Cannes looks beyond Hollywood as US film-makers mostly fail to make the grade

The 79th edition of the influential festival boasts an auteur-heavy lineup – with one, very big, country conspicuous by its almost total absence Gillian Anderson and Cara Delevingne to hit Cannes as auteur heavyweights dominate festival lineup Has Europe fallen out of love with the US? Has Cannes fallen out of love with Hollywood? Will the festival, like Nato, become a non-American institution? Either way, the annual announcement of the Cannes selection has revealed a list that skews away from Hollywood towards a renewed dominance of world-cinema auteurs and heavy hitters, including Pedro Almodovar, Cristian Mungiu and Asghar Farhadi. There’s certainly nothing to compare with last year’s Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible extravaganza, although there are directorial debuts out of competition for Andy Garcia (also starring) with his crime drama Diamond, and John Travolta directs Propeller One-Way Night Coach, expressing his love of aviation, based on his own novel. There are no Britis...

‘You think God didn’t make gay men?’ Comedian Leslie Jones on religion, grief and getting famous at 47

She was Saturday Night Live’s oldest hire, then faced a torrent of abuse after her role in the Ghostbusters reboot. She talks about the deaths of her mum, dad and brother – and why she’s given up dating men

It’s early evening in a photography studio in west London, and the American comedian Leslie Jones is capering about, dressed in a full-length gold lamé ballgown and smoking. “Make me look skinny,” she says to the photographer’s departing back.

“I’m 6ft tall – I can’t cut my feet off,” she says, later. “I can’t stop being a scary motherfucker. This is who I am – let me work with who I am.” Yet, she is the opposite of scary. Statuesque, no question, but whatever she’s doing, whether peering into a bag of fish and chips as if it’s alive, or telling her assistant to read The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s trust-the-universe novel, for the 100th time, there is always somebody laughing. She brings an air of deliberate chaos, which you just have to surrender to, wherever the conversation leads, until you find yourself nodding along with the most crackpot conclusion. (The birthrate is low because men spend too much time in hot tubs, and their sperm has become lazy and complacent? “It’s funny, but it’s true. Go look that shit up – I’m not saying something that’s not factual. I hope.”)

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