CANNES, France, May 25 (Reuters) – “Twilight” star Robert
Pattinson is a ruthless billionaire on a journey to
self-destruction in Canadian director David Cronenberg’s
“Cosmopolis”, a searing attack on greed and capitalism launching
at the Cannes film festival.

In the movie based on a Don DeLillo novel of the same name,
capitalism is corrupting, characters cannot communicate, and
people joke that rats could be the new currency. The film is
competing for the festival’s top prize to be awarded on Sunday.

PARIS, May 24 (Reuters) – With respected French designer
Jean Paul Gaultier a member of the Cannes jury this year,
celebrities at the swanky film festival on the French Riviera
knew they had to step up their fashion game.

They did not disappoint.

Despite occasionally rainy weather that soaked the red
carpet and a no-show from Hollywood glamour puss Angelina Jolie,
the festival has featured colour, kilts and cut-outs – a wide
array of to-the-minute fashions worn by film stars gathered from
around the world.

CANNES, May 23 (Reuters) – The Bible of the Beat Generation,
“On the Road” premiered at Cannes on Wednesday, taking more than
five decades for the frenetic tale of liberation, masculinity
and post-War America to play out its journey from novel to the
big screen.

Furiously written on a typewriter over a three-week long
creative binge in 1951, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is the
seminal portrayal of “Beat” culture and its spiritual quest for
expression.

CANNES (Reuters) – Ken Loach provides more than a wee dram of humor and Scottish charm undercut by working class realities with his new film “The Angels’ Share”, which premieres in Cannes on Tuesday, about a Glasgow delinquent who finds a way out through whisky.

Although Angels’ Share is a feel-good film, and is marketed as a comedy, the Scottish picture written by Paul Laverty carries a strong social message that comes to the defense of unemployed youth left with little chance of a better life.

PARIS (Reuters) – Take 15 well-known French theatre and film actors, add a classic Greek legend and voila, you have the makings of the latest Cannes offering from French director Alain Resnais.

“Vous N’Avez Encore Rien Vu” (You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet) is an art-house film within a film that relies heavily on its ensemble cast, whose members include Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, Anne Consigny and Lambert Wilson.

CANNES, France (Reuters) – Syringes of infected blood, festering sores and sterile white labs are the images of “Antiviral”, as young film maker Brandon Cronenberg borrows themes of disease and bodily transformation that have made his father David king of the body horror genre.

“Pass the sick bag, there’s another Cronenberg on the block” read the headline of the Hollywood Reporter’s review after the film debuted at the Cannes film festival, part of the “Un Certain Regard” competition for emerging directors.

CANNES, France (Reuters) – It is a subject rarely tackled in cinema, but Austria’s Michael Haneke forces us to confront the reality that will befall us all – the end of life – in “Love”, his beautiful and devastating film at Cannes.

The French-language feature “Amour” follows an elderly married couple, former music teachers, who are enjoying a comfortable retirement in Paris before Anne, played by Emmanuelle Riva, suffers a stroke.

CANNES (Reuters) – The Cannes film festival took time out from the movies to raise money for Haiti on Friday night, with Sean Penn at the helm pleading the humanitarian cause at a celebrity gala.

“Okay, room. Haiti is watching us tonight like you cannot believe,” Penn told the black-tie crowd who had paid up to $100,000 for a table at the “Carnival in Cannes”, just steps from the famous red carpet.

CANNES, France (Reuters) – Just who exploits and who is exploited in the sex tourism industry is the question asked in director Ulrich Seidl’s “Paradise Love”, a powerful and unsettling exploration of female loneliness and economic imbalance in Africa.

Called “Paradies: Liebe”, the German-language movie is in competition at the Cannes film festival and had its world premiere on Friday.

CANNES (Reuters) – Obsession with celebrity is the focus of Italian director Matteo Garrone’s new movie “Reality” at the Cannes film festival, one of two pictures in the lineup exploring the corrosive power of instant fame and the desire to be watched.

Garrone is best known for his last film, the gritty “Gomorrah” about a Naples crime syndicate. But with “Reality” he switches gears, creating a modern day fairy tale whose protagonist’s soul is slowly and inexorably eroded by the lure of fame.