Xan Brooks

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Xan Brooks

The collaboration between Spike Lee and Denzel Washington has spanned four decades and tackled many aspects of African American life. But Lee feels their latest venture, the kidnap drama Highest 2 Lowest, will probably be the duo’s swansong. “This is the fifth one we’ve done together,” Lee said after the picture’s premiere at the Cannes film festival. “It has been a blessing, this body of work between us, doing films that people love. And I think this is it. He’s been talking about retirement.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Xan Brooks

The sea takes many forms in fiction. It was an adventure playground in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and a rowdy neighbour in Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. It played the wine-dark seducer in Homer’s Odyssey and the snot-green tormentor in Joyce’s Ulysses. But while its colour can change and its humour may vary, its fictional properties remain reassuringly stable. The sea is our unconscious, a repository of memory, the beginning and end of all things.

2 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | Xan Brooks

Amid a mood of unease in week one of the festival, a bruising Stalinist drama and the thunderous latest Mission Impossible settle the nerves, while jury president Juliette Binoche reminisces with our writer about her comical Cannes past At the opening press conference for the Cannes film festival, the stars sing the praises of the event we’re attending. It’s a temple for the arts, the celebrity jurors inform us. It’s a beacon of light in a dark, troubled world.

3 weeks ago | belfasttelegraph.co.uk | Xan Brooks

New drama ‘Good One’ follows a father and daughter on a fraught hiking trip in New York’s Catskills. Xan Brooks looks at an emerging sub-genre of films – and the death of a long-held American traditionThere’s nowhere to run to in American films any more. The wide open spaces grow narrower by the day. The once impenetrable forests have been carved up for logging, while the prairies are lost to soybean crops and stripmalls.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Xan Brooks

On the opening night of the Cannes film festival, Robert De Niro takes the stage to accept an honorary Palme d’Or. He embraces Leonardo DiCaprio, turns to the mic and lets fly: celebrating the event as a haven for art, democratic, inclusive and therefore a threat to autocrats and fascists. His speech is fiery and combative, but the adoring response leaves him shaken: he has to blink and regroup. At one point, I think, he might have even welled up.