Cannes

George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and other members of the all-star caper Ocean’s Thirteen made off with millions at Cannes ahead of the movie’s red-carpet premiere on Thursday. The A-list cast raised ,2-million at an exclusive charity bash for Sudanese uprooted by the savage conflict in Darfur.

The Cannes Film Festival opens on Wednesday with a mix of arthouse movie making and raw star power fitting for cinema’s greatest showcase, which turns 60 this year. Chinese director Wong Kar Wai, best known in the West for In The Mood For Love, brings My Blueberry Nights” to the palm-lined Riviera resort.

A summit intended to strengthen ties between Africa and former colonial power France opened on Thursday but all eyes will be on a subject not on the agenda — Sudan’s battered Darfur province. The United Nations Security Council has proposed sending peacekeepers to secure Darfur’s border area, but UN officials say there must first be peace.

Asia’s passion for singing and karaoke may be legendary, but now Asians are so enamoured of Western opera that Europe’s music academies are bursting at the seams with young Korean and Chinese opera students with stars in their eyes. ”The Koreans are mad about opera,” Christophe Capacci, the new artistic director for classical music and jazz at Midem.

A knot of police officers rush into a burning office building to evacuate survivors. They hear a hellish rumble above and dash for haven in an elevator vestibule as the structure collapses around them. So begins Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, the first 25 minutes of which was previewed at the Cannes Film Festival.

A searing indictment of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi wrapped into a tender story of one man’s bid to overcome failure won a rapturous welcome from Cannes critics on Monday. Director Nanni Moretti’s film was released in March, just before the elections in which the conservative Berlusconi was narrowly ousted after five years in office.

Sex — in many forms and, in at least one case, unsimulated — is heating up screens at the Cannes film festival, confirming the event’s reputation for taboo-busting fare. About five films in the official selection alone have already shown enough nudity to mark them for mature audiences only, and one, Shortbus, by United States director John Cameron Mitchell, blurred the boundary between pornography and art with its actors engaged in real intercourse.

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar went back to his roots on Friday, paying homage to his mother and all women in his haunting film Volver, already hotly-tipped for the coveted Palme d’Or prize. Penélope Cruz gives a stunning performance as a young, hardworking mother who has to confront the ghosts of her past.

Critics on Wednesday crucified Hollywood’s hotly awaited film of the runaway bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, ahead of its glittering premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Several disappointed whistles were all that greeted the end of Ron Howard’s -million film, and, even worse, the 2 000-strong audience even burst out laughing at the movie’s key moment.

Tom Hanks and the other stars of The Da Vinci Code were to arrive in Cannes on Tuesday ahead of an exclusive preview screening of the movie version of the bestselling novel by Dan Brown. This was to effectively raise the curtain on the Cannes film festival a day early this year.

Tetsuya Wakuda went to Australia 24 years ago in search of kangaroos and koala bears. What he found instead were ocean trout and octopus, two of the local ingredients that inspired his ground-breaking cooking style. In recognition of his singular impact on Australian cuisine he was last week named personality of the year along with French chef Pierre Gagnaire and British wine writer Hugh Johnson.