Actor Harrison Ford cracked the box-office whip as his latest Indiana Jones movie grossed a hefty -million from its first day in North American theatres. That bodes well for a movie industry looking to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to help shake the movie business out an early summer slump.
A lack of memorable movies mean the 2008 Cannes film festival is unlikely to live long in the minds of many critics, who argue that after a solid start the main competition faded. With four out of 22 films in the main competition this year yet to screen, critics and journalists struggled to come up with many highlights.
Back after 19 years, the new Indiana Jones film premiered at Cannes. Charlotte Higgins reports from the festival.
<b>BLOCKBUSTER OF THE WEEK</b>: Peter Bradshaw reviews <i>Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</i>.
While a frenzy was building amid the sea of fans massed to glimpse Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford and the rest of the stars at the world premiere on Sunday, a healthy scepticism was building up at the Cannes festival among film critics who would assess the merits of the movie on show.
When to slow down and retire? For most people in their 60s the decision is a no-brainer — the sooner the better. But in the rare air of movie stardom, where careers are fuelled by a mix of talent, ego, vanity and, sometimes, cosmetic surgery, it seems to be a far harder decision.
Kicking kung-fu pandas and a chilling Brazilian vision of the apocalypse: the Cannes film festival kicked off on Wednesday blending fun with philosophy, and Hollywood blockbusters with arthouse fare. The world release of the latest long-awaited episode of whip-cracking Indiana Jones is set to be the star act of the 12-day film bonanza.
The items are like a march through some of the most famous moments in 20th-century American history, some of them real, some of them cinematic: from the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald to the filming of Citizen Kane. But destiny is calling for the owner of the 850 lots that went under the auctioneer’s hammer over the weekend in a casino in Las Vegas.