Woody Harrelson Film Takes Top Prize at Cannes

Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s class warfare comedy Triangle of Sadness won the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, giving Ostlund one of cinema’s most prestigious prizes for the second time, per the AP. The movie features Woody Harrelson as a Marxist yacht captain with a boat full of rich passengers. Rampant vomiting is involved. The film received an eight-minute standing ovation after its Cannes screening. “We wanted after the screening (for people) to go out together and have something to talk about,” said Ostlund, whose art-world send-up The Square took the Palme in 2017. “We have to save something to talk about, but we should also have fun and be entertained.”

• The jury’s second prize, the Grand Prix, was shared between the Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s tender boyhood drama Close, about two 13-year-old boys whose bond is tragically separated after their intimacy is mocked by schoolmates; and French filmmaking legend Claire Denis' Stars at Noon, a Denis Johnson adaptation starring Margaret Qualley as a journalist in Nicaragua.
• The directing prize went to South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) for his twisty noir Decision to Leave, a romance fused with a police procedural.
• Korean star Song Kang Ho was named best actor for his performance in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film Broker, about a Korean family seeking a home for an abandoned baby.
• Best actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi for her performance as a journalist in Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, a true-crime thriller about a serial killer targeting sex workers in the Iranian religious city of Mashhad.

(More Cannes Film Festival stories.)