Coppola’s passion project screens at Cannes film festival to seven-minute standing ovation, but reviews have been polarising

After 40 years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project Megalopolis has finally premiered at Cannes film festival – to polarising reviews that have variously called the film “staggeringly ambitious”, “absolute madness”, and “bafflingly shallow”.

Megalopolis, which screened at Cannes on Thursday night to a seven-minute standing ovation, was once considered a pipe dream for its years of false starts and abandoned shoots as well as its baroque, borderline unfilmable premise about “political ambition, genius and conflicted love” where “the fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems”.

Cannes film festival
Francis Ford Coppola’s question – can the US empire last forever? – may be valid but flashes of humour cannot rescue this conspiracy thriller from awful acting and dull effects

Everyone who loves cinema owes Francis Ford Coppola a very great deal … including honesty.

His ambitious and earnestly intended new film, resoundingly dedicated to his late wife Eleanor , has some flashes of humour and verve. Jon Voight’s scene with his bow-and-arrow shoots a witty dart. The film’s heavily furnished art deco theatricality sometimes creates an interestingly self-aware spectacle, like an old-fashioned modern dress production of Shakespeare.

Lebohang Kganye blends oral traditions, family photos and theatre in a ‘new and fresh way’ to trace personal history of apartheid era

The South African artist Lebohang Kganye has won the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize for her work that uses large-scale cutouts and elements of set design to trace and depict her family history during the apartheid era.

The Johannesburg-based artist took home the £30,000 prize for her winning exhibition, which is on display at the Photographers’ Gallery in central London and is called Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home .

Judges describe second novel set between south-east London and Ghana as ‘symphonic’ and ‘viscerally moving’

British-Ghanaian author Caleb Azumah Nelson has won this year’s Dylan Thomas prize for his second novel Small Worlds, which judges described as “symphonic” and “viscerally moving”.

Azumah Nelson, 33, was awarded the £20,000 prize at ceremony on Thursday in Swansea, the home city of the poet Dylan Thomas. The prize is given to a writer aged 39 or under in memory of Thomas, who died at that age.

Kammerakademie Potsdam/Manacorda
(Sony Classical, five CDs)
Though the sound is lean and bright, and the articulation of the strings wonderfully crisp, this rehash of Beethoven’s Symphonies lacks character and excitement

When the range of available alternatives is already bewilderingly wide – modern or period instruments; large orchestra or chamber band; swift, light-fingered performances or more emphatic, heavyweight ones – there has to be a good reason nowadays for a record company to release a new cycle of the Beethoven symphonies, especially from an unfamiliar orchestra with a conductor, who, in the UK at least, is still relatively unknown. And while there is little wrong with these performances from Antonello Manacorda and the Kammerakademie Potsdam, which appear to be a mix of concert and studio recordings, it’s hard to discern what might recommend them above any of the myriad existing versions.

Though it’s described as a chamber orchestra, the Kammerakademie Potsdam seems to be a sizable band. More than 50 string players are listed in the accompanying booklet, though clearly not all of them were used in each symphony. According to an interview with Manacorda they sometimes use gut strings, sometimes metal, and in these performances the trumpets and horns are natural, but the woodwind modern.

Studio Voltaire, London
From Tom’s pert-bottomed hunks to Cook’s curvacious ladies, both artists wanted to give pleasure

‘Hate the politics, love the uniform,” would pretty much sum up Touko Valio Laaksonen’s attitude towards the Wehrmacht soldiers he encountered as a young, conscripted anti-aircraft officer in the Finnish army, fighting alongside the Germans in the second world war. After the war, Laaksonen began signing his commercial drawings for physique magazines with the moniker Tom of Finland , and the very different uniform of the sexual outlaw, inspired by American biker culture (and in particular by Marlon Brando in the 1953 movie The Wild One), replaced field grey with leather and denim, a hyper-masculine look that developed in gay culture from the 1950s onward.

Pert-bottomed and conspicuously well hung, six-packed and nipples erected, poured into their jeans and their leather trousers, Tom of Finland’s groups of hunks and Muscle Marys indulge in all sorts of horseplay. They suck, they rim, they fist, they fuck. They pose and they cruise, they watch and, given half a chance, they join in. There’s a bit of lighthearted BDSM, but not much else to vary the routine. What a tiring round their days must be. Away from the magazine page or beyond the edge of the drawing they might complain, if they had the time, about their onerous moisturising regimes, the daily workouts and depilation routines. Never mind the same old outfits every day, or that as soon as one scene has ended another’s begun. Even when they’re tied to a tree and being thrashed with a belt they seem happy enough, and no one ever screams their safe word.

The grimly effective 2008 home invasion shocker gets a strange semi-remake that sucks out all of the suspense

In a genre in which innovation is increasingly resigned to the furthest outskirts, there’s something almost admirable about just how staggeringly redundant The Strangers: Chapter 1 is, early contender for 2024’s most pointless horror movie. It’s the third in a series that should have stopped after one, a reboot that’s more of a remake but sold as a prequel while also acting as the start of a new trilogy, an over-complicated attempt to squeeze new life out of old IP. The 2008 original, which starred Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a couple menaced by three masked invaders, was a short, sharp shock to the system, a bare-bones exercise in drip-drip suspense made scarier by its cold, motivation-less villains (“Because you were home”).

There was a stark, naturalistic nastiness to it, closer to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games than most of the silly genre dreck being churned out at the time and so while the film was a commercial win for Universal, it didn’t lend itself to easy extension. A troubled decade of false starts finally led to 2018’s sleekly made yet maddeningly scare-free sequel Prey at Night and now six years later, with rights moving over to Lionsgate, we have a new trilogy, ambitious in concept if nothing else. The three films are all set to be released within a year, an expansion of a world that worked best on the simplest of terms, a perfect example of unnecessary bloat at a time when we’re surrounded by it. It’s the era of 10-hour TV seasons that could be 100-minute movies and prequels to stories answering questions we never cared to ask and with yet more to come from the worlds of Harry Potter , Twilight and Lord of the Rings , why not stretch a tight 85-minute shocker into a multi-film franchise?

Cannes film festival
Toads who sweat hallucinogens, lonely pre-teens and a sudden German in a kilt: Arnold’s pick’n’mix latest dives as much as it soars

Andrea Arnold’s flawed, garrulous new movie is a chaotic social-realist adventure with big, chancy performances, grimly violent episodes, tragedy butting heads with comedy and physical existence facing off with fantasy and imagination.

It meditates on identity and belonging, the poignancy of not being valued, not being seen, the transition from childhood to adulthood, girlhood to womanhood, sexism and cruelty. The energy and heartfelt good humour offset the moments of cliche and implausibility.

Barry Keoghan plays Bug, a lairy bloke who is over the moon at his imminent wedding and his foolproof idea for easy money: he has imported from Colorado a certain kind of toad whose slime is a powerful (and expensive) hallucinogen. It’s just that the toad needs the right kind of soothing and yet upbeat music played to it, before it starts sweating out the good stuff. And what track does Bug like? Andrea Arnold couldn’t resist it: Murder on the Dancefloor. Perhaps every Keoghan film from now on is going to have a Saltburn gag.

Cannes film festival
Lou Ye’s docu-realist film starts as sophisticated comedy, morphs from looking like a zombie apocalypse to intimate drama, and evolves into a tribute to how a nation handled trauma

Out of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film, evidently inspired by a real-life situation in film production. As well as everything else, the film meditates on what it means to be “unfinished”. Very few of us will leave this life with a satisfied sense of everything achieved, complete, squared away. To be mortal is to feel that things have ended without being finished. It is possibly his best film since the courageous Tiananmen Square drama Summer Palace from 2006 – and set near Wuhan, the city in which his 2012 film Mystery was set in the days when that place was internationally known – if at all – simply for being almost scarily vast and impersonal.

It is 2019 and a film director and his crew gather in a production studio and excitedly unbox a big 00s-era computer, containing the digitised video and audio files for a film he had had to abandon 10 years before – without even having a title – because he had refused to bow to his producers’ demands to soften the content. It is a story of a gay man’s passion for another man who is involved with someone else. Getting the unfinished film now is clearly the end result of legal wrangling. (Lou has evidently had access to genuine footage from a real production.)