ deeply moving AIDS-era drama, Malek almost walked away from it entirely. The role hit too close to home. “I can’t do this, there’s too many similarities,” he said after reading the script. His concern was obvious: he’d already won a Best Actor Oscar playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, a performer who also died of AIDS. Now here was another role — a singer and performer battling the same disease, in the same era. “It could be problematic,” he admitted. “There was a certain sense of fear.”

But he didn’t walk away. He ran toward it.

“If there was anything that Freddie taught me it was to address the fear,” Malek said. “If there’s anything I learned from Ira is that he makes unique cinema unlike any other, and I knew I was in extraordinary hands. If he was choosing me, I could rely on him, not only to depend on him throughout the film, but to elevate it, to push myself, to force myself to race into that fire. When I raced into it, I started to discover that these were men who were similar, but they were also worlds apart.”

Who Is Jimmy George?

In The Man I Love, Malek plays Jimmy George, a fictional Downtown New York performance artist in the late 1980s who has just survived a three-week hospital stay following AIDS-related pneumonia. He’s back on his feet — barely — and his response to staring down death is to create. He throws himself into staging a theater piece loosely inspired by André Brassard’s 1974 French-Canadian queer film Once Upon a Time in the East, playing a defiant female character named Hélène who sings with a band. He sings at his parents’ anniversary party. He picks up a new lover — Vincent (Luther Ford), a younger man who’s just moved into the apartment downstairs — even as his devoted partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge, genuinely terrific) holds everything together at home.

The film was co-written by Sachs and his longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, and it’s set against the backdrop of Reagan-era America — a period of reactionary homophobia at its ugliest. But Sachs isn’t interested in making a film about suffering for suffering’s sake. Jimmy’s story is about the hunger to live, to create, to love one more time, even when the clock is running out.

Rebecca Hall and Ebon Moss-Bachrach round out the cast as Jimmy’s sister and brother-in-law, and there’s a woundingly funny scene where Moss-Bachrach walks in on Jimmy oversharing some extremely personal details about his sex life to his nephew — a moment that captures, without any speechifying, the quiet estrangement between Jimmy and his family.

What the Critics Are Saying

The reviews out of Cannes suggest Malek has delivered something that will be very hard to ignore come awards season. Variety called it his best role since Bohemian Rhapsody, writing that the performance is built on “shades of anger, tenderness, psychosis, and the sheer pesky individuality of Jimmy” — and singled out one particular scene as the film’s emotional highlight: Malek sitting in front of a backup band at his parents’ anniversary party, singing the 1970 Melanie hit “What Have They Done to My Song Ma.” The way he delivers it, according to Variety, “he charges it with the sadness and defiance of a lifetime.”

The Wrap went even further, declaring that Bohemian Rhapsody “was just the opening act for his vocal work here” — pointing to a sorrowful cover of “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma” that reportedly lands like a gut punch. Their review called the film “spectacular” and “shattering.”

IndieWire was more measured but no less impressed, noting that Malek’s work here is “probably the most affecting of his career” — a quieter, more inward-facing performance than anything he’s done before, and a deliberate departure from the larger-than-life showmanship of Freddie Mercury. The review praised Sachs for sidestepping every AIDS-movie cliché: there are no Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on display, no tearful bedside vigils playing for easy emotion. Just a man who wants to keep making art for as long as his body will let him.

The character of Jimmy, multiple critics noted, was inspired by real figures from New York’s queer arts underground — Ron Vawter of The Wooster Group, performance artist and playwright Ethyl Eichelberger, and comedian Frank Maya — all of whom kept performing until the very end.

A Big Night at the Palais

The premiere at the Grand Théâtre Lumière on Wednesday, May 20 drew a crowd that included Demi Moore, Halsey, and filmmaker Chloé Zhao alongside the film’s cast. Malek, Sturridge, Hall, and Moss-Bachrach all walked the red carpet before the screening that would leave the room on its feet for eight solid minutes.

The Man I Love is one of only two American films competing for the Palme d’Or this year — the other being James Gray’s Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson. It also marks Malek’s first time headlining a Cannes competition film. MUBI holds international distribution rights; U.S. distribution is still being negotiated.

It’s worth remembering what Malek said about the moment he finally stopped being afraid and started discovering who Jimmy George really was: a man similar to Freddie Mercury in some ways, but worlds apart in others. Standing in that theater, in tears, the audience refusing to sit down — it’s hard to argue with the decision he made.

The post Rami Malek Cried at Cannes Ovation for ‘The Man I Love’ appeared first on Cream.

• Laura Dern stepped out with her kids Ellery and Jaya at the Cannes premiere of her dad Bruce Dern’s new documentary, Dernsie
• Laura is currently filming White Lotus Season 4 nearby in the south of France and took a break to be there
• Bruce, 89, received a two-minute standing ovation before the film even screened — and a six-minute one after
• The appearance was the family’s first public outing together since the November 2025 death of Diane Ladd, Laura’s mother and Bruce’s ex-wife
• The documentary features appearances from Quentin Tarantino and Alexander Payne and covers Bruce’s 65-plus years in Hollywood

Laura Dern didn’t have to travel far for one of the most meaningful red carpets of her life. The actress — currently in the south of France filming White Lotus Season 4 — took a break from set on Wednesday to join her father, Bruce Dern, at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival for the world premiere of Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern. And she didn’t come alone. Her son Ellery, 24, and daughter Jaya, 21, were right there beside her.

It was a rare three-generation moment — and a genuinely emotional one. The premiere marked the first time the father and daughter have appeared publicly together since the death of Diane Ladd, Bruce’s ex-wife and Laura’s mother, in November 2025. Ladd passed away at 89.

On the red carpet, Bruce, 89, held on to Laura and Ellery on either arm, beaming for cameras in a black tuxedo, a bow tie, and — very much on brand — a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap. Laura was stunning in a silver gown with a sheer overlay. Jaya wore a striped black-and-white dress, and Ellery matched his grandfather in a black tuxedo with a skinny tie.

The crowd inside was clearly ready to honor a legend. Bruce earned a two-minute standing ovation before Dernsie even screened — and after the film, the audience gave him six minutes on their feet.

What ‘Dernsie’ Is Actually About

Directed by Mike Mendez, the documentary takes its name from a term used in Hollywood to describe Bruce’s signature gift for improvisation — going off-script in a way that directors have come to not just tolerate, but depend on. The film features Bruce walking through his own storied career, alongside appearances from Quentin Tarantino, Alexander Payne, and Laura herself.

“We can’t write the s— that he says,” Bruce said, quoting what directors like Tarantino and Payne have told him about his instincts on set. “Because it comes out of him, he doesn’t rehearse it. He doesn’t know what it’s gonna be.”

He offered a perfect example from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — a scene with Brad Pitt, during which Pitt reportedly broke character laughing at one of Bruce’s unscripted lines. When Tarantino asked what happened, Pitt said Bruce had gone off script. Tarantino’s response? “No s—. That’s why the man’s here.”

It’s a career that stretches back more than 65 years — from his first major film role in 1966’s The Wild Angels through westerns like 1972’s The Cowboys, and on to two Oscar nominations: one for 1978’s Coming Home and another for his unforgettable turn in Alexander Payne’s 2013 film Nebraska. He’s also appeared in three Tarantino films — Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the last of which he stepped into after his friend Burt Reynolds passed away in 2018.

A Family Shaped by Hollywood — and Heartbreak

The documentary doesn’t shy away from the harder chapters either. Bruce speaks openly about the 1962 drowning death of his eldest daughter, Diane Elizabeth, who was just 18 months old. She was with the family’s maid when she accessed the swimming pool during a phone call.

“My wife was at a Dodgers game; I was at a track meet at the Coliseum,” Bruce recalled in the film. “I was told over the loudspeaker to go to the desk, and some plainclothes cop said to me, ‘Are you Bruce Dern?’ And I said ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘You should go home right now, because your child just drowned in a swimming pool.'”

He said he “never got over it” — and that the tragedy kept him and Diane Ladd together longer than their marriage might have otherwise lasted. “Because Diane and I shared a tragedy, we stayed together longer than we should have, but out of it, five years later, came Laura,” he said. “About a month later, it was over for Diane and I, and we never really talked it out. She wasn’t there. I wasn’t there.”

Despite their 1969 divorce, Bruce and Ladd remained close for decades — so close that in 2010, the two of them and Laura were honored with adjoining stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. When Ladd died last November, Laura called her “the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created.”

Laura shares Ellery and Jaya with her ex-husband, musician Ben Harper. The two married in 2005 and divorced in 2013.

At the 2020 Oscars, when Laura won best supporting actress for Marriage Story, she put it simply: “Some say, ‘Never meet your heroes,’ but I say, if you’re really blessed, you get them as your parents. I share this with my acting heroes, my legends, Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern.”

Wednesday night at Cannes, that legacy was on full display — three generations of a Hollywood family, standing together in the south of France, celebrating a man who’s spent 65 years doing things no one could have written for him.

The post Laura Dern, Her Kids, and Bruce Dern Reunite at Cannes appeared first on Cream.

• Rami Malek plays Jimmy George, a downtown New York performance artist living with AIDS in the late 1980s, in Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love
• The film world-premiered in official competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, Sachs’ first time back in competition since Frankie in 2019
• Critics are calling Malek’s performance the best of his career, surpassing his Oscar-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody
• Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and newcomer Luther Ford co-star; the film is currently seeking U.S. distribution
• Sachs and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias spent 15 years developing the story, which was inspired by Maurice Pialat’s film Van Gogh

Rami Malek has always been a polarizing figure in Hollywood — magnetic, a little mannered, occasionally too much. But in The Man I Love, Ira Sachs’ achingly observed portrait of art, desire, and mortality in late-1980s New York, all of that stops mattering. What Malek does here is something else entirely. It’s the kind of performance that resets the conversation.

The film had its world premiere Wednesday in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, walking the red carpet at the Grand Théâtre Lumière with co-stars Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach — plus surprise attendees Demi Moore, Halsey, and Chloé Zhao there to witness what is already shaping up to be one of the year’s most talked-about films.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RdBfLft2buY%3Fversion%3D3%26enablejsapi%3D1%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fdeadline.com%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den-US%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent

Malek plays Jimmy George, a downtown Manhattan theater artist and founding member of a fictional experimental company called The Mechanicals. As the story opens, Jimmy has just survived a hospitalization for AIDS-related pneumonia — a brush with death that has, if anything, sharpened his hunger to create. He’s throwing himself into rehearsals for a new piece: a word-for-word stage recreation of a forgotten 1974 French-Canadian queer film called Once Upon a Time in the East, in which he’ll perform in drag as a blonde-wigged diva named Carmen. He is, in Sachs’ precise framing, a man living in the space between great illness and everything still possible.

That framing wasn’t accidental. Sachs and his longtime co-writer Mauricio Zacharias spent 15 years developing the story, drawing inspiration from Maurice Pialat’s film Van Gogh. “It’s about the last several months of Van Gogh’s life when his death was imminent,” Sachs explained in his director’s note. “But in that period, he lived and chose to live with such commitment to the creation of art, as well as the experience of pleasure. That was the kind of film Mauricio and I decided to write: one in which death is present, but in actuality, nobody actively dies; they actively live. What the film needed to be was the abundance, not the disappearance.”

The film shot over 28 days in New York, from September 21 to October 29, 2025. It is Sachs’ third feature in three years — following Passages and last year’s Peter Hujar’s Day — and arguably the most personal. Having moved to New York City around the time the movie is set, he is writing from lived memory, recreating the downtown alternative theater and performance scene with the specificity of someone who was actually there: the Wooster Group, the Pyramid Club, the drag acts and post-punk bands, the communal apartment gatherings where someone always ended up singing.

A Career-Best Performance — and a Supporting Cast That Matches It

What makes Malek’s work here so striking is how much he strips away. This is not the operatic commitment of Freddie Mercury, not the cold precision of his spy and detective roles. Jimmy George is languid and narcissistic and fiercely alive, a medium-sized exhibitionist in an oversize pond — an aging downtown party boy with real talent who doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Malek colors him with anger, tenderness, psychosis, and a morose charisma that makes the room bend toward him without him even trying. He plays Jimmy as a man caught between liberation and AIDS, between wanting to break out and staying true to his subversive drag soul.

The performance has a particular emotional peak that critics are already singling out: a scene at his parents’ anniversary party — one Dennis, his long-term boyfriend, wasn’t invited to — where Jimmy sits before a backup band and sings Melanie’s 1970 folk-pop hit “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma.” It’s a song that reads as slight on paper. In Malek’s hands, according to Variety, “he charges it with the sadness and defiance of a lifetime.” The world, the scene suggests, has stopped hearing Jimmy’s song. Here, it rings out like something irreplaceable.

As Jimmy’s devoted partner Dennis, Tom Sturridge is the film’s quiet revelation. Dennis manages Jimmy’s medications, makes sure he eats, organizes his life — and does it all while slowly registering the hurt of watching his partner begin a charged affair with Vincent (Luther Ford), the attractive young British man who’s just moved in downstairs. Sturridge doesn’t traffic in big emotional displays. He works in flickers — a tightening around the eyes, a studied stillness. One scene at the hospital, played with raw exposed nerves, has been described as genuinely crushing.

Ford, meanwhile, makes an impressive feature debut — particularly notable given his previous work as the young Prince Harry in The Crown. Vincent is jittery, hormonally alive, freshly out of the closet and not yet equipped to understand that he’s being used as a muse. When Dennis confronts him about the affair, Vincent’s defense lands like a gut punch: “He’s an artist, he wants to have inspiration. He wants to fall in love with me!” Dennis, who has watched his partner nearly die, has no answer for that.

Rebecca Hall, reuniting with Sachs after Peter Hujar’s Day, brings deep feeling to Jimmy’s sister Brenda — the realist in the room, the one who refuses to pretend the clock isn’t running. A scene where Sachs takes the siblings to a fabulous drag bar, set to Shirley Ellis’ “Clapping Song,” is pure joy — cinematographer Josée Deshaies getting in close to drag queens in thrift-store glamour shaking their asses with total self-celebratory abandon. Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Brenda’s husband Gene with quiet, pragmatic kindness, gently reminding his wife that Jimmy’s current vitality won’t hold. Also along for the visit: their preteen son Billy (Dennis Courtis), who adores his uncle, and who becomes the unlikely audience for one of the film’s funniest and most heartbreaking scenes — a confessional video message to his grandparents that starts as a tribute and spirals, in exquisite detail, into a full accounting of Jimmy’s history with alcohol, drugs, and sex. Gene cannot get his son out of that room fast enough.

Not an AIDS Movie You’ve Seen Before

What Sachs has made, critics agree, is emphatically not the AIDS film you’re bracing for. There are no Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, no tearful bedside vigils as set pieces, no disease-of-the-week emotional beats. The film’s single hospital scene focuses entirely on Dennis — on what he’s experiencing, not what Jimmy is losing. The approach is less about dying than about the ferocious, almost defiant insistence on living: on rehearsal, on parties, on desire, on singing one more song.

The movie is also, in its own way, a time capsule. Sachs recreates the downtown New York arts scene of the late ’80s with the same specificity he brought to the mid-’70s in Peter Hujar’s Day — a window between peak Andy Warhol and Keith Haring giving way to the generation that followed. The needle drops are impeccable throughout, building to a closing song choice that may be the year’s most devastating outro: Ronee Blakley’s “Lightning Over Water,” from the 1980 film co-directed by Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray. It’s a track that builds from a beat-poem spoken-word opening to a full-force crescendo where Blakley sounds, as one critic put it, like Patti Smith and Grace Slick rolled into one. A song about clutching onto one life with everything you have, refusing to let go for as long as possible.

The Man I Love is currently seeking U.S. distribution. If there’s any justice, it won’t be waiting long.

The post Rami Malek Stuns Cannes in Ira Sachs’ ‘The Man I Love’ appeared first on Cream.

• “Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern” premiered in the Cannes Classics section at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
• The documentary is directed by Mike Mendez and features Quentin Tarantino, Laura Dern, Billy Bob Thornton, and Walton Goggins among others
• The title refers to an on-set term coined by Jack Nicholson for Dern’s signature improvised moments
• Dern, who turns 90 on June 4, is the film’s primary narrator and reviewers call him a captivating storyteller
• The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution after its Cannes debut

Before Bruce Dern was one of Hollywood’s most beloved character actors, he was a runner. A serious, obsessive, log-200-miles-on-a-weekend runner. And if you watch Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern, Mike Mendez’s new documentary that just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, you’ll come away understanding that those two facts about the man are completely inseparable.

The film, which screened Wednesday in the festival’s official Cannes Classics section, arrives just weeks before Dern turns 90 on June 4 — and the 89-year-old shows up to his own life story with the energy of someone who still hasn’t quite gotten over how wild the whole ride has been. He’s the film’s primary narrator, and by most accounts, that’s exactly the right call.

“He’s got a crazy story about everybody,” director Joe Dante says in the film — and he’s not wrong. Dern has stories about John Wayne, Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis, Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg, and Quentin Tarantino, among many others. The ones that made it into the documentary are compelling enough. The ones that didn’t — including, reportedly, a legendary Marilyn Monroe/Greta Garbo yarn — apparently didn’t make the cut, which feels like a genuine loss.

From Chicago Privilege to Hollywood’s Perennial Villain

The most disarming thing about Dern’s story, given the weathered, gritty characters he’s spent decades playing, is where he came from. He grew up in a wealthy Chicago family with a maid and a chauffeur. His grandfather was the first non-Mormon governor of Utah and FDR’s Secretary of War. His granduncle was poet Archibald MacLeish. Adlai Stevenson — the two-time Democratic presidential nominee — was his father’s law partner, and young Bruce called him “Uncle.”

When Dern decided he wanted to be an actor, his blue-blooded family essentially showed him the door. “I was persona non grata,” he says in the film. “They said, ‘You don’t need to come home for Christmas.’ They didn’t get it, and they sure as hell didn’t get me.”

He landed at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York alongside Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and Marilyn Monroe. Elia Kazan — whom Dern still refers to as “Mr. Kazan” — took him under his wing and told him his gift was for “behavior.” Kazan made him perform scenes without speaking for an entire year. As it turned out, that was the best possible training for what was coming: years of small background roles, bit parts, and endless guest appearances on episodic Westerns once he got to Hollywood.

“Every show I was in on television, I was playing a prick,” Dern says. “You start to believe that’s all you’re ever going to do.”

He climbed slowly — Roger Corman villain roles, fifth-cowboy-from-the-right stuff — before Jack Nicholson handed him a meatier part in The King of Marvin Gardens. He had a real shot at reshaping his image with Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, but then took three days off from that shoot to appear in The Cowboys — and became the first actor in Hollywood history to kill John Wayne on screen. So much for playing the good guy.

What a “Dernsie” Actually Is

The film’s title isn’t a nickname. It’s a term — coined, the documentary explains, by Jack Nicholson — for something that happens when a director knows a scene needs a little something extra, something that isn’t on the page. They turn to Bruce and say, “Gimme a Dernsie on this one” — and something small, unexpected, and unforgettable happens.

Tarantino, one of the documentary’s most enthusiastic talking heads, points to a perfect example from his own work: in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, when Brad Pitt’s character wakes Dern’s napping ranch owner and introduces himself as Cliff Booth, Dern’s groggy, bewildered response — “John Wilkes Booth?” — was pure improvisation. A Dernsie.

But the definitive one, according to the film, came in Coming Home. In the scene where Dern’s Vietnam veteran strips off his clothes on the beach before walking into the ocean to end his life — knowing there’s nothing left for him in the world his wife (Jane Fonda) has built with Jon Voight’s character — Dern added one tiny, unscripted moment: he made it nearly impossible for his character to get his wedding ring off. It wasn’t in the script. Walton Goggins says it made him want to become an actor.

That scene, and others like it, trace back directly to what Kazan identified all those years ago: Dern’s gift isn’t dialogue. It’s behavior. The glances, the hesitations, the physical life he gives characters that exists entirely outside what’s written. The documentary clips chosen to illustrate this — from Coming Home to Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, the 2013 film that gave him the richest role of his career — are well-selected and make the case without overstatement.

The Personal Stuff He Doesn’t Shy Away From

Dern’s personal life gets real in the documentary, even if some of it goes by quickly. He tells a colorful, intentionally vague story about a first marriage involving two women he describes as call girls who took all his money. His more famous marriage, to actress Diane Ladd, is harder to hear about: their 18-month-old daughter drowned in their swimming pool while both parents were out and the child was in a maid’s care. He and Ladd stayed together longer than they should have, he says, “because we shared a tragedy” — but those extra years produced Laura.

He also cops to having “lost a decade to Vicodin” in the ’90s, and mentions a heart attack three years ago. He’s continued working steadily through all of it. Runner’s World once estimated that Dern has covered more than 104,000 miles on foot over his lifetime — a number that tracks given that he was still running well into his eighties before doctors finally slowed him down (he kept going more than they advised anyway).

The running metaphor is the documentary’s structural spine, and it’s an apt one: Dern built his entire career on endurance, on outlasting everyone who might have given up. While his close friend Nicholson found stardom early, Dern just kept showing up. The film leans on this idea perhaps a few dozen times more than necessary, and most reviewers agree that a tighter cut would have made the point just as well.

What the Critics Are Saying

The consensus out of Cannes is warm but clear-eyed. The documentary is straightforward — Mendez, best known for horror films including Big Ass Spider!, doesn’t reinvent the form here — but Dern himself is so naturally compelling that it barely matters. His “no-nonsense attitude cuts through most of the treacle,” as one critic put it, and his deep, almost ferocious love of cinema gives the whole thing genuine weight. (“The reason I never went back to the theater,” he says at one point, pointing directly at the camera recording him, “is because what we’re doing here — is forever.”)

Mendez does try a few stylistic flourishes — animated puppets of Nicholson and Hitchcock, a live-action recreation of Dern on a hospital gurney after his heart attack — with mixed results. The puppets work as visual grace notes. The gurney scene is widely described as just a bit creepy. But the film’s core, which is essentially an old man with wiry grey hair and a gravelly voice sitting close to a camera and talking, is more than enough.

Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern is currently seeking U.S. distribution. In the meantime, Dern and Mendez appeared on Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast — hosted by 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley — ahead of the Cannes premiere, where Dern tells stories about nearly everyone he’s ever worked with. Given what reviewers are saying about the man’s storytelling, that’s probably worth your hour.

The post Bruce Dern Doc ‘Dernsie’ Premieres at Cannes appeared first on Cream.

• Ella Bleu Travolta, 26, stars as a flight attendant in her father John Travolta’s directorial debut, Propeller One-Way Night Coach
• John declared “a star is born” after a clip of Ella’s performance aired on The Tonight Show
• The father-daughter duo attended the 2026 Cannes Film Festival together, where John was surprised with an honorary Palme d’Or
• Beyond acting, Ella is a singer-songwriter whose 2024 EP Colors of Love was co-produced by her dad
• Propeller One-Way Night Coach streams on Apple TV starting May 29

John Travolta has never been shy about his pride for his daughter — but standing on the Tonight Show stage on May 19, watching a clip of Ella Bleu Travolta’s performance in his directorial debut, the Grease legend said it as plainly as he could.

“A star is born right,” he told host Jimmy Fallon, after Fallon noted that Ella was “fantastic.”

It was a big week for the Travolta family. Just days earlier, John, 72, had premiered Propeller One-Way Night Coach at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival — and walked away with a surprise he never saw coming: an honorary Palme d’Or. But standing next to his daughter on that red carpet, watching her shine at 26, clearly meant just as much.

The Film That Brought Them Together Again

Propeller One-Way Night Coach is a deeply personal project for John. The Apple TV film — which he wrote, directed and narrated — is an adaptation of his own 1997 children’s book of the same name, telling the story of his very first flight as a kid. Ella plays a flight attendant in the film, and the two attended Cannes together to promote it ahead of its May 29 streaming debut.

For Ella, the night at Cannes was something she wanted to hold onto. “I knew it was just such a special night for my whole family that I sort of made sure to put myself in the moment and really take it all in,” she told People. “And it felt very calm, actually, and very just beautiful and very emotional.”

As for John’s Palme d’Or — he genuinely had no idea it was coming. “I didn’t expect this at all,” he told Fallon, bringing the award with him to the studio. The honor had apparently been set in motion about five months earlier, after festival director Thierry Fremaux screened the film and decided to make it a special occasion — though not even Travolta’s own team was told. Only the Apple TV crew knew. “I cried,” John said. “I couldn’t believe that he felt that way.” He later posted about it on Instagram, writing: “I’ve never been more proud to win an award! To me the Cannes Palme d’Or award has always represented art at its finest. It is beyond a humbling experience.”

This isn’t the first time Ella and her father have shared a screen. Their collaboration goes back further than most people realize.

A Career That Started at Age 7

Ella Bleu Travolta was born on April 3, 2000, to John and his wife, actress Kelly Preston. She made her onscreen debut in the 2009 Disney comedy Old Dogs — alongside both of her parents — at just 7 years old. The story of how it happened is very on-brand for a kid who clearly knew her own mind: John first floated the idea when she was 5, but Ella told him she wasn’t ready. Two years later, when she changed her mind, he moved fast, locking her into a role in a film he’d already been offered. Kelly joined too, making it a full family affair.

“It was the best filming experience I’ve ever had, bar none,” Kelly said at the time while promoting the film. “It was just the greatest to be able to be in her first movie.”

Ella went on to appear alongside her dad again in 2019’s The Poison Rose, before landing her first leading role in the Alice in Wonderland-inspired film Get Lost. In 2026 alone, her IMDb credits include both Alicia in Wonderland and Propeller.

“I always jump at the opportunity to do something with my dad and we always have the most fun doing something together,” she told People in 2023.

The creative pull has been there from the beginning. “Pretty much as long as I can remember, I’ve always just loved the arts in general — acting, singing, dancing, and I grew up around it,” she told Parade in 2023. “So it was just such a natural part of my life that continuing to do that just feels right.”

Singer, Songwriter — and a Tribute to Her Mom

Acting is only part of the picture. During the pandemic, Ella started writing and recording snippets of songs on her own — and when her dad heard them, he didn’t let it go. “He was like, ‘Oh, wow, you should really finish these. You should finish these songs, and then you could record demos of them or something,'” she recalled on the 3rd hour of TODAY.

She released her first single, “Dizzy,” in 2022, followed by “Little Bird” in 2024. John co-produced her debut EP, Colors of Love, which also dropped in 2024.

“He’s amazing and he’s so protective because he’s been in this industry — in the movie industry, in the music industry — forever, so he knows how to protect me in that sense,” Ella said.

“Little Bird” carries a weight that goes beyond a debut single. It’s a tribute to Kelly Preston, who died in July 2020 at 57 after a private battle with breast cancer — a loss that shook the family deeply, coming just over a decade after the death of Ella’s older brother Jett, who suffered a fatal seizure at 16 while the family was vacationing in the Bahamas in 2009. John and Kelly later welcomed a third child, son Benjamin, in November 2010.

The music video for “Little Bird” features family footage, and Ella has spoken about what the song means to her. “This was sort of my message from a baby bird to a mama bird,” she said on TODAY. “And also to yourself too, because you will always know what’s right.”

Fashion, Painting, and What Comes Next

Ella has also been quietly building a presence in the fashion world. John celebrated her New York Fashion Week debut in 2022 with an Instagram post — “So proud of Ella’s debut at fashion week in New York City!” — and she’s been leaning into it more since. “I do love fashion. I’m definitely finding myself more and more in the fashion world,” she said on the Tea Time podcast in 2025, adding that she’d love to design something someday. “I think it would be really, really cool.”

Her creative interests don’t stop there. “I love painting as well,” she said. “And as long as I have some creative outlet, I’m happy.”

The mutual admiration between father and daughter runs deep. John told People in 2019: “She is her own person. She is gracious, generous, poised, graceful and gorgeous. I don’t know how she came to be, and I don’t take any credit other than just adoring her. And maybe that’s a valid contribution.”

Ella, for her part, is just as devoted. “He’s my biggest fan, and I’m his biggest fan, so there’s a lot of support going on,” she told Parade. “I learn so much from him, all the time.”

Oh — and there’s one more milestone she’s hoping for. She’d love to record a Christmas duet with her dad someday.

Given how this year has gone for the Travoltas, it doesn’t seem far off.

The post Ella Travolta Steps Into the Spotlight With Dad John appeared first on Cream.

• Andy Garcia’s neo-noir film Diamond earned a 9-minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night
• The film — which Garcia wrote, directed, stars in, and co-composed the score for — has been nearly 20 years in the making
• The ensemble cast includes Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman, Brendan Fraser, Vicky Krieps, and Rosemarie DeWitt
• It marks Garcia’s first appearance at Cannes since Ocean’s Thirteen premiered on the Croisette back in 2007
• The film plays Out of Competition in the Official Selection and was shot across 52 Los Angeles locations in just 25 days

Andy Garcia got his Cannes moment — and it was a long time coming. His passion project Diamond received a thunderous standing ovation Tuesday night in the festival’s Grand Salle Lumière, with the crowd keeping the applause going for a full nine minutes. Co-stars Vicky Krieps and Rosemarie DeWitt were by his side for the premiere, while the film’s sprawling ensemble — Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman, Brendan Fraser, Demián Bichir, and Danny Huston — did not make the trip to the Croisette.

“As you might know this has been a 20-year journey and I couldn’t think of a more sacred place than to be than here… to share this very personal journey with the Festival de Cannes,” Garcia told the audience after the screening. “We all grew up with a dream and could tell you and share with young people out there who have dreams that there is no great obstacle that can’t be overcome. Follow your dream. Keep falling forward. As my father would say never take a step backward not even to gain momentum. I am blessed to be here with you all this evening. Thank you.”

The origin story of Diamond is almost as cinematic as the film itself. Garcia first landed on the idea while helping his daughter Daniella with a homework assignment — she had to write a short story in the style of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Something clicked. Two decades later, that kernel of a homework exercise has become a full-blown love letter to Los Angeles and an homage to the great noir films of Hollywood’s golden age.

What ‘Diamond’ Is Actually About

Garcia plays Joe Diamond, a fedora-wearing private detective who looks and talks like he walked straight off a 1940s movie set — except he’s operating in present-day L.A. The film opens with Diamond in full noir mode: the trench coat, the aging office, the world-weary secretary (LaTanya Richardson Jackson). Then he steps outside, and a Waymo autonomous car rolls past. That’s the joke, and the film commits to it brilliantly.

Diamond is hired by a wealthy widow, Sharon Cobbs (Krieps, playing the classic femme fatale), after her husband turns up dead under mysterious circumstances. His uncanny powers of observation — the kind that leave the LAPD baffled — kick in as he moves through a dreamlike version of Los Angeles, crossing paths with a colorful cast of characters: a well-connected bartender named Jimbo (Murray, serving martinis and insider knowledge), a darkly funny coroner with a passion for Chinese food (Hoffman), a slippery gardener (Bichir), and a mystery woman named Angel (DeWitt, described as genuinely touching in the role).

Brendan Fraser plays Diamond’s legal eagle contact “Danny Boy” McVicar, while Danny Huston appears as a character named Bruce Tannenbaum — a quietly sly bit of casting, given that Huston is the son of John Huston, who directed the 1942 noir classic The Maltese Falcon. Garcia clearly knew what he was doing there.

The production shot across 52 locations in Los Angeles in just 25 days on an indie budget, hitting iconic spots including the Bradbury Building and the Paramour Estate. Production designer Clay A. Griffith, cinematographer Tim Suhrstedt, and costume designer Deborah L. Scott worked together to give the city a suspended-in-time quality — the L.A. of noir mythology, still somehow standing. Garcia also co-composed the score alongside jazz legend Arturo Sandoval, an homage in its own right to what Jerry Goldsmith created for Chinatown.

A Third Act Behind the Camera

Diamond is Garcia’s third feature as director, following the 1993 documentary Cachao… Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos and 2005’s The Lost City. It’s a side of him that doesn’t always get its due — most audiences still know him as Michael Corleone’s illegitimate nephew in The Godfather Part III, or as the charming Danny Ocean sidekick Rusty’s straight-man foil in the Ocean’s trilogy. (His last Cannes appearance was, in fact, for Ocean’s Thirteen in 2007.)

But Diamond is something more personal. Garcia plays Joe Diamond as a three-dimensional man haunted by a traumatic past, not just a one-note genre gag. The film earns its heart, and the casting — assembled with the help of veteran casting director Cathy Sandrich and, by Garcia’s own admission, a few favors — gives it the weight of something that actually meant something to the people who made it.

Produced by Garcia alongside Frank Mancuso Jr., Paul Soriano, and Jai Stefan, the film runs 1 hour and 58 minutes. CAA Media Finance is handling North American sales, with The Veterans managing international. It plays Out of Competition in the Official Selection, alongside Quentin Dupieux’s Full Phil (with Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart) and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell.

Garcia’s daughter — the one who unknowingly started all this with a homework assignment two decades ago — has a role in the film. The full circle of it is hard to miss.

The post Andy Garcia’s ‘Diamond’ Gets 9-Minute Ovation at Cannes appeared first on Cream.

• Pedro Almodóvar received a 6.5-minute standing ovation at the Cannes international premiere of Bitter Christmas
• The film is Almodóvar’s eighth in competition at Cannes — a festival record — but the Palme d’Or has still eluded him
• A simultaneous press screening in the Bazin theater was evacuated after an elderly attendee collapsed about 15 minutes in
• Critics are divided: some call it a fascinating act of self-interrogation, others find it emotionally remote despite its craft
• Almodóvar told Deadline he spent four years writing the script and hinted he may make another English-language film

Pedro Almodóvar brought the Cannes crowd to its feet Tuesday night. The Spanish auteur’s Bitter Christmas earned a 6.5-minute standing ovation at its international premiere in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, with the director attending alongside leads Bárbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia and the full ensemble cast. It wasn’t the 17-minute marathon that greeted The Room Next Door at Venice — but the Cannes crowd made their affection clear, cheering Almodóvar all the way out of the theater after he addressed them directly.

“I always enjoy the warm reception Cannes gives me from the moment I enter the cinema,” Almodóvar told the audience, adding that he would miss it when he could no longer attend. That drew another fresh wave of applause.

It’s his eighth film in competition here — a festival record — cementing a relationship with Cannes that stretches back decades. He won best director for All About My Mother in 1999, best screenplay for Volver in 2006, and Antonio Banderas took best actor for Pain and Glory in 2019. The Palme d’Or, somehow, has never come.

What ‘Bitter Christmas’ Is Actually About

Bitter Christmas — which opened in Spain in March to positive reviews before making its Croisette debut — is, in the simplest terms, a Russian nesting doll of a movie. It begins in 2004, following Elsa (Lennie), a cult filmmaker turned advertising director plagued by migraines and panic attacks, who travels to the volcanic island of Lanzarote with her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) after the death of her mother. Her devoted younger boyfriend Bonifacio, played by Patrick Criado, is a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper — and yes, we get the full routine, set to Grace Jones.

Then the film pulls back to reveal that Elsa’s entire story is a screenplay being written by Raúl Rossetti (Sbaraglia), an esteemed auteur in 2026 who carries Almodóvar’s bearing and silvery hairdo, and who has been creatively running on fumes. Raúl lives in an airy villa beside a Hockney-esque swimming pool, supported by his younger partner Santi (Quim Gutiérrez) and his indispensable assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). As the film progresses, the boundary between Raúl’s fiction and his reality begins to dissolve — and by the end, it becomes clear that Raúl is Almodóvar’s own alter ego, with Elsa functioning as an alter ego once removed.

The ensemble also includes Milena Smit as Natalia, a young mother undone by grief, and a characteristically scene-stealing cameo from Rossy de Palma as the madrileña social butterfly Gabriela — “like an Auntie Mame,” as one reviewer put it — who pauses a fabulous party long enough to give Elsa her stash of heavy-duty painkillers. The movie takes its title from a Chavela Vargas ranchera, and the late Mexican singer’s music appears twice, including a raspy late-career performance of “La Llorona” that several critics singled out as the film’s most ravishing sequence.

The Scene Everyone’s Talking About

The film’s emotional climax arrives in a pair of ferocious confrontations between Raúl and Mónica, after she reads his script and returns furious — both at his use of a friend’s suicide attempt as dramatic material, and at his broader obliviousness to the people around him. In one moment that got a laugh at the Cannes screening, she suggests he cut the problematic section entirely, call it a minor work, and sell it to Netflix. “I ask for your advice,” Raúl shoots back, “and you tell me to make a TV movie!”

Sánchez-Gijón is being singled out for her work in these scenes — fierce, unsparing, and clearly speaking for the director himself. Almodóvar confirmed as much in an interview with Deadline. “Monica’s character is a reflection of the ways in which I may question myself,” he said. “As Monica is challenging him, yes, she’s challenging me as a director. And I found the experience of displaying that both liberating and amusing because it did become a process of criticizing myself.”

He was equally candid about the ethics of autofiction — the film’s central preoccupation. “Sometimes a writer doesn’t think of the way precisely that they’re going to hurt the people around them, because at the end of the day, they don’t think about the hurt, they think about the idea, and that becomes a dangerous thing,” he said. “And so at a certain level, my screenwriter is kind of also the villain in the film.”

The script itself, he revealed, has been brewing for about four years — adapted from a short story he wrote years earlier that originally just followed Elsa, her firefighter boyfriend, and their trip to Lanzarote. The character of Mónica, who ends up driving the entire third act, wasn’t part of the original at all. “She was not part of the story previously. She came to me,” Almodóvar said.

The Press Screening That Had to Stop

While Almodóvar was receiving his ovation in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, things took a more alarming turn across the Palais. About 15 minutes into the simultaneous press screening in the Bazin theater — ironically, during a hospital sequence — an elderly attendee collapsed in their seat. Loud yelps were heard, the person’s eyes were closed, and those nearby surrounded them as the film kept running. The ushers then cleared the entire theater.

The festival confirmed the incident in a statement: “The screening was immediately interrupted, and the theater evacuated to allow emergency services to assist them. The person was conscious and responsive before being transported to the hospital for further medical care. Once the intervention was completed, the screening resumed from the beginning of the film.”

Eyewitnesses on social media described hearing a loud scream and reported that the person appeared to suffer some kind of seizure. One attendee told Deadline the response felt disorganized: “It was a muddle and it seemed as though the festival didn’t have any protocol in place for such an emergency.”

Where Critics Land

The reviews have been warm but measured — the consensus being that this is unmistakably Almodóvar, and unmistakably minor Almodóvar. The craft is beyond dispute: Alberto Iglesias’ score, Antxón Gómez’s production design (not a single apartment in the film you wouldn’t want to live in), Pau Esteve Birba’s cinematography — particularly a bird’s-eye shot of Elsa and Patricia lying on white towels against Lanzarote’s black volcanic sand, wearing red and black — all land with the director’s signature visual intensity. Hot pink, as one critic put it, has never burned hotter.

Where critics diverge is on emotional access. Some find the film’s layers of self-critique genuinely thrilling — “a difficult but virtuoso piece of auto-fiction,” in The Wrap’s assessment. Others feel the double-proxy structure keeps the audience at arm’s length, that Almodóvar is working things out in his own head rather than inviting viewers to share the experience. The Hollywood Reporter noted that while Pain and Glory stung with “startling vulnerability and poignancy,” Bitter Christmas “stays somewhat at a distance for the audience, compelling but seldom affecting.”

Deadline’s review landed somewhere in the middle, comparing it favorably to the idea that even minor Fellini and minor Bergman is a gift — a line that, tellingly, Almodóvar put into Mónica’s mouth in the film itself.

Bitter Christmas is produced by Agustín Almodóvar for El Deseo. Sony Pictures Classics handles North American distribution, Warner Bros. releases in Spain and Mexico, and Curzon covers the U.K. and Ireland. The film has grossed around $3 million domestically in Spain since its March opening — more than The Room Next Door and Parallel Mothers managed, though well short of Pain and Glory.

As for whether he’ll return to English-language filmmaking, Almodóvar left the door open. “I would like to work again with Tilda and Julianne,” he said, referring to Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. “So, perhaps in the future there will be another movie in English.”

For now, though, he’s back in Spanish — and back on the Croisette, where the crowd still cheers him all the way out the door.

The post Almodóvar Gets 6.5-Min Ovation for ‘Bitter Christmas’ at Cannes appeared first on Cream.