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

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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...
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Zero review – Senegalese time-bomb thriller is a blast

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An American wakes up on a Dakar bus to find an explosive device strapped to his chest in Jean Luc Herbulot’s propulsive and strikingly shot action thriller

Set in Senegal’s capital Dakar, this action thriller is so strikingly shot, so propulsively edited and so confident in its tonal shifts that by the end viewers are likely to feel enervated and stunned, but in a good way. It has one of those literal ticking-time-bomb narratives; a corny device to be sure, but one that Congolese writer-director Jean Luc Herbulot, with assistance from main actor and co-writer Hus Miller, manipulates in fresh and interesting ways. Certainly it will inspire some viewers to take a plunge into Herbulot’s back catalogue, which includes festival-anointed gangster-horror flick Saloum, another adept genre mash-up set in Senegal.

The conceit here is that Miller’s white, American-accented unnamed protagonist, called simply #1 in freeze-framed titles, wakes up on a Dakar bus with a sophisticated bomb strapped to his chest that is set to go off in 10 hours’ time. The bomb is connected to a countdown-displaying mobile phone, and a young woman sitting nearby explains to him that he needs to put a Bluetooth earpiece in his ear and answer when he hears the phone ring. When it does, a croaky American-accented voice (Willem Dafoe, no less!) explains that #1 has a number of chores to perform that day before the bomb goes off.

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