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SOPÉ DÌRÍSÙ

May 21, 2025

Akinola Davies, Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, Efon Wini, Godwin Egbo, My Father’s Shadow, Sopé Dìrísù
hollywood authentic, cannes dispatch, cannes film festival, greg williams, hollywood authentic
Akinola Davies, Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, Efon Wini, Godwin Egbo, My Father’s Shadow, Sopé Dìrísù

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER

The Gangs Of London actor tells Hollywood Authentic about the special thrill of bringing the first Nigerian film to competition in Cannes and the emotion of filming My Father’s Shadow in Lagos.

Hollywood Authentic catches up with Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù at the Cannes Palais the day after his soulful and evocative ‘un certain regard’ film has premiered to rave reviews and celebrated with a party on the beach attended by Nigerian dignitaries. As we sit above the red carpet as Spike Lee’s latest film premieres below, Dìrísù smiles at the reaction to a project close to his heart as the child of Nigerian parents – and as exec producer on the film. ‘I think that people who have been to Lagos found there was a sensory experience to this film,’ he nods. ‘The redness of the earth… they said that they could smell and taste the food, you know? They could smell the cooking in the bukas, on the street corner. And they could feel the heat in the textures. It is a wonderful representation of the country.’

Akinola Davies, Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, Efon Wini, Godwin Egbo, My Father’s Shadow, Sopé Dìrísù

It certainly is. Akinola Davis Jr’s vivid, evocative film co-written with his brother Wale weaves through a vibrant Lagos in 1993, as a father (played by Dìrísù) shows his two pre-teen sons the teeming capital city during one eventful day as the election results that will change the country are announced. Filmed on location in Nigeria, Dìrísù found the experience very different from his trips to the country to visit family and friends. ‘I was delighted to be contributing to the history of Nigerian cinema and to be there on my own agency, personally. I’ve been back and forth from Nigeria a lot, but mainly for family reasons – weddings and birthdays and funerals, unfortunately. But I really felt great purpose being in the country, as opposed to being there on holiday. It made me feel like I was connecting with my community. And the big celebrations that have happened, not only in Nigeria but with Nigerians across the world, on the back of the success of this film have completely justified the way that I was feeling making it.’

Dìrísù plays the father to two real-life brothers, Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibiuke Marvellous Egbo, and as the story unravels the relationship between parent and children becomes more nuanced. The connection between the trio had to feel authentic and the actor recalls the detail he and his director paid to ensuring it worked. ‘It was a really interesting task that Akinola and I worked a lot on, because I think the stereotype of a Nigerian father is very harsh, patriarchal and somewhat dictatorial. But the truth of a lot of fatherhood is that it’s not just that. There’s also great tenderness and love there as well. It was really important that we spent as much time together as possible. Because if we didn’t have that intimacy, which is captured so beautifully in the film, then I don’t think the film would work as well, you know? You want these boys to yearn for their father in the same way that Nigeria is yearning for great leadership. Wale talks a lot about a dream deferred and plans unfulfilled, and how that is thematically in parallel between the domestic familial story and the one of the country. The boys couldn’t swim and we wanted to capture this beautiful beach sequence. So I remember there were nights when we were at the hotel together, where I would take them swimming. I would try to teach them to swim, or give them familiarity in the water. To get to that point where their mother entrusted me to take the boys swimming, look after them, entertain them off set – I think it speaks to the relationship that we were able to foster in the course of the film.’

Akinola Davies, Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, Efon Wini, Godwin Egbo, My Father’s Shadow, Sopé Dìrísù

As we watch the red carpet below, Dìrísù explains the importance of My Father’s Shadow breaking barriers by being the first Nigerian film in competition at the festival. ‘It’s not only what it means for me, but what it means to Nigeria and the community, in the country and in the diaspora. There has been such a remarkable celebration of it. We didn’t get to see the carpet when people came to see the film yesterday – but I was told there was a wonderful expression of the joy and the pride that those who have been able to travel to Cannes have had for the film. That same joy and pride, and that expressiveness, I’ve felt on social media. I’ve felt it in conversations. I think a lot of people are excited that Nigerian cinema and Nollywood – which are definable as two different things but ultimately go film in hand – is being celebrated on a global scale. Nigeria has such a rich, deep history of filmmaking, and it’s kind of a shame that it’s taken so long for it to be on a platform like this. But I’m delighted that we’re able to break through that ceiling, and forge the connections and the global collaborations that are necessary for this to have happened.’

Backed by Irish Element Pictures, Nigerian Fatherland, the BFI, the BBC, Match Factory and Le Pacte, production on this film was, he says, ‘truly a global effort and I hope that there can be more collaborations like that in the future.’ And what does he think of possibly winning the big ‘Un Certain Regard’ prize at the end of this week? He chuckles and shrugs. ‘The experience here is a reward enough…’

My Father’s Shadow premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Read our My Father’s Shadow review here
Ṣọpẹ́ wears Louis Vuitton

hollywood authentic, greg williams, hollywood authentic magazine

THE PLAGUE

May 20, 2025

Charlie Polinger, Everett Blunck, Kenny Rasmussen, Lennox Espy, The Plague, Joel Edgerton

Words by JANE CROWTHER

In his debut feature Charlie Polinger riffs on The Lord Of The Flies but makes it entirely his own and pertinent to today’s politics, social media pile-ons and the cowardice of allowing cruelty to another to ensure one’s own safe passage. An adolescent study in social hierarchy and coercion, The Plague is what the 12 and 13 year old boys at a 2003 water polo camp call the rash that one of their number has developed during the summer. Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) is a ‘weird kid’, and his skin condition is deemed to be highly contagious by ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) who has already bullied a boy over it in a previous summer session. When mild-mannered Ben (Everett Blunck) turns up, the fractured dynamics in his home and a speech impediment make him self-protect – he’d rather allow cruel taunts and ostracising than make a stand. Their coach (Joel Edgerton) is no ally anyway. A well-meaning man who sees unkindness as a right of passage based on his own high school experiences, he may shout at the group about compassion but he’s not willing or able to do anything about it.

Charlie Polinger, Everett Blunck, Kenny Rasmussen, Lennox Espy, The Plague, Joel Edgerton
Spooky Pictures

Foreboding sound design, score and cinematography make The Plague an uneasy watch from the start, the muffled underwater world of a swimming pool strafed with diving boys, the queasy chlorinated lighting of locker rooms and dark corners of a brutalist sports centre. This is a world of hard surfaces and no digital escape via cell phones or social media. The claustrophobic society created in the changing rooms and dorms is what we, and Ben, are stuck with as Jake smirkingly controls the group by picking apart any perceived weakness. Ben can’t pronounce his ‘t’s, cannot enunciate ‘stop’, so is christened ‘Soppy’ and ridiculed for his vegetarianism. It’s enough to not want to make him protest as Eli is humiliated in the lunch room, showers and, in a particularly vulnerable moment, when the arrival of girls causes an embarrassing reaction.

Polinger teases horribly recognisable performances out of his young cast; Blunck’s panic is infectious while Rasmussen is unexpected in every scene as a boy who is being bullied for being different but trying to own it. A moment where he dances like nobody’s watching (even though every one is) is heartbreaking and triumphant. But the standout is Martin who wears a knowing smile most of the time and has charisma to burn. Playing like a young Michael J Fox turned feral, he has a sweet face, a smart mouth and the instincts of a killer. The way his lips curl as he detects fallibility, ready to weaponise it, is the stuff that haunts all our memories of adolescence. And the ease with which his controlled community abuses a teammate is something we can all recognise in all social groups, both intimate and global. Ben’s ultimate question of ethics is one posed to every audience member.

Charlie Polinger, Everett Blunck, Kenny Rasmussen, Lennox Espy, The Plague, Joel Edgerton
Spooky Pictures

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photographs courtesy of SPOOKY PICTURES
The Plague premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival

MY FATHER’S SHADOW

May 20, 2025

Akinola Davies, Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, Efon Wini, Godwin Egbo, My Father’s Shadow, Sopé Dìrísù

Photography by LAKIN OGUNBANWO
Words by JANE CROWTHER

‘I will see you in dreams,’ says one of the delightfully cheeky children at the heart of this haunting tale of hindsight, loss, identity and love from Akinola Davis jr. The film, co-written by Davies and his brother, Wale, is like a vivid dream; loaded with so much evocative imagery that one can practically smell the food cooking in the teeming streets of Lagos, feel the heat from the dusty road and taste the salt of the beach where a key moment plays out. It is a loving portrait of both West Nigeria and a parent who comes sharply into focus when remembered on one adventurous day in 1993.

Akinola Davies, Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, Efon Wini, Godwin Egbo, My Father’s Shadow, Sopé Dìrísù
Lakin Ogunbanwo/BBC Films

The father in question, Fola (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), is largely absent from the lives of two brothers, Akin and Remi (Godwin Chimerie Egbo and Chibiuke Marvellous Egbo) who live in a rural town, constantly awaiting the return of both their parents from work. One day, as the wind whispers through the trees and fruit rots on the ground, Dad arrives home. As he moves through the house alighting on various personal possessions, he brusquely suggests his sons accompany him on his trip into the capital to collect money owed to him from shift work. The three of them squash into a bus for the journey but amid the petrol shortages and political unrest of the recent elections, it breaks down. Now begins the real odyssey, as the trio hitchhike to Lagos and are consumed within its messy, chaotic, bright and busy centre – zipping around on motorbikes, hanging out with Dad’s friends, visiting a closed-down fairground, watching the city hold its breath waiting for the election results in a bar as beer bottles sweat. 

Akinola Davies, Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, Efon Wini, Godwin Egbo, My Father’s Shadow, Sopé Dìrísù
Lakin Ogunbanwo/BBC Films

Daddy suffers from nosebleeds, has an unspoken past and is wary of the soldiers patrolling the streets with watchful eyes. His trauma and possible infidelity flutter within the periphery of a day that crystallises both boys’ image of their father. In their jumbled recollection Fola is a stern parent, a swimming teacher, a protector, a provider, hurt by his own childhood and filled with hope for better days, politically and personally. He feels so fully formed by all the aspects of himself coming together during this day, that a stunningly beautiful beach scene begins an emotional ache that lingers to the final, sorrowful moments. Throughout, decay and rot is catalogued via decaying fruit, bones, the circling of vultures – and once linked by a deft foreshadowing twist, Davis’ film packs real emotional punch.

Dìrísù is magnificent in a role that may see him on the same trajectory as Paul Mescal when he arrived in Cannes with Aftersun, ably supported by plucky performances by his young co-star brothers. The film also makes non-fiction history in being the first Nigerian film to be in competition at the festival, despite the power of Nollywood. And what a gorgeous, evocative, smart and tender portrait of Nigeria and a family it is.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photography by LAKIN OGUNBANWO
My Father’s Shadow premiered at the 78th Cannes film festival
Read our interview with Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù here

MIA THREAPLETON

May 19, 2025

Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Scarlett Johansson, The Phoenician Scheme, Tom Hanks, Wes Anderson
hollywood authentic, cannes dispatch, cannes film festival, greg williams, hollywood authentic
Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Scarlett Johansson, The Phoenician Scheme, Tom Hanks, Wes Anderson

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER

The British actor who leads Wes Anderson’s latest ensemble tells Hollywood Authentic about landing her role in The Phoenician Scheme and experiencing her inaugural Cannes.

Attending the Cannes Film Festival for the first time is ‘adrenaline-pinching’ according to Mia Threapleton. ‘It does feel quite daunting, primarily because I’ve not done that many red carpet things ever, actually,’ she laughs. ‘But it is also incredibly exciting and amazing that that is where the film is going to be seen by so many people for the first time. That, for me, is the most exciting thing.’

Though she has been acting for a while – impressing in BAFTA winning I Am Ruth and last year’s The Buccaneers – Threapleton takes centre stage in Wes Anderson’s all-star latest where she plays Liesl, the pipe-smoking, sardonic, nun daughter of Benicio Del Toro’s business mogul. It promises to be a performance and project that skyrockets her. ‘It was actually a very intense auditioning process over about six months,’ she recalls of pursuing the role. ‘The first email I was sent was extremely scant. There was no information on the character. The only name as far as the character that I had to go off was ‘young girl’. I self-taped and several meetings down the line, I had a screen test, and met the wonderful Benicio del Toro. [Anderson] gave me a little bit of an explanation: ‘You haven’t seen your father for six years, and you’ve lived in a convent for the majority of the life that you can remember living. You have some very full-on, unanswered questions…’ And I found out 24 hours later that I had the job.’

Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Scarlett Johansson, The Phoenician Scheme, Tom Hanks, Wes Anderson

That job saw the 24 year-old joining a cast including many of Anderson’s repeat collaborators including Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeffery Wright – and a steep learning curve in the director’s inimitable style. ‘He does have a very particular style. But, actually, when it comes to the acting, he really loves things to be as natural as possible. There’s lots of other opportunities within the scene to try a couple of different beats. So what you end up seeing is basically one of the many, many versions that we do. I think 20 takes was maybe our absolute lowest. On one of our first days, we did 69 takes.’ The experience was something she says she’s still getting her head around. ‘It just feels so surreal and equally amazing to have been able to have been a part of something like this with all the people – unbelievably talented people – cast, crew members, camera team, film team, props team, sound design, set design. I don’t think it really sunk in.’

Though Threapleton is the daughter of Kate Winslet, working with such a group of established actors must have provided plenty of useful instruction on how to navigate the precarious waters of acting. She laughs and recalls how she would observe her castmates in action to learn, even on her days off. ‘I would cycle into set and hide under tables, or Wes would point at a plant pot, and say, ‘Go hide over there. That’s a good place to hide today’. I remember having a really lovely conversation with Michael Cera, who plays Professor Bjorn. It was during a scene where we’re sat in a train car talking to each other, and then outside there’s everyone else playing basketball: Benicio, Brian [Cranston], Riz [Ahmed], Tom [Hanks]. I remember Michael turning to me and going, ‘This is so amazing. This is never going to happen again. This is crazy’. We just sat looking at each other, laughing; ‘What are we doing here? This is insane.’ It felt like summer camp every day.’

She recently saw the film ahead of its Cannes premiere and was amazed anew by the calibre of the cast and project. ‘The second that the opening credits rolled, I burst into tears. I couldn’t really believe what it was that I was seeing. There’s so much excitement, adrenaline and anticipation for seeing something like this, that everybody worked so hard on, and that you really care about. And it was so surreal watching this thing in front of me – ‘Oh God, that’s my face. That’s a lot of my face. Oh my God!’ It was overwhelming in the most amazing way possible.’

Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Scarlett Johansson, The Phoenician Scheme, Tom Hanks, Wes Anderson

With a second series of The Buccaneers in the can, Threapleton is aware that Cannes will be a moment that could change her career and opportunities. So what projects is she looking for in the wake of her festival debut? ‘I don’t know if I really have a bucket list. What excites me so much about this job is the amount of incredible, creative people that are out there who want to tell really cool stories.’ Hollywood Authentic wonders how her perception of the industry has changed since her first experience of filming as a little girl on Alan Rickman’s A Little Chaos. ‘I don’t think it’s changed, and I don’t think it will change. I just feel like a little sponge with everything. Then I was just wanting to absorb all of it and I still do now. I like the fact that I still have so many things to learn.’ 

As a child who grew up with a working understanding of acting, has she ever been given advice that has helped her on her journey so far? ‘“Actually, I didn’t grow up with an understanding of acting necessarily. I really didn’t grow up on a film set at all. I can count on both hands the amount of times I went into work as a kid. But I think I was always just told, you know, ‘Do the work. Work hard on it, and concentrate’. I’ve tried to do that as best I can.’

The Phoenician Scheme premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
Mia wears Oscar de la Renta

hollywood authentic, greg williams, hollywood authentic magazine

JENNIFER LAWRENCE

May 18, 2025

Die, Jennifer Lawrence, LaKeith Stanfield, Lynne Ramsay, My Love, Nick Nolte, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek
hollywood authentic, cannes dispatch, cannes film festival, greg williams, hollywood authentic
Die, Jennifer Lawrence, LaKeith Stanfield, Lynne Ramsay, My Love, Nick Nolte, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek
Die, Jennifer Lawrence, LaKeith Stanfield, Lynne Ramsay, My Love, Nick Nolte, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER

Jennifer Lawrence’s abrasive new film – which she co-produced and stars in – may not reflect her own experience of motherhood, but the choice to take it on was certainly informed by it. Lawrence made the movie about postpartum psychosis with filmmaker Lynne Ramsay between having her two children (she was five months pregnant during filming) and told Cannes press that ‘having children changes everything. It changes your whole life, but it’s brutal and incredible’. The project, she said, ‘deeply moved’ her.

Die, Jennifer Lawrence, LaKeith Stanfield, Lynne Ramsay, My Love, Nick Nolte, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek
Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence

In the film Lawrence plays Grace, a young woman who moves into an isolated Montana farmhouse with her boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson), where she falls pregnant. When the baby arrives Grace is locked in a rinse-and-repeat pattern of feeding and changing while Jackson goes off the work, her writing ambition stalled and her grip on reality growing tenuous. Filled with rage, frustration and the need to be seen as a sexual being and not just a mother, Grace becomes erratic and violent, confounding her partner and his recently widowed mother (Sissy Spacek). Conjuring a sexual fantasy with a mysterious biker (LaKeith Stanfield) and desperate to feel something – pain, orgasm, passion – other than the numbness of a mothering routine, she wants to set her world alight. As the end credits song (performed by Ramsay) attests, ‘Love will tear us apart’… 

Die, Jennifer Lawrence, LaKeith Stanfield, Lynne Ramsay, My Love, Nick Nolte, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek
Lynne Ramsay

Though Grace finds motherhood opens her up to self-destruction and chaos, Lawrence says that her children have helped her access more of herself as an actor. ‘I didn’t know that I could feel so much, and my job has a lot to do with emotion, and they’ve opened up the world to me. It’s almost like a blister or something, so sensitive. So they’ve changed my life, obviously, for the best, and they’ve changed me creatively. I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.’

The film is certainly something of a tour de force for Lawrence who spits, fights, claws and crawls through the role like a feral creature, Grace’s fantasies overlapping and pushing against her reality. It is a fever-dream representation of the confusion, fear and delirium of post-partum depression and psychosis which the actor admitted was a terrifying condition for any woman to experience. ‘There’s not really anything like postpartum… it’s extremely isolating. The truth is extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating no matter where you are. You feel like an alien.’

Die, Jennifer Lawrence, LaKeith Stanfield, Lynne Ramsay, My Love, Nick Nolte, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek

The film premiered to a nine-minute ovation in Cannes and looks to be another role that could net Lawrence awards buzz. The actor attended wearing custom Dior, an updated version of a 1949 Poulenc gown inspired by fans, and was photographed by Greg Williams in a rooftop suite of the Carlton Hotel overlooking the Croisette.

Die, My Love premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival

hollywood authentic, greg williams, hollywood authentic magazine

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER

May 18, 2025

Imogen Poots, Jim Belushi, Kristen Stewart, The Chronology of Water, Thora Birch

Words by JANE CROWTHER

No bodily fluid is left untouched in Kristen Stewart’s raw, unflinching poem to wetness, adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir. Adapted (with Andy Mingo) and directed by the actor with Imogen Poots as Stewart’s front-of-camera proxy playing Lidia, it charts the non-linear, tortured path of a girl who is sexually abused by her father and finds sanctity in the chlorinated depths of her school swim team. Her prowess in the pool is what sets her free to some degree, taking her away from a somnambulist mother and her father’s fingers to college where sex, drugs and the healing power of writing led to pregnancy, addiction, self destruction and the redemption of art. And always there is immersion in water: in baths, lakes, pools, showers, rain. ‘In water, like in books,’ Lidia intones in one of many overlapping, murmured voiceovers offered like dream-state remembrances, ‘you can leave your life.’

Imogen Poots, Jim Belushi, Kristen Stewart, The Chronology of Water, Thora Birch

Told in four chapters, it explores the legacy of trauma, the physical/emotional pain of losing a child, BDSM and the difficulty and release of becoming an artist. A writer from childhood, Lidia’s confronting prose finds purpose when she joins a writer’s class with author Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) at the University Of Oregon. But can she trust an older man who values her work? Or is he another predatory male? And does the sweet college boy who becomes her partner (Earl Cave) deserve the disdain she literally spits in his face?

Impressionistic yet graphic, The Chronology of Water shows a woman experiencing all her body is capable of: female ejaculation, excretion, birth, orgasm, destruction. And It seems that Stewart pours all of the teaching she’s gained from the dazzling array of filmmakers she’s worked with as an actor into the production of a woozy, elemental, bruising mood piece that is like its protagonist; messy, unbridled, in need of structure. Stewart has described her film presented to Cannes as a ‘first draft’ and in that regard it could use some corralling; but equally, like Lidia, it shows fierce potential. As Kesey notes, ‘you can write, girl’.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photography courtesy of Scott Free Productions
The Chronology of Water premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival

EDDINGTON

May 17, 2025

Ari Aster, Austin Butler, Eddington, Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix, Luke Grimes, Pedro Pascal

Words by JANE CROWTHER

‘Hindsight,’ runs Eddington’s tagline on its poster depicting buffalo tumbling off the side of a cliff, ‘is 2020’. For Ari Aster’s latest, that means training his quirky eye on America, linking where we are now to events of 2020 when Covid bred paranoia, conspiracy and MAGA like a socio-polical petri dish. Popping the pandemic in a neo-noir Western set in the appellative New Mexico town during May of that year, Aster picks at virtue signalling, bandwagonning, social media, fake news, radicalisation, trauma and first amendment jingoism via the moral and emotional meltdown of the town sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix).

Ari Aster, Austin Butler, Eddington, Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix, Luke Grimes, Pedro Pascal

A mild-mannered chap in a fraught marriage to his doll-making, damaged wife Lou (Emma Stone) and living with his conspiracist mother-in-law (Deidre O’Connell), Joe is law-abiding until medical mandates come around. An asthma-sufferer, the sheriff does not believe anyone should wear a mask if they don’t want to (or that Covid is a real threat) and clashes with mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). The two men have history involving Lou and Joe is fired up enough to run for office against his romantic rival, leaning into NRA/MAGA sentiments and further losing his rag when Lou brings home a charismatic cult leader (Austin Butler) and gazes at him in a way she hasn’t looked at her husband in many moons. Suddenly, this is no longer a movie in the vein of John Sayles’ Lone Star and takes an Asterian turn to something darker, more febrile and explosively ludicrous. As Aster films go, it’s less challenging than the big swings of Beau Is Afraid but not as startlingly fresh as Hereditary. 

Ari Aster, Austin Butler, Eddington, Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix, Luke Grimes, Pedro Pascal
Ari Aster, Austin Butler, Eddington, Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix, Luke Grimes, Pedro Pascal

Peppered with as many fatalities as delicious performances, Eddington is surprisingly droll, luridly violent and has the prescience to use a Katy Perry song in a film that worries about the potential stranglehold of big tech in all aspects of life. (The proposed data bank that promises infrastructure and jobs for the area looms throughout as bellwether commentators warn of political control, ecological impact and wealth disparity.) There’s gallows humour to be found as characters declare Covid is ‘not a here problem’, espouse the virtues of Bitcoin and watch TikTok videos as news. The ranting homeless man who staggers into town at the start muttering incoherently about perceived wickedness is no longer the anomaly as ideologies burn brighter, fuelled by misinformation, frustration and ultimately,  actually gasoline.

This is an accomplished cast so it’s no surprise that Phoenix holds focus despite playing an insubstantial man with shifting morals, ably supported by Pascal (stoic), Stone (fragile), Butler (scene-stealingly slithery) and Michael Ward, faultless as an ambitious sheriff department officer who becomes a pawn. Nothing so horrific as the decapitation of Hereditary, but Eddington offers a seething discomfort in recognising the start of the slip towards the dumpster-fire rolling-news reality we now live in. Which is truly terrifying.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photography courtesy of A24
Eddington premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival

HALLOW ROAD

May 16, 2025

Babak Anvari, Hallow Road, Matthew Rhys, Megan McDonnell, Rosamund Pike

Words by JANE CROWTHER

Student Alice is used to being picked up and brushed off by her parents whenever she stumbles. Though we never see her, we hear and know about her via her parents; over-protective Frank (Matthew Rhys) and his exasperated paramedic wife Maddie (Rosamund Pike). Early in the small hours, Alice calls her sleep-deprived mum in a panic – she has taken her dad’s car and driven to the titular road in a nearby forest where she’s accidentally knocked over a pedestrian. The parents jump into Maddie’s car to reach her, their SatNav informing them of the distance to reach their daughter while an increasingly upset Alice keeps them abreast over the speakerphone of the terrible, fatal mess she’s got herself into. 

Babak Anvari, Hallow Road, Matthew Rhys, Megan McDonnell, Rosamund Pike
Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Essentially a real-time bottle episode in the vein of Locke, Hallow Road then unfurls, one mile and minute at a time, in the car as the couple struggle to help their child remotely, question their parenting and reveal the fractured family dynamic that preceded Alice storming out of the house earlier. And as the country roads become more labyrinthine and dark, a folk horror aspect begins to hover over proceedings as both parents’ psychological secrets come to the fore. 

Hallow Road starts with a warning – a battery depleted smoke alarm chirruping – and grows in tension and disquiet as Rhys and Pike master myriad emotions while the green dashboard light casts a queasy hue over their distraught faces. To give more detail would be to spoil, but if you’re familiar with director Babak Anvari’s previous work in Under The Shadow, the fact that the crisis at the start of this thriller morphs to something more primal and primordial at its close should come as no surprise. Like the fraught relationship between parents and daughter (voiced by Megan McDonnell), there is something else going on in the trees – what exactly is open to interpretation by each viewer. And, based on a post-credit sting, those interpretations will not necessarily align. 

Playing like a lost episode of Inside No 9, this disorientating, brisk thriller is an easy way to spend 80 minutes this weekend while also opening conversations of guilt, grief, helicopter parenting and the inherent creepiness of deep, dark woods.

Babak Anvari, Hallow Road, Matthew Rhys, Megan McDonnell, Rosamund Pike
Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images © 2025 Universal Pictures
Hallow Road is in cinemas now

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING

May 15, 2025

Angela Bassett, Christopher McQuarrie, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Pom Klementieff, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames

Words by JANE CROWTHER

In case you missed the previous instalment, The Final Reckoning begins by ensuring viewers are on the right page with this adventure, kicking off a couple of months after the events of Tom Cruise’s 2023 summer blockbuster. Now Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) hair is longer, his tech whiz Luther (Ving Rhames) is ill and the rogue AI threat, The Entity, has plunged the world into chaos. The Entity plans to initiate a world wipeout via armageddon by taking control of the nuclear codes of all nations, the only way to stop it is to retrieve its source code from the bottom of the Arctic ocean where it’s trapped in a crashed Russian sub (seen in Dead Reckoning) and then play out a complicated game of digi cat-and-mouse. The only person who can complete this mission is Hunt – appealed to by the US president (Angela Bassett) – and the thorn in his side is Big Bad Gabriel (Esai Morales) who holds a vital piece of the plan. The mission is literally world-saving and it triggers Hunt’s memories of all the people he’s lost and all the crazy stuff he’s done across seven previous films. Cruise and his co-conspirator/producer/director Christopher McQuarrie set this chapter up as a swan song (but is it really?), and ensure it goes out with a bang.

Angela Bassett, Christopher McQuarrie, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Pom Klementieff, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Angela Bassett, Christopher McQuarrie, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Pom Klementieff, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

As is now expected of Cruise, The Final Reckoning ups the ante on stunts that its star completes personally, his face clearly visible as his body is battered by water and G-force. While there’s plenty of globetrotting, trademark running, mask removal, double crossing and bomb defusing, the big ticket here are two set-pieces in which Cruise and cinematic innovation are pushed to their limits. After a series of fights and escapes, Hunt embarks on solo deep diving to the Russian submarine, his chance of drowning immeasurable due to depth, location, temperature. Add to that a sub that is glitchy and moving on the Baring seabed, and the sequence becomes literally breathtaking as Hunt is trapped in the oceanic version of a freezing washing machine as his oxygen depletes. The production built the world’s deepest and largest water tank at Longcross studios and devised new diving masks to show Cruise’s face to complete the scenes for real, and it translates. It’s a claustrophobic, teeth-clenching watch.

Angela Bassett, Christopher McQuarrie, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Pom Klementieff, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

It’s no spoiler to mention the finale – promotion quite rightfully leans hard into the vintage bi-plane sequence which see Cruise clinging to the spindly wings of not one, but two different swooping, diving and barrelling planes with South Africa’s stunning Drakensberg Mountains flying beneath him. His face flapping in the G-force, his body weightless as the planes invert, this is another breath snatching moment (certainly for Cruise trying to suck a breath in hurricane-level wind resistance) and provides some much needed levity. There’s a reason Hunt is costumed like Indiana Jones at this point – it’s the sort of delirious der-doing that evokes classic cinema. It’s worth the ticket price alone.

Angela Bassett, Christopher McQuarrie, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Pom Klementieff, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Though the extended IMF team play a part in proceedings (a bow-out adds emotional resonance), they are certainly second fiddle, facilitators to the Hunt show. That may disappoint fans who enjoyed the previous spike of Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff). Via additional characters the movie champions the unpredictability of human nature, the concept of being on the right side of history despite the rules, the celebration of the rebel, the maverick. That’s seen in Bassett’s POTUS, Hannah Waddington’s aircraft carrier Admiral and Tramell Tillman’s sub captain who likes to call everyone ‘mister’ (bringing Jeff Goldblum levels of deliciously unexpected line delivery). But the star is certainly Cruise, his previous M:I incarnations celebrated in flashback montages and his character praised continuously by his team. ‘Only you can do this,’ he is constantly told, and when you see Cruise dangling off the corner of a vintage Boeing Stearman as it flips around a canyon, you might have to agree.

Angela Bassett, Christopher McQuarrie, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Pom Klementieff, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images © 2025 Paramount Pictures
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning played at Cannes Film Festival and will release in cinemas on 21 May

TOM CRUISE

May 15, 2025

Christopher McQuarrie, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Greg Williams, Hollywood Authentic
hollywood authentic, cannes dispatch, cannes film festival, greg williams, hollywood authentic
Christopher McQuarrie, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Greg Williams, Hollywood Authentic

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER

As he prepares to release his eighth (and final?) instalment of the Mission: Impossible series, Tom Cruise brings the action to Cannes.

Just as he brought Top Gun: Maverick to Cannes in 2022, the world’s biggest movie star returned to the Croisette this year to deliver his eighth Mission: Impossible film, The Final Reckoning, to the Palais. Stopping to sign autographs and greet fans on the red carpet (where an acapella group sang the film’s theme tune), Cruise’s latest actioner garnered a 6 minute standing ovation when it premiered. 

Christopher McQuarrie, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Greg Williams, Hollywood Authentic

Earlier in the day he made an unbilled appearance at a Q&A with Mission director Christopher McQuarrie who credited the actor/producer with keeping him in the film business. Cruise’s enthusiasm for cinema, McQuarrie told the crowd, was a turning point. ‘When I met him, I was going to quit the business.’ The duo have made 11 films together since and have developed a shorthand together figuratively, and on the latest film, literally – as Cruise completed death defying stunts while underwater in a groundbreaking submarine set as well as dangling from the wings of a vintage bi-plane over South Africa’s Drakensberg Mountains.

Final Reckoning rejoins the narrative a few months after the action of Dead Reckoning as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt comes to terms with losses from their team and the fallout of an agent called Gabriel (Esai Morales) trying to control an AI programme called ‘the entity’. The team must reassemble to find the source code for the AI in an attempt to stop it from triggering all-out global nuclear war. Known for completing his stunts himself, Cruise is battered in a rolling submarine on the ocean floor and fights negative Gs and incredible physical strain on his body on the wings of a vintage Boeing Stearman. During their joint on-stage chat, McQuarrie admitted that at one point during filming he didn’t know if the actor was conscious or not during a take, fearing for his life as the pilot could not land the plane with him on the wing. Luckily, Cruise rallied, climbed to the cockpit and the plane and performer landed safely. 

Not such worries at the Carlton hotel on the Croisette when Greg Williams photographed Cruise balancing on a chair in his suite before walking the red carpet… 

Christopher McQuarrie, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Greg Williams, Hollywood Authentic

Mission: Impossible, The Final Reckoning is in cinemas in the UK and Europe 21 May, and in the USA 23 May

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