Film & TV

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest is an unashamed firework display of bad taste – and very funny

After his live-ammo situationist spoofs Borat and Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen has returned to straight fiction-features with his broad comedy satire The Dictator. This is not, repeat not, a cinephile homage to Chaplin's The Great Dictator. It is less edgy than Baron Cohen's previous two films, featuring big, conventionally contrived gags and a colossal central turn from the man himself. Baron Cohen's Dictator is set to make Peter Sellers's Inspector Clouseau a model of subtlety and sensitivity. The movie is in the fish-out-of-water tradition of Coming to America and many others. It doesn't, in truth, offer much of a twist on the genre. It does, however, deliver laughs and weapons-grade offensiveness.

Baron Cohen plays General Aladeen, the bizarre ruler of the oil-rich north African rogue state Wadiya: he is a satirical version of the Saddams and Gaddafis, those tinpot tyrants whose natural cruelty and vanity was nurtured by the west – maintained as allies to keep other states in line, or repurposed as bogeymen to be defeated when the need arose. A confrontation with Washington looms after the General announces Wadiya was just months away from enriching uranium, and corpses and giggles uncontrollably when trying to claim this was for "clean energy purposes".

An invasion threat from the US forces him to make a state visit to New York to explain himself to the UN, and like Borat before him, Aladeen finds himself stunned in various ways by the strange and exotic world of New York City hotels. Yet when a duplicitous relative, played by Ben Kingsley, turns out to have a treasonous plan in mind, the General finds himself anonymous and penniless on the Manhattan streets and becomes dependent on the charity of a feminist vegetarian cafe manager, played by Anna Faris, who comes to his rescue like Jamie Lee Curtis with Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places.

Subtle it isn't. The satirical content is lower than in Borat, apart from one Michael-Moore-ish speech in which Aladeen begs America to become a dictatorship. Basically this is a firework-display of bad taste, and I was often reminded of the cheerfully reprehensible Kentucky Fried Movie in the 70s, a film unashamedly low in nutritional value. But it was very funny, and so is this. The Dictator isn't going to win awards and it isn't as hip as Borat. Big, goofy, outrageous laughs are what it has to offer.

Rating: 4/5

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What will Cannes 2012 make of Sightseers – a British black comedy that melds The League of Gentlemen with Nuts in May?

British hopes at this year's Cannes film festival split between the old and new guard of domestic cinema. Representing the first camp is Ken Loach, nominated for the Palme d'Or for a record-breaking 11th time and ensconsed in the splendour of the main competition with his hard-scrabble comedy The Angel's Share. Embodying the second is 39-year-old Ben Wheatley, camped out in the rowdier, less salubrious setting of the directors' fortnight section, far up the Croisette. He's like the barbarian at the gates.

Basildon-born and Brighton-based, Wheatley cut his teeth on internet virals and TV commercials before making an acclaimed feature debut with the criminal sitcom Down Terrace. But it was last year's Kill List that truly snared the attention. Wheatley's wonky account of contract killing and pagan curses looked like a film washed in from the underground; clammy, unstable and wicked to the core. "As far as British horror goes right now," wrote the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, "Kill List is pretty much top of the range."

Yet Wheatley's third feature is something else again. Sightseers, in a nutshell, is the tale of Chris and Tina (played by co-writers Steve Oram and Alice Lowe), two ostensibly humdrum thirtysomethings who set out on a caravan holiday across the UK, only to find paradise overrun with litterbugs, graffiti artists and middle-class busybodies. "It was completely conceived as an antidote to Kill List," the director explains. "I wanted to do something lighter, looser and more improvisational. At least this one won't have people staggering out appalled. That's probably a good thing."

Well, maybe. At this point, however, it should be pointed out that Sightseers is not quite the sunny diversion it first appears. Chris, it transpires, is a serial killer and the odyssey that follows comes spring-loaded with shocks and scares and ghoulish black comedy. "Ah well," he concedes. "The apple never falls too far from the tree."

True to form, Wheatley's latest is an unruly, confounding affair; a shotgun wedding of The League of Gentlemen and Nuts in May. No doubt some will view it as an acid satire on modern England, pootling its way from Matlock Bath to the Blue John caves to the eccentric wonder that is the Keswick pencil museum, and leaving a trail of corpses in its wake. All of which is fair enough, although the director is at pains to point out that there is an affection here, too. "Yeah, the film has got a lot of murder in it. And yeah, it touches on issues of the recession and class and where we sit in the social structure. But at the other end it's also a film that shows the kind of England that we never get to see in films. I think some British film-makers are so terrified of being seen as parochial that they ignore the land that's under their very noses. But I'm very sympathetic to all that stuff. Yeah, caravaning is inherently silly, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying the British countryside. So we're not taking a snide view of it here. You have to love that stuff in order for the film to work."

It remains to be seen what Cannes will make of Wheatley with his beady-eyed take on an English tourist trail riddled with ley-lines, campsites and a "shaman from Portsmouth". In the meantime, I'm wondering what Wheatley will make of Cannes. It's tempting to cast him in the role of festival novice, wide-eyed, wet behind the ears and charmingly out of depth amid the movers and shakers. It turns out that Wheatley has already visited on a number of occasions, picking up prizes at the advertising festival and attending business meetings at the film event. "You meet all the same people that you meet in London," he explains. "Except that over here they're in a much better mood."

Wheatley plans to be in town for almost a week. This, he feels, should leave him ample time to soak up the atmosphere and sample the wares. He wants to see Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom and he's also intrigued by Room 237, a documentary on Stanley Kubrick and the making of The Shining that is playing in his own directors' fortnight sidebar. Aside from that, he may have a stroll around the marché, the vast bazaar at the back of the Palais that flogs cut-price monster romps and action movies to the international buyers. "The marché can be a terrifying place," he concedes. "It's very easy to get lost in there and it's a scary reminder of just how many movies get made. It's a reminder to all of the directors who have been selected for the main Cannes programme. All of them, no matter how important, are literally just a few steps away from the bear-pit. So yeah, this year I've managed to avoid it. Next year, who knows?"

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The woman who made her name as Bella Swan reckons her new role in Snow White and the Huntsman has a lot in common with a certain vampire-loving teenager. She talks here about her 'bad-ass girl power movie'

After a year of unsuccessful auditions, the nine-year-old Kristen Stewart told her mother she wanted to pack it all in. It hadn't been her ambition to act; she had wanted to be an archaeologist. But she lived in Los Angeles, where an agent saw her sing in a school play aged eight, and so inevitably the notion was put to her. She was interested initially. Her parents were crew members, and she had spent time on film sets where there was a feeling that: "we were all in this together, and we were making something worthwhile". She takes one of many deep, meaningful breaths. "And then I would see a kid walk around and people would be like: 'Shhh, that's the actor, don't talk to him.' And I was like, I want a job, I want you guys to talk to me like I matter!"

It's not surprising Stewart wasn't tying down all those roles. I can't imagine her having made a convincing child star in the twinkling insincerity and too many teeth mould. She's just so socially awkward. She bounds into the hotel room, in her Led Zeppelin T-shirt and black jeans, clasping a glass of milk, and rather than sitting opposite me, she perches on the next chair, so close I have to check our knees aren't touching.

She's renowned for being moody. I've read whole interviews about her dislike of being interviewed, and she certainly has nervous tics. Her leg sometimes twitches like a piston, and she says "do you know what I mean" 18 times in the course of the interview. But she seems to be putting her all into being understood as genuine, and that, in itself, is completely endearing.

Anyway, her essential traits were not going over very well in the child actor market. She would go to auditions for commercials where she had to dance with the product. She pulls a face. "And in those situations I became really like a pompous nine-year-old. I was like: 'I don't want to do those auditions any more. I feel silly.'" She asked if she could ditch the final one, and her mother said: "Kristen! You have fucking integrity! If you make an appointment, you go. I'll fire your agent tomorrow."

If she hadn't landed her role as a troubled, tomboyish kid in The Safety of Objects, followed by a role as a troubled, tomboyish kid in Panic Room, she might be off on an archaeological dig right now. Instead she's at the heart of a juggernaut.

When she first signed up, in her late teens, to play Bella Swan in Twilight, there was, she says, no talk of sequels or merchandise or monsterish profit margins. It was a small film. Stewart has been in lots of smallish films, before and since. She has played Joan Jett in The Runaways, an 80s teenager working at an amusement park in Adventureland and a girl suffering from a serious illness in The Cake Eaters. The word that is often applied to her performances is "watchful".

She started off on a distinctive route, then, an indie-inflected career, and Twilight seemed apt. The first film is all rain storms and inchoate emotion. Then the series took on a life of its own. The first film took almost $70m in its opening weekend in the US; the second, New Moon, had the biggest midnight opening in US box office history; the four films in the franchise have made more than $2bn at the worldwide box office in total. Last year, a Forbes magazine survey found that for every dollar Stewart is paid, her films bring in an average of $55.83, making her the best-value actor around - a value which reflects both the staggering speed of her rise, and how many young women adore her. Bella Swan might be devoid of any obvious interests beyond her lust for vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black, but her very blankness has allowed a generation of young women who are in love or would like to be to live out their longings for dangerous, unattainable men. Stewart is startlingly beautiful, of course, but her slightly clumsy gait, her palpable self-consciousness, have made her a perfect proxy.

She realised how big Twilight was going to be before it even came out, when she and Robert Pattinson, her co-star and rumoured boyfriend, were mobbed by 6,500 people at a comics convention. Did that make her nervous? "Oh my gosh. It blew my head off." She's talked since then of feeling trapped, unable to go for walks, stuck in hotel rooms. She says it's not always like that though. "I mean, if I walked out of this hotel" – Claridge's – "obviously I'd be screwed. But in London, I am perfectly fine, unless I have a trail of parasites behind me. ". The paparazzi are at the hotel entrance when I leave. "But I'm good at evading those little twits. Once I lose them, once no one's trying to make a buck off you, you know, I'm fine – I know at this point that there's a buck to be made, which is weird considering I'm just walking down the street with dirty hair."

Stewart has a silent film star face that can project all manner of wordless emotion. It's a quality that has been used to great effect in the Twilight series – all that endless staring, wanting, needing – and now in her new film, Snow White and the Huntsman, in which she stars as the titular heroine, and which threatens to become another franchise. The film is uneven. It's hard to get excited about the romantic hero, played by Chris Hemsworth, a character who spends a surprising amount of the film as a sloppy drunk. But it's visually interesting, with its blinking mushrooms, melting mirrors and dark, dark forests. Stewart and her co-star Charlize Theron, as the evil queen, are terrific.

The film is a reworking of the classic fairytale, with Stewart as a more powerful heroine, who is locked up by the evil queen for a decade, before escaping and becoming a warrior. Stewart was never a great fan of the Disney movie. "In the original she totally represents what a woman wanted to be back then: the ultimate maternal figure. She cleans house really well. It's just that [women] do more than that now." Instead they created a "bad-ass, girl power movie", she says, in which the character's strength is represented in a realistic way. "We're not built to take out big guys in armour. So it was really more about being faster and smarter."

In some ways, Snow White is, of course, the ultimate Hollywood story; the older woman terrified that a young girl might surpass her in beauty. (There's a hilarious scene in which Theron sucks the life force out of Lily Cole.) I ask if Stewart finds the Hollywood focus on looks difficult, and she answers an entirely different question. She starts talking about how beauty is ruined "if you're not cool as well. If you don't have the heart to back up your looks, you are ugly. I've met so many people that I thought were so gorgeous and talented and amazing. And then you meet them for one second and you're like," she heaves another breath, and spits out emphatically, "'you are wearing a costume, you are a fake, you are so unattractive'. And it doesn't always come across in a picture, but you can be really beautiful in a still frame, and then, in life, moving around, you're ugly. And that's kind of what the movie's about."

There's a big similarity between Snow White and Twilight, she says, in that, "there's a stage of life represented in both movies that is so impassioned, and it doesn't know why yet. Do you know what I mean? That was what I really liked about Bella. The fact that she trusted that at some point these feelings are going to make sense, and that she's not going to let everyone tell her she's fucking crazy. Also, it was just so," she takes a big breath, "it was so intense," she laughs.

Was she an intense teenager? "Yeah, I'm still a very intense person." She's 22 now. "I'm chilled out about some things. I'm cool. But definitely, I take things far too seriously ... I am just a serious person. I love joking around, and it's obviously about mood, because sometimes I can definitely be a silly idiot. But most of the time I am like this." She makes a sound as if her mouth has been suctioned shut. Quite private? "Yeah," she says. "And I'm overtly aware of fucking everything. I'm always like," she mimes picking things out of the air, "details, little things. Just obsessive, analytical."

Many thought Twilight pushed an abstinence message, presenting sex as a danger to be avoided – in this case, of course, specifically because it would involve coupling with a vampire and a werewolf. Was it worrying to have that outlook pinned to her? "I always just very honestly said that that's not why I did the movie, and it's not why the book was written," she says, adding that she finds it frustrating when people read the characters differently to her. "Mostly in this idea that Bella is a weak girl who is just obsessed with these two boys, and doesn't really think beyond her own needs, and is selfish. And she is, completely, but that's like the way to live, man! You've got to follow your heart. That is actually a really bold way to live, not making concessions, or giving things up ... I don't know why people ignore the sacrifices that Edward makes. I don't know why the power thing has been viewed the way it's been viewed, because I just view it so differently."

Isn't it because the men are physically threatening, and Bella willingly becomes their potential victim? In the first film, Edward tells Bella he's "the world's most dangerous predator", and has wanted to kill her. Her response? "I trust you." "I think girls think that they're stronger than the next one, and so they can take it," says Stewart. "I think that she's not hurting herself. I mean, it's extreme, it's really romantic, it's really ideal. I think that the reason it's effective is because if she was a vampire, he would do the same. He would be like 'fuck me up!'"

Stewart grew up with an older brother, Cameron, and adopted brother, Taylor, who's five days her senior, and says it was a very tomboyish childhood. "I don't think I had a picture taken of me without a backwards baseball cap before the age of 14." They all played hard. "You'd just connect skateboards to bikes and see how fast you can go down a hill without dying … I would go for it. But I would hurt myself. I'm always, always, always the one that is incredibly gung-ho, really excited, and then just before, you doubt yourself, and take a tumble."The first time she realised a film could be really important was when she made Speak, aged 13, about a girl who had been raped. She did a public service announcement after it was shown on TV, with details of a helpline for people who had been sexually assaulted to call. An enormous number did so that night. The other film that stands out for her, in those terms, is Welcome to the Rileys, in which she played a troubled teenager, working in a strip club. She met women in those jobs while researching it, which gave her an idea she is still working on, of putting her earnings into a network of homes for women who want to leave the sex trade, or need support.

She has just made another film that means a lot to her, On the Road, with the director Walter Salles. She plays the wild, instinctive Marylou, partner of Dean Moriarty, and she loved the chance to improvise, to try to bring the feel of the book to the screen. "I think in order to do that book right, in order to make everyone happy – because there's a lot of people sitting around going: 'OK, let's have it' – it had to be spontaneous, it had to have that feeling of never quite knowing where someone's going to jump or scream," she says. "So sometimes it was a truer reading of the line to just forget it, and say it your own way."

Stewart reminds me, at times, of an earlier era of actors. The sullen teenagers of James Dean's generation (she is keen to adapt the one-time Dean vehicle, East of Eden); or the grungy young actors of the 90s – Winona Ryder, River Phoenix, Johnny Depp – with their gorgeous, unwashed earnestness. She plays a character who is a terrible role model in Twilight, but in person is a blessed relief, with her trainers on the red carpet, crumpled clothes and intensity. While many of her toothierchild-star contemporaries implode, she seems grounded. "When you make moving pictures, it's so easy to become disingenuous," she says. "It's so easy to just become a commodity, and I think that's so embarrassing." And with that, she finishes her milk.

Snow White and the Huntsman is released on 30 May.

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Beautiful A-listers hit the Croisette in support of the most Hollywood-friendly competition lineup in years

Glancing over the Cannes lineup from 20 years ago is a startling reminder of just how little that seemingly prestigious Official Selection badge matters in the long run: among the 1992 prizewinners, The Player and Howards End may still be with us, but when was the last time you were tempted to seek out and stick on Bille August's Palme d'Or winner The Best Intentions? Other selections have retained their cultural cachet, but lost their festival association: sex-lies-and-icepicks thriller Basic Instinct made its European premiere in the august competition lineup.

Whether such gleeful trash would make the grade today is doubtful; there certainly doesn't appear to be anything quite as lurid vying for the Palme this year. (Following Tuesday night's dismal After the Battle, an earnest blend of dressage and Egyptian feminist tract, I rather wish there was.)

Current festival director Thierry Frémaux gave a bold nod to the multiplex by selecting Shrek for his inaugural competition lineup in 2001, but his selections since then have by and large reinforced the notion of the "festival film" as an exotic, even esoteric, beast, abetted by juries who are quite comfortable picking such acquired-taste fare as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and The Tree of Life for the gold.

It's this kind of programming environment that made the pulsating sugar rush of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive all the more bracing when it premiered on the Croisette in the last days of the 2011 fest, propping open the eyelids of jaded critics and speeding off with a best director prize. With Refn adoringly cribbing from Michael Mann and Walter Hill, it had just enough auteur cred to go unquestioned in the lineup by the old guard, while raising the pulses of genre fanboys and fluttery Ryan Gosling devotees alike.

The press approved, and the bigwigs got the message. This year's competition lineup is the festival's most Hollywood-friendly in yonks, with three star-powered American thrillers (Killing Them Softly, Lawless and The Paperboy) aiming for the same art-pulp sweet spot that Drive hit so squarely last year. A slew of beautiful A-listers is set to hit the red carpet, from Brad Pitt and Reese Witherspoon to teen-idol upstarts such as Zac Efron and the Twilight duo of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, not to mention Matthew McConaughey – this year in two films competing for the Palme d'Or.

Granted, they're in flicks that may represent a compromise for their regular followers. R-Pattz takes the lead in David Cronenberg's adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis, which means a lot of Stephenie Meyer message-board lurkers are set to expand their literary horizons. Regardless, their presence craftily attracts a wider set of eyeballs to a festival still dominated by usual suspects such as Michael Haneke, Alain Resnais and Abbas Kiarostami.

This is nothing new – for 65 years, Cannes has been a prime destination for stars and their gazers, whether attached to films there or not. (For example, Cheryl Cole is hitting the Croisette this year.) But with this year's competition heavy on big-name fare and unusually light on non-European world cinema, it's hard not to sense that Frémaux is wooing the mainstream more openly than usual, whatever tough-sell art film Nanni Moretti's jury gives the laurels to in the end.

Still, after the biggest crossover hit of last year's competition turned out to be French, black-and-white and silent, he would be wise not to over-calculate.

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It's time for Madagascar 3 and Charlie Chaplin on the beach. You get used to it

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Yousry Nasrallah's Cannes offering is an act of defiance, a deeply political film shot amid hostility in Tahrir Square

The Egyptian film-maker Yousry Nasrallah and his cast withstood harassment and intimidation to bring their film to the screen. At one point, shooting in Tahrir Square amid the demonstrations of July 2011, the female cast members were attacked, and lead actor Menna Shalabi taunted as a "whore".

The producers even used a false title for the film to give the impression that they were shooting a romance, rather than use the real title – After the Battle – and betray the fact that they were making a film that, while fictional, was an on-the-spot, deeply political account of two people from opposite sides of society caught up in the Egyptian revolution.

But, said the director, the struggle to make the film was in itself an act of defiance "in a context where cinema is being attacked as a sin, where all arts – singing, art, music – are all being criticised by Islamist political parties". The actors' commitment to their perilous work was, he said, "a commitment in favour of cinema, because we want cinema to continue to exist in Egypt".

Bassem Samra, co-lead in the film, added: "I felt that even if it might have been my last film, we wanted to affirm our presence as artists and do our job." He added that the film's presence in Cannes – where it premieres in competition for the Palme D'Or – "is a wonderful answer to the people who want to put an end to art in Egypt".

Nasrallah, a veteran of Egyptian cinema whose previous work has screened at Cannes and Venice film festivals, described how, in January 2011, he was under contract to make an entirely different film. Then, the revolution started, and it became clear that there was only one story to tell.

The film was made over eight months, from March to October 2011, with events in real time dictating its story. Co-scriptwriter Omar Schama would sometimes write through the night for a scene to be shot the following morning; the characters are embroiled in actual events as they occurred during the shoot, culminating in the demonstrations of 9 October, when 25 people died in clashes between Coptic Christian and Muslim protesters and the police. After the Battle tells the story of Reem (Shalabi) and Mahmoud (Samra). She is a secular, liberal revolutionary, living separated from her husband, and working in an advertising agency. He is a horseman living near the pyramids who, on 2 February 2011, was one of the pro-Mubarak mounted men who rode into Tahrir Square and charged the revolutionaries. According to Nasrallah, the horsemen of what become known as the "battle of the camel" became the "incarnation of the counter-revolution" to many liberal Egyptians.

The story of the film came partly from Samra, who believed that the horsemen had been manipulated into believing that former president Mubarak would restore the tourist trade, on which most of the horsemen rely for a living, when it ground to a halt during the Arab spring.

The film is about, said Nasrallah, "a man who is trying to regain his own dignity and a woman trying to find a place in an Egypt that is changing".

The idea of making a film about great historical events as they happened was, said Schama, partly inspired by the Italian neorealists: films such as Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City, which was made shortly after the Germans retreated from Italy's capital amid the bombed-out ruins.

"We decided to portray what we were seeing – to try to make sense of what was happening," he said. "Writing history while it is unfolding is a way of showing reality. One interprets what is happening on the spur of the moment."

Despite the challenges and difficulties of the shoot, there were grounds for optimism, said the director. "It is a trend in Arab cinema in general, to try to break censorship and social taboos. You don't want to watch a film where you are in a kind of prison; you want to feel the film is liberated and has liberated you, too. I hope this will be the definition of Arab cinema in the future."

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A teenager diagnosed herself with cancer after watching her illness depicted in the Cameron Diaz weepie My Sister's Keeper

No one ever claimed going to the cinema was good for you, but a teenage girl has discovered that paying attention while watching a DVD can save your life, after she diagnosed herself with cancer during a viewing of the Cameron Diaz movie My Sister's Keeper.

Alex Cooper, 17, realised she was suffering from leukaemia when she noticed symptoms similar to her own in a dying character from the 2009 Nick Cassavetes weepie, which also stars Abigail Breslin and Alec Baldwin. She had previously believed her lethargy was due simply to being a lazy teenager, she told the Telegraph. But when she went to see her GP in October 2010 she was swiftly diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) and immediately began a course of chemotherapy.

"It was one of those surreal moments in life," said Alex, of Bredgar, Kent. "I was watching the film and all of a sudden I realised I had the same symptoms. It was terrifying at first but I started to rationalise it and thought - I can't really be suffering from cancer.

"But I eventually went to my doctor and he sent for blood test straight away. When I was first told about the cancer I was in shock. I thought it was the end. I just thought I am going to lose all my hair and just keep getting more and more ill.

"I suppose if it wasn't for the film I may not have got my diagnosis in time. When you watch something on screen it makes everything much more real. I guess I am just really lucky to have watched it. However, I can't bring myself to see it again. It is too upsetting - I have hidden it under my bed."

Alex, who is now in remission, might have died in less than a year had she not begun taking the chemotherapy drug Distaniv. She is now hoping to go to university after completing A-levels in English, Maths, Art and Psychology.

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Catch up with the last seven days in the world of film

The big story

It's kind of difficult to miss: Cannes 2012 started yesterday: the bees knees when it comes to film festivals. With oceans of frocked-up glamour, yards of cutting-edge features, hordes of grinning A-listers, and enough buzz to drown out the incessant whine of private jets flying overhead, it's finally here.

The opening film, as you may or may not have gathered, was Moonrise Kingdom, the new one from Wes Anderson, boasting the mix of big shots and quirkmeisters we have come to expect. Here's what Peter Bradshaw thought of it, here's what Peter and the rest of the Guardian's team were prepared to say on camera, and here's what the whole thing looked like.

Of course, Cannes isn't just about one film: there's a whole competition lineup to get through before the Palme d'Or is declared on Sunday week. At the time of writing we'd got verdicts on two more: Rust and Bone, the hotly anticipated noir from France's finest, Jacques Audiard; plus After the Battle, the politically-inflected selection from Egypt.

There's still many a twist and turn before Cannes winds up: you can follow them all on our daily live blog.

In the news

Dark Knight Rises imperilled by Morgan Freeman's politics, claims Time Warner shareholder

Aaron Sorkin to write script for Sony's Steve Jobs biopic

Mitt Romney's bully beef: film-maker takes him to task

Sacha Baron Cohen and Kurt Russell leave Django Unchained

Michael Caine trapped in dressing room

How 48 hours at large in LA turned Fellini into a maestro

The $50m Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr set for Avengers windfall

BFI sets out five year plan for British film industry funding

On the blog

Sacha Baron Cohen – what are his greatest clips?

Is edible cinema a tasty new way to enjoy films?

From hair to eternity: poll finds Brad Pitt's 'best cuts'

Between the lines: Why The Dictator isn't Great

Between the lines: The boomerang kid bounces back in Jeff Who Lives at Home

What next after Joss Whedon's miracle year?

Reel history: Barbarossa – Siege Lord; why the emperor needs a new movie

Cine-files: Genesis Cinema, Mile End, London

Clip joint: Ghosts

Watch and listen

The Guardian Film Show: Dark Shadows and Jeff Who Lives at Home

Can Killer Joe save its star from a life of romcom crime?

Will The Amazing Spider-Man's Lizard scale new heights?

Further reading

From Prometheus to Spider-Man: our summer blockbuster preview

Julie Delpy: 'Hollywood hates me – but I don't care'

The Dictator: are we right to laugh?

Slumdog's dissenters: poverty on film in India

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje: 'I didn't want to be black. So I joined the skinheads…'

Why the most English of movies often benefit from an outsider's perspective

Gary Maitland: not a load of rubbish

In the paper

Tomorrow's G2 Film & Music features interviews with Kristen Stewart, star of Snow White and the Huntsman, and Kill List director Ben Wheatley, as well as reviews of all this week's film releases.

On Saturday the Guide speaks to director Wes Anderson about Moonrise Kingdom and John Patterson looks at French occupation movies, while in Weekend magazine Hadley Fereeman meets Chris O'Dowd.

And finally

• Follow @guardianfilm on Twitter

• ... and like us on Facebook

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With Cannes scrubbed up for the tourists, you have to cross a red carpet to face reality in Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone

Cannes is cleaned before the festival starts and looks bright and new when the guests arrive. The delegates are welcomed at the expense of the non-delegates and there are rumours that the town's homeless population has now been discreetly swept out of town, so as not to spook the tourists and spoil the fun. On first arriving, I saw a couple still bedded down in the underpass below the railway station. Now they have vanished, perhaps shooed out to the suburbs or to neighbouring Antibes. The only place we see them is up on the screen.

Rust and Bone, the bruising new drama from the talented Jacques Audiard, charts the rumble-tumble existence of Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), an itinerant worker and bare-knuckle boxer who lands in Antibes with his infant son in tow, fishing food from the dustbins or cadging off his sister. Marion Cotillard co-stars as Stephanie, who trains the whales at a cheesy marine park where the girls shake their pom-poms to Katy Perry songs while the whales loom out of the blue like visitors from another planet, alien and unknowable. Both of these characters are geared for a tough time, and possible ruin. Both, by clinging to each other, may just get out alive.

The festival has been in sore need of a film to get it rolling; to stir the blood and set the pulse racing. With Rust and Bone it has what it wanted. Audiard's Palme d'Or contender is tough and sinuous, robustly acted by Cotillard and Schoenaerts and rustling up a compelling picture of the France beyond the Palais, where unlicensed fights play out on scrubland and desperate men roll cigarettes outside cheap cafes. In other hands, this triumph-over-tragedy plotline could have come across as bogus; a honeyed Hallmark sympathy card. Audiard, though, keeps it vital and honest. His darting, invasive camerawork signals trouble, strife, disaster.

I'm less impressed by After the Battle, the tale of an anguished working-class horseman dragooned into storming the protesters during last year's Egyptian uprising. Full credit to director Yousry Nasrallah for getting a film made on this subject while all the pieces are still in flux. If only this nimbleness were matched by the movie itself. After the Battle clip-clops laboriously across the issues and looks in constant danger of pulling up lame.

Screening complete, we walk back through town, past ritzy Rue d'Antibes and through that deodorised underpass. The bars are thronged, the restaurants are buzzing, and true-life Cannes has been tidied away. It comes to something when you have to walk a red carpet in order to catch a glimpse of dirty reality; a queer form of escapism that we've all signed up for. We stare at the screen like tourists at an aquarium, safe in the knowledge that the beasts won't break through the glass and bite us.

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This violent, intense and brilliant bulletfest from Indonesia puts western action movies to shame

It was in a delicate, almost feathery mood that I sat down to watch this film: apparently set in Indonesia, probably an evanescent arthouse piece, and called, The Rain, was it … ? Perhaps it would soothe my working London commuter's cares like a cup of elusively scented herbal tea. Perhaps there would be unhurried shots of treetops languidly disturbed by evening breezes, of skies on which mysterious cloudshapes would be inscribed, lakes whose surfaces would be disturbed by whorls from the titular rainfall. In the evening, perhaps there would be enigmatic silences between gentle characters accompanied by the plinkety-plunkety-plink of wind-chimes and later a full and plangent moon.

Actually, no. The Raid is a skull-splinteringly violent, uncompromisingly intense and simply brilliant martial arts action movie in a nightmarish and claustrophobic setting. It has something of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs or John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York, along with the icy ruthlessness of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs. There's also a reminder of the desperate fight scenes from Park Chan-wook's Oldboy. Occasionally, prior to killing or dismembering someone, a combatant will run up a wall and flip over backwards, surreally like Donald O'Connor. The leading man is Iko Uwais – who is basically the Carlos Acosta of Indonesian martial arts – and it is directed by the Welsh film-maker Gareth Huw Evans, who keeps a 10-tonne weight positioned on the accelerator.

It is sublimely, in fact heroically simple in its desire to deliver gasp-inducingly athletic action setpieces at all times, and the stunts and fight moves are stunning. There are times when the drum-roll of automatic fire is so deafeningly continuous it sounds like the fizz of white noise from a mistuned TV. In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee famously says: "We need emotional content, not anger." But frankly there seems to be an awful lot of anger here, and I can't believe that the filming ended without some pretty serious hospitalisation for everyone concerned. There really aren't many films that will have you holding clenched fists to the corners of your mouth over an hour and a half. I was forever bleating the two clipped monosyllables of shock: "Ohhhsh … " and "Ohhhhf … "

Uwais is Rama, a young rookie in a highly armed paramilitary special forces unit in Jakarta. On one grim day, he finds himself with his comrades in the back of an unmarked van, hurtling through the streets at dawn towards the nastiest part of town. In their black, bulletproof vests and black helmets, the team are disconcerted to be getting their briefing here, in the vehicle, rather than back at base: they are to launch a raid on a 15-storey building whose top floor is a drugs factory run by sinister crime lord Tama (Ray Sahetaphy).

Tama has turned the building into a virtual gated community for every serious criminal in town, and he is protected by a scary martial-arts hombre nicknamed Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian). The briefing is secret because the raid is secret; Rama and the team discover, chillingly, they are on their own, without official backup, forced to fight their way up the building, floor by floor, corridor by corridor, against fanatical and highly armed criminals. There is just one hope: that the enemy is addicted to the thrill of unarmed combat, and will lay down their assault rifles and meet Rama with bare hands, on equal terms.

The building itself appears to exist in a sort of expressionist-realist universe: the exterior looks like a digital creation, and the interiors, with their endless shabby corridors, are like a bad dream. It looks like a haunted hotel in a novel by Stephen King. The cops have rifles; the bad guys have all manner of weapons, including knives and machetes – everything, it seems, short of the "little friend" of Al Pacino's Scarface.

The Raid does not detain the audience with expositions of character; despite the plot reversals there is no pretence at subtlety or depth, and the comparison with Tarantino does not run to tricksy flashbacks or point-of-view shifts. The action runs at hair-raising speed on one single rail from A to B. It is not for everyone and the mayhem is pretty hard to take, but the brilliance of its choreography can hardly be denied, and as film-making it's fluent and muscular and uninhibited to say the least, the element of absurdity held in deadpan check: this is a superb pulp shocker made with passion and flair.

The action genre has been left too long to lumbering beefcakes like Stallone and Lundgren; melding it with martial arts has given it fresh life here, and Iko Uwais is a new star. Those cinephiles who have taught themselves not to turn up their noses at westerns may wish to think on the same lines about action. The Raid is completely deranged – and completely superb.

Rating: 5/5

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