George Clooney to join Steven Spielberg at star-studded Cannes Film Festival

By Helen Barlow

From George Clooney and Julia Roberts in Jodie Foster’s Money Monster, to Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling and Shane Black’s The Nice Guys, there will be no lack of Hollywood stars on the Cannes Croisette this year.

Hollywood titan Steven Spielberg will present his first Roald Dahl adaptation, the BFG, that reportedly harks back to his earlier masterpiece ET, while indie stalwart Jim Jarmusch will do double duty presenting Gimme Danger, a documentary on Iggy Pop, as well as Paterson, a small intimate film starring Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver which screens in the competition.

Like Foster, Sean Penn will undoubtedly again show considerable talent behind the camera in The Last Face, his second film in the Cannes competition after 2001’s The Pledge.

Charlize Theron and Javier Barden play humanitarian workers who fall in love in Africa. After filming Theron briefly became engaged to Penn, her longtime friend.

Ken Loach and Cillian Murphy the director and star of the 2006 Palme d’Or winning The Wind that Shakes the Barley could still be reunited in Cannes. But for the moment Loach is competing with I, Daniel Blake, his 16th film at the festival since his breakthrough film Kes screened in Critics’ Week in 1970.

Festival director Thierry Fremaux joked it will be the second time Loach, who turns 80 in June, presents his last film - after 2014’s Jimmy’s Hall - and describes the film which follows an injured carpenter and single mother struggling to get by on welfare, as “very Loach-ian”.

Murphy will most likely turn up next week in Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire when the announcements are made for the sidebar, Director’s Fortnight, where the director’s breakthrough black comedy, 2010’s Sightseers premiered.

His disappointing recent film, High-Rise, I’m told can be forgiven as Free Fire is very good. Produced by Martin Scorsese, the film is Wheatley’s homage to vintage crime movies and stars Oscar winner Brie Larson (from Lenny Abrahamson’s Room) as a woman who arranges a meeting between two trigger-happy Irishmen (Murphy and Northern Irish comic Michael Smiley) and a heavily armed gang.

It seems unlikely that Jim Sheridan’s The Secret Scripture, chronicling a young woman’s time in a mental institution, will make it to Cannes especially given that the Irish director has never debuted a film at the festival so is not part of the Cannes club.

In today’s announcements held at the Normandie cinema on the Champs Elysees, Festival President Pierre Lescure noted the youth emphasis at this year’s event.

Even Woody Allen with Café Society - his third film to open the festival - presents a story with young actors Kristin Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg, whom he says “symbolise the future of cinema”.

Certainly Stewart is already entrenched as part of Cannes royalty as the actress, who won a French Cesar (Oscar) for Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, reteams with the edgy French director for Personal Shopper, set in the demimonde of Paris fashion.

“She’s the queen of Cannes”, Fremaux declared.

The Lyon-born festival selector said they had to choose from 1,869 features from all around the world. While there were no Irish movies announced today the British are well represented.

Interesting though Andrea Arnold (who made Fishtank featuring a child-molesting Michael Fassbender) presents her first film to be set and filmed outside the UK, American Honey starring Shia Labeouf.

We wonder what hijinks the irascible American, who plugged his role as young Indie for Spielberg in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in Cannes 2008, might get up to at the festival this time.

Other highlights will undoubtedly include Paul Verhoeven’s French-language Elle starring Isabelle Huppert, Pedro Almodovar’s Julieta, Quebecois enfant terrible Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World starring Léa Seydoux, Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Los Angeles-set cannibal horror movie, The Neon Demon, featuring the Danish director’s first female protagonist, Elle Fanning.