Suspects accused of conning two women out of €325,000 by pretending to be Hollywood star online
Spanish police have arrested five people accused of scamming two women out of €325,000 (£271,000) by posing as the Hollywood star Brad Pitt online.
The suspects made contact with the women on an internet page for fans of the Oscar-winning actor and led them to believe “they had a sentimental relationship with him”, Spain’s Guardia civil police force said in a statement on Monday.
Continue reading...Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt star in a remake of a French classic as designer Virginie Viard turns the catwalk into a coastal boardwalk
The lights dimmed, and the Chanel show opened with Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt on the catwalk. Cruz smouldered in a chic black polo neck and discreet diamonds, Pitt twinkly eyed in an open-necked white shirt. They gazed into each other’s eyes, flirted a little, and then – how could either of them resist? – embarked on a clandestine affair.
Well, almost. Cruz was, in fact, sitting demurely in the front row in a leather skirt suit, and Pitt was not in attendance. The rendezvous was on a short film, made for the show and screened above the catwalk, a remake of a seminal scene in Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et Une Femme, a classic Gallic romance about a widow and widower falling in love that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival in 1966. Lelouch, now 86, was also a guest of honour at Chanel’s show.
Continue reading...Pair are rumored to be reuniting for 70s-set drama The Movie Critic after last working together in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Brad Pitt is reportedly starring in Quentin Tarantino’s final film The Movie Critic, according to a Deadline report.
The pair previously worked together in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with the role bringing Pitt his first Oscar for best supporting actor. Pitt also starred in 2009’s Inglourious Basterds and featured in 1993’s True Romance, which was co-written by Tarantino.
Continue reading...Actor appears alongside Australian musician Nick Cave and British sculptor Thomas Houseago to reveal his first ever public art exhibition
Most know him for his blockbuster movies, chiselled cheekbones and high-profile relationships, but Brad Pitt can now add creating sculpture to his list of achievements after publicly debuting his first works of art in a lakeside museum in Finland.
The A-list Hollywood star unveiled the sculptures – what he called a “radical inventory of self” – at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, a move that came as a surprise. It is the first time the “largely self taught” artist presented his sculptures to the public, the gallery said.
Continue reading...Lawsuit was brought by owners after Pitt’s supposedly sustainable, flood-proof homes were plagued by mold, leaks and rot
It sounded like a dream come true, complete with a handsome prince riding to the rescue: the construction of 109 new, sustainable, flood-proof and affordable homes in New Orleans’s Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward, all thanks to movie star Brad Pitt.
But the homes that were eventually built fell far short of Pitt’s 2006 promises: they were plagued by mold, electrical fires and unclean water.
Continue reading...Pitt says Jolie broke their agreement not to sell their interests in Château Miraval without the other’s consent
Brad Pitt has sued his ex-wife Angelina Jolie for selling her stake in a French winery they had bought together – and where they got married – to a Russian businessman.
In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles on Thursday, Pitt said Jolie had broken their agreement not to sell their interests in Château Miraval without the other’s consent by selling her stake to a unit of Stoli Group, a spirits maker controlled by oligarch Yuri Shefler.
Continue reading...The actor opens up about why her divorce from Brad Pitt is a human rights issue, escaping Harvey Weinstein and what young activists have taught her
• ‘People try to stop us speaking up’ – Jolie meets inspirational young campaigners
Angelina Jolie sits at a desk, back straight as a rule and rather regal. Her features are cartoonishly beautiful – straight black hair, vertiginous cheekbones, huge blue eyes and lips like a plumped red sofa. She is talking on Zoom to four young activists. It is a horribly apt day to be discussing human rights – the Taliban has just captured Ghazni city on its approach to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
If this were a movie, you might suspect Jolie was playing a divine leader addressing the fortunate few. Yet it soon becomes apparent that things aren’t quite as they seem. The actor and film director is the one in awe, not the activists. The young people talk about the work they have done raising awareness of the carnage in Syria, the environmental crisis, trans rights and food poverty. Jolie hangs on their every word. She tells them they have inspired her children who follow their work, warns them against burnout, apologises for the failings of her generation and says how honoured she is to meet them.
Continue reading...Actor and activist says her experiences made her realise importance of children’s rights
Angelina Jolie has told the Guardian she feared for the safety of her children during her marriage to Brad Pitt and criticised the US government for not doing more to protect the rights of minors.
In an interview with Weekend magazine, the actor and activist said her experiences in her relationship with Pitt made her realise the importance of children’s rights, which she is supporting with a new book, Know Your Rights.
Continue reading...Decision comes after criticism by Jolie of decision not to let children testify in court
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been awarded joint custody following a protracted court battle.
The former couple have been in dispute for five years over access to their six children and hired a private judge, John Ouderkirk, to oversee the case.
Continue reading...Actor claims she was denied a fair trial when the judge refused to allow her children to testify in the case
Angelina Jolie has criticized the California judge deciding on custody arrangements for her and Brad Pitt’s children, saying in a court filing that the judge has refused to allow their children to testify.
Jolie, who has sought to disqualify judge John Ouderkirk from the divorce case, said in a court filing on Monday that he declined to hear evidence she says is relevant to the children’s safety and wellbeing before issuing a tentative ruling. The documents don’t elaborate on what that evidence may be.
Continue reading...New Netflix drama Stowaway is the latest in a crop of movies that suggests space travel is more random death and boredom than warp speed nine
Anybody who fancies watching a new science fiction film this month can count their lucky stars. A Netflix drama, Stowaway, features Anna Kendrick, Toni Collette and Daniel Dae Kim as a trio of astronauts who are on their way to Mars when they discover that an unfortunate launch-plan engineer, Shamier Anderson, is still onboard. The trouble is, there is only enough oxygen for three of them. American viewers can also see Voyagers (due for release in Britain in July), in which 30 hormonal starship passengers are preparing to colonise another world. The trouble is, something goes wrong on their mission, too, and the trip turns into an interplanetary Lord of the Flies. The moral of both stories is that you should probably push “astronaut” a few slots down your list of dream jobs. But if you’ve caught any other science fiction films recently, it’s bound to be quite far down the list, anyway.
Again and again over the past decade, cinema has warned us that venturing beyond the Earth’s atmosphere is uncomfortable, dangerous, exhaustingly difficult, frequently tedious, and almost certain to involve interplanetary angst and asphyxiation. George Clooney’s morose The Midnight Sky rounded off 2020 with a fatal spacewalk. Aniara and Passengers posited that existence on a colony ship was a lot grimmer than Wall-E had led us to believe. The “sad dads in space” sub-genre coalesced with Brad Pitt’s Freudian moping in Ad Astra, and Robert Pattinson’s in High Life. No wonder today’s youngsters would rather be YouTubers or influencers than astronauts. The overriding thesis of current science fiction films is this: space travel is rubbish.
Continue reading...A live-reading of 80s teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High brought together an array of big names with a surprising standout
It can feel rather unsporting to turn a critical eye on the live-read fundraisers that have been cropping up since the Covid-19 pandemic banished all celebrities to their handsomely appointed homes. A guy’s got to be one of the world’s wetter blankets to dump on a charity event that aspires to little more than fostering a loose, convivial environment in which we can join famous friends as they have a good time. Fortunately, last night’s stripped-down Zoom read-through of the script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High – a special event put together by Dane Cook’s “Feeling A-Live” benefit series, with an introduction from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti explaining the good work of foundations CORE and Reform Alliance – didn’t give too much cause for harshing anyone’s buzz.
Related: 30 Rock: is the quarantine reunion worth the wait?
Continue reading...Will The Irishman clean up? Or Marriage Story? And how will Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fare? Peter Bradshaw offers a lowdown of the main categories and his predictions and omissions
The best film category is dominated – just like everything else in the cultural conversation around movies – by Netflix, which has the majority of the nominees: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes.
Continue reading...The actor blasts off in search of long-lost pops Tommy Lee Jones in James Gray’s intergalactically po-faced take on Apocalypse Now
Brad Pitt is an intergalactic Captain Willard, taking a fraught mission up-river in James Gray’s Ad Astra, an outer-space Apocalypse Now which played to rapt crowds at the Venice film festival. In place of steaming jungles, this gives us existential chills. Instead of Viet Cong soldiers, it provides man-eating baboons and pirates riding dune-buggies. It’s an extraordinary picture, steely and unbending and assembled with an unmistakable air of wild-eyed zealotry. Ad Astra, be warned, is going all the way - and it double-dares us to buckle up for the trip.
Set in the near future, this casts Pitt as Major Roy McBride, a lonesome samurai who prides himself on the fact his pulse rate has never climbed beyond 80. He’s travelling out to Neptune in search of his lost father, a man he barely knows, and seeking to halt a series of unexplained cosmic rays that threaten life on Earth. Pitt embodies McBride with a series of deft gestures and a minimum of fuss. His performance is so understated it hardly looks like acting at all.
Continue reading...With Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt playing a TV actor and stuntman who cross paths with the Manson cult, Tarantino has created outrageous, disorientating entertainment
Quentin Tarantino’s exploitation black-comedy thriller Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood finds a pulp-fictionally redemptive take on the Manson nightmare in late-60s California: a B-movie loser’s state of grace.
It’s shocking, gripping, dazzlingly shot in the celluloid-primary colours of sky blue and sunset gold: colours with the warmth that Mama Cass sang about. The Los Angeles of 1969 is recovered with all Tarantino’s habitual intensity and delirious, hysterical connoisseurship of pop culture detail. But there’s something new here: not just erotic cinephilia, but TV-philia, an intense awareness of the small screen background to everyone’s lives. Opinions are going to divide about this film’s startling and spectacularly provocative ending, which Tarantino is concerned to keep secret and which I have no intention of revealing here. But certainly any ostensible error of taste is nothing like, say, those in the much admired Inglourious Basterds. And maybe worrying about taste is to miss the point of this bizarre Jacobean horror fantasy.
Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers – and conversely, of course, to shudder at the horror and cruelty and its hallucinatory aftermath.
Our first non-hero is Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a failing cowboy actor and alcoholic going to seed in the autumn of his career and in moments of bad temper beginning to resemble Jack Black. His best friend – pathetically, his only friend – is Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt in his Ocean’s-Eleven mode of easygoing competence and imperturbability. Cliff is Rick’s stunt double and has an awful secret in his life: a grisly event for which he may or may not be guilty. Cliff has to drive Rick everywhere because he has lost his licence, and he is Rick’s best pal, assistant, factotum, and the person who has to straighten Rick when he bursts into boozy tears of self-pity.
Tarantino’s epic is the big draw at Cannes. But there are other Manson movies around – including one about what ultimately happened to the young women who fell under the murderer’s spell
Over the last half century, one villain has loomed large over Hollywood. The gruesome murders committed by Charles Manson and his followers in the summer of 1969 have filled countless films and documentaries about stardom and the debaucheries of the 1960s. But his malign influence extends far beyond the screen. Aside from murdering eight people, Manson and his disciples – the Family – have been blamed for wiping out the counterculture, free love, communes and hippies.
Three new films are making fresh attempts to reckon with “the symbol of animalism and evil”, as Rolling Stone magazine called him. The biggest is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, about to premiere at the Cannes film festival. Set in Los Angeles during the Manson era, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a fading TV western star and Brad Pitt as his stunt double, both attempting to make the leap to the big screen. Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate – the actor and wife of director Roman Polanski – who was brutally murdered by the Family. Manson, a background figure in the film, is played by Damon Herriman.
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