Panda wins the 2025 Palm Dog award at Cannes — and a look-alike accepts
Panda, though, is an Icelandic sheepdog who stars in 'The Love That Remains,' from Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason. Always positioned at the tail end of the festival, the beachside Palm Dog ceremony comes a day before the winner of the festival's Palme d'Or is announced.
Pálmason's tragicomic film, which premiered at Cannes not in competition, follows five characters — Panda included — over the course of a year after the breakdown of a marriage. Panda is ever-present and very much part of the on-screen family and at the heart of the movie. Panda, who retains her name in the film, is Pálmason's dog and stars alongside his real-life children in the movie, which may explain the award-winning performance.
While Panda sadly could not be there to collect the award, a look-alike local pooch was on hand to collect the coveted dog collar along with one of the film's human producers. Panda did make a virtual appearance with an acceptance video, on a car journey through Iceland. She succeeds last year's winner, Kodi, from 'Dog on Trial.'
This year's awards marked the 25th anniversary of the much-loved event. Palm Dog founder Toby Rose explained that it has had more impact that he could imagine, becoming a fixture at Cannes.
'We honor the four-legged here just so they get a bit of their moment before the big dresses and the tuxedos take over,' Rose said.
Other prizes included the 'Mutt Moment' Award, for stealing the scene. This went to a long-haired dachshund and a rottweiler, for their roles in raunchy BDSM biker drama 'Pillion,' starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling. The scene in question involves the film's two lovers bringing their respective dogs to a nighttime tryst.
In a thank-you statement, director Harry Lighton described Hippo the dachshund's 'raw sex appeal' and said she's the true domme in 'Pillion.'
Finally the grand jury prize was awarded to mystical Spanish odyssey 'Sirât,' for Jack Russell terrier Pipa and Lupita, a Podenco cross. The story follows a father searching for his daughter across the desert, accompanied by his son — and Pipa and Lupita.
Lead actor Jade Oukid was there in person to collect the award alongside director Oliver Laxe. She told the gathered audience that Lupita was her own dog, who had sadly died soon after filming. After the show, Rose added that Lupita would be immortalized with this prize: 'We were so happy that we could celebrate a short life.'
The Palm Dog has seen many a famous guest come down to pick up their awards in person. Quentin Tarantino came in person to collect the award in 2019 when Brandy the pit bull in 'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood' won. And, in 2021, Tilda Swinton attended the ceremony to pick up the prize when her own three dogs, Rose, Dora and Snowbear, won the award for their roles in Joanna Hogg's 'The Souvenir II.'
Some dogs have become mini-celebrities in their own right, including Messi from 'Anatomy of a Fall.'
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BBC News
20 hours ago
- BBC News
The Naked Gun to Freakier Friday: 12 of the best films to watch in August
From The Naked Gun to Freakier Friday – these are the films to watch at the cinema and stream at home this month. Souleymane's Story Boris Lojkine's powerful drama was the winner of two prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, and has a 100% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review round-up site. It's the story of Souleymane (first-time actor Abou Sangaré), an immigrant from West Africa who has come to Paris in the hope of making enough money to support his ill mother. But the title, Souleymane's Story, has another meaning: it also refers to the false life story he has to memorise and recite at a legal residency application interview in two days' time. The trouble is that memorising anything is almost impossible while Souleymane is cycling around Paris as a food delivery worker, crossing paths with the police and with people who owe him money, and trying to find somewhere safe to sleep. "Lojkine's narrative is pacy and moves like an edge-of-the-seat thriller," says Namrata Joshi in the New Indian Express. He "also documents the entire industry that gets built around immigration and asylum". Released on 1 August in the US and Canada Weapons Barbarian, Zach Cregger's twist-filled horror film about the world's worst Airbnb, was a commercial and critical hit in 2022, and now the writer-director returns with a film which, he says, is "more ambitious in almost every way". The Twilight Zone-worthy premise is that 17 children from the same class all wake up at the same moment, walk out of their houses and disappear into the night, never to be seen again. The children's parents (Josh Brolin, among others) are desperate for answers, and their teacher (Julia Garner) is under suspicion. But that, says Cregger, is just the start of the story. Even more intriguingly, he says that he was influenced by Paul Thomas Anderson's multi-stranded ensemble drama, Magnolia. "I love that movie," he told Entertainment Weekly. "I love that kind of bold scale. It gave me permission when I was writing this to shoot for the stars and make it an epic. I wanted a horror epic, and so I tried to do that." Released on 8 August in cinemas internationally The Bad Guys 2 The Bad Guys was a different kind of DreamWorks cartoon – a stylish heist caper in the Ocean's Eleven mould, except that the criminals just happened to be talking animals. Adapted from Aaron Blabey's graphic novels, the film featured Mr Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr Snake (Marc Maron), Ms Tarantula (Awkwafina), Mr Shark (Craig Robinson) and Mr Piranha (Anthony Ramos), a gang of wisecracking criminals who got tired of being stereotyped as scary predators. In the sequel, they're still struggling to be accepted as upstanding members of the community, and things get trickier when they're blackmailed into teaming up with another gang of crooked animals: The Bad Girls. The director, Pierre Perifel, says that the sequel makes the jump from heist film to all-action blockbuster. "We're big fans of Mission: Impossible, and of big action films in particular, and we wanted to dabble and play with that genre," Perifel told Collider. "We're not doing Mission: Impossible, we're doing The Bad Guys, but it has those tropes." Released on 1 August in cinemas internationally Caught Stealing Darren Aronofsky is known for his abyss-dark dramas; no one goes to see Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler or The Whale because they fancy a fun Friday night at the cinema. But now Aronofsky has switched to Tarantino / Ritchie mode for a boisterous crime caper set in grimy 1990s New York. Adapted from Charlie Huston's novel, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as a baseball-loving barman who is trying to impress his new girlfriend (Zoe Kravitz) when he stumbles into a gangland feud involving a British punk-rocker (Matt Smith), a pair of Orthodox Jewish hitmen (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio), and $4m in ill-gotten gains. "The state the world's in right now... There's a lot going on," Aronofsky explained in Empire. "So, I wanted to get back to the core ingredients that make movies great – entertainment and fun. I wanted to make something filled with joy and adventure… It's a romp." Released on 29 August in cinemas internationally It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley Jeff Buckley's Grace is one of the greatest albums of the 1990s – or, as David Bowie once said, one of the greatest albums ever made. Buckley's poetic songwriting, swirling guitar arrangements and angelic multi-octave voice were stunning, but, tragically, we'll never know what else he might have accomplished: he accidentally drowned in a river in 1997 before he had completed his second album. Amy Berg's documentary examines the conflicted man behind the music, and ponders the dark ironies of his short life. The father he never knew, Tim Buckley, was also a singer who died young. "What the documentary captures is that Buckley was on his way to becoming a staggeringly huge star," says Owen Gleiberman in Variety. "I defy you to see It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley and not fall in love with Jeff Buckley's voice. By the time the film is over, you want to find a way to go back and rescue him to let him live the life he should have had." Released on 8 August in the US Highest 2 Lowest Highest 2 Lowest "fulfils every expectation you might want from a modern Spike Lee movie", says Stephanie Zacharek in Time. A loose remake of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low (1963), this New York music-industry thriller stars Denzel Washington as a record-company boss. He's renowned for signing some of the biggest names in the business, but his company has fared so poorly in recent years that he is struggling to keep control of it. And then he hears that his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped. Co-starring some real-life music stars, including A$AP Rocky and Ice Spice, Highest 2 Lowest is "smart, hugely entertaining, and profound in a way that's anything but sentimental", says Zacharek. "Lee has made a film that feels modest and grand at once, the kind of movie you can see on a Saturday night just for kicks and still be thinking about the next day." Released on 22 August in the US The Roses One of Hollywood's darkest ever anti-romantic comedies, The War of the Roses (1989) starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as a couple going through a blisteringly bitter divorce. Thirty-six years on, it has been remade – or reimagined – with Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as the unhappy couple. Cumberbatch is Theo Rose, a famous architect, and Colman is Ivy Rose, a small-time cook. But when his career crashes while hers goes into orbit, the Roses' relationship gets thorny. Co-starring Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, the film is directed by Jay Roach (Meet the Parents, Austin Powers), and written by Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Cruella), who says that his screenplay is even more outrageous than the 1980s one, but not, perhaps, as cynical. "We were like, 'Let's do a movie about people who want to stay married rather than two people trying to destroy each other,'" McNamara said on Streaming Movie Night. "A sophisticated adult screwball comedy didn't seem like it had been done for a while in a proper commercial way, and so it seemed like an opportunity." Released on 29 August in cinemas internationally Splitsville Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin have already made one acclaimed indie comedy together, The Climb (2019), which Covino directed, and both men wrote and acted in. Now they've reunited for a higher profile project opposite higher profile co-stars, Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona. Marvin plays Carey, who has been married to Ashley (Arjona) for a year when she announces that she has been unfaithful to him and wants a divorce. When he tells the sorry tale to his wealthy friends Paul (Covino) and Julie (Johnson), they reveal that their marriage works so well because they are free to sleep with other people. Could this work for Carey and Ashley, too? And is Paul and Julie's relationship really as healthy as they make it sound? This "reliably funny romcom about the notion of open relationships makes for a delightful time", says Esther Zuckerman in IndieWire. "The film-makers have created an utterly endearing tale of four people trying to negotiate their own desires in the silliest ways possible with unexpected chaos around every turn." Released on 22 August in the US Freakier Friday Lindsay Lohan spent years in the Hollywood wilderness after she starred alongside Jamie Lee Curtis in 2003's Freaky Friday, so it's heartening to see her back on the big screen in the perfectly named sequel, Freakier Friday. In the first film (itself a remake of a Disney comedy from 1976), Lohan and Curtis played a teenage girl and her mother, Anna and Tess, who swapped bodies for a day. In Freakier Friday, Anna and Tess swap bodies with Anna's daughter and step-daughter – so both Lohan and Curtis get to pretend that they're teenagers. "[Freakier Friday] is a feelgood movie, which is what I want to give people," Lohan said in Elle. "And it's fun. When I saw the second cut, I wanted to get up and dance at the end." Released on 8 Aug in cinemas internationally The Naked Gun How can you make a Naked Gun film without the franchise's beloved star, the late Leslie Nielsen? The answer, it seems, is to cast Liam Neeson – not just because his name is so similar to Nielsen's, but because he knows how to be gruff and deadpan while surrounded by silliness. "Liam Neeson is probably the only actor alive in the 21st Century who could do what Leslie Nielsen did," the film's producer, Seth MacFarlane, said in Entertainment Weekly. The casting of Pamela Anderson as the love interest / femme fatale was an inspired move, too, especially as Anderson was so acclaimed for her previous film, The Last Showgirl. MacFarlane is hoping that his spoof cop thriller will be that rarest of things, a Hollywood comedy that is a cinema hit. "It's been a long time since a really high-profile hard comedy has been put out there. This is a true comedy, with a whole bunch of laughs. And hopefully, if the movie does well, it brings a few more of those kinds of movies back into our shared landscape." Released on 1 August in cinemas internationally The Thursday Murder Club Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club has been a publishing sensation since it came out in 2020. Not only was it a bestseller, but it helped established the genre of "cosy crime" detective novels – although Osman might not use that term himself. "When I started writing The Thursday Murder Club, the successful crime books of the time were mainly dark psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators," he told the BBC in 2023. "I just wanted to write an Agatha Christie-style thriller but with some humour and with a modern twist. A book I'd love to read, but couldn't find. I'd never heard the term 'cosy crime'." The inevitable screen adaptation is produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Chris Columbus, the maker of Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter films. Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie play four pensioners in the same retirement community who hit upon an unusual hobby: solving mysteries. Released on 28 August on Netflix Nobody 2 Bob Odenkirk, the star of Better Call Saul, doesn't look like a typical Hollywood action hero – but that's one reason why Nobody (2021) was so entertaining. The idea was that Odenkirk's character, Hutch, was a mild-mannered, middle-aged suburban dad. But it turned out that he had a secret past as a government assassin, so when he got tangled up with Russian mobsters, we had the cathartic pleasure of seeing this average-looking fellow participating in some of modern cinema's most gloriously brutal fight scenes. In the sequel, Hutch is on a summer holiday with his wife (Connie Nielsen) and children when a crime boss (Sharon Stone) interrupts their family time. "For me, what mattered in the second movie was: what's something that a couple could relate to as a tension in their life," Odenkirk said in Discussing Film. "One of the big ones in America is the inability to take a break and not work constantly or worry about our jobs… Hutch just can't do it. Most people can't do it. I've struggled to do it myself." Released on 15 August in cinemas internationally -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
Glasgow Times
a day ago
- Glasgow Times
Spacey told actor ‘don't worry about it' after alleged assault, documents claim
Ruari Cannon is suing Mr Spacey as well as two organisations connected to the Old Vic Theatre in London, claiming he suffered psychiatric damage as a result of sexual and emotional abuse. The 33-year-old has waived his anonymity in the claim. In court documents seen by the PA news agency, Mr Cannon alleges that Mr Spacey, who was a 'powerful figure and a world-famous actor and celebrity' at the time, assaulted him in about June 2013, when he was 'a very vulnerable young man'. Kevin Spacey attending Cannes Film Festival (Doug Peters/PA) Oscar-winning actor Mr Spacey has previously denied allegations of inappropriate behaviour and wrongdoing, and details of his defence are not yet available. According to the documents, filed in June, Mr Spacey was working as artistic director at the Old Vic Theatre at the time of the alleged assaults on a production of a play by Tennessee Williams known as Sweet Bird Of Youth, and Mr Cannon was a member of the cast in this production. They claim that Mr Spacey 'took a particular interest' in Mr Cannon for 'reasons of sexual interest' and sent him a 'lavish' gift of a framed poster of the 1985 production of the play directed by Harold Pinter. After the press preview of the show on June 12 2013, Mr Cannon attended a party at The Savoy in London organised by The Old Vic Theatre Company (The Cut) and The Old Vic Theatre Trust 2000. It is claimed that one of the alleged assaults took place at the event. Setting out the allegations, Elizabeth-Anne Gumbel KC, for Mr Cannon, said: 'Kevin Spacey pulled the claimant towards him, turned him around through 45 degrees and placed his left hand on the claimant's buttocks and lifted up the recess material of his suit.' It is alleged that Mr Spacey then pushed Mr Cannon's underwear 'as far up' into his bottom as possible, 'so as to cause pain and distress'. Ms Gumbel added: 'Mr Kevin Spacey pulled the claimant closer to him and whispered into the claimant's ear 'Don't worry about it'. 'Mr Spacey made more uncalled for and unwelcome advances to the claimant during the evening.' The following day, Mr Cannon reported the alleged assaults to his stage manager at the Old Vic Theatre, but no action was taken. According to the documents, it is accepted that Mr Cannon did not ask for any action to be taken, and was scared about how any further action might affect his career. Later that year, during the run of the show, Mr Cannon saw Mr Spacey at the Old Vic bar. Mr Spacey allegedly said to him, 'I hear you have a dirty secret', and then said: 'Open up.' Ms Gumbel said: 'Kevin Spacey then forced open the claimant's mouth with his fingers and thumbs and commented 'quite a bad boy' before the claimant could pull away. 'The claimant then left the bar. The forcing open of the claimant's mouth was another assault for which Kevin Spacey was responsible and for which the second and/or third defendants were vicariously liable. 'Further in 2017 when the Old Vic set up a confidential complaints email on October 31 2017 the claimant reported the above complaint again to the Old Vic.' She added that the alleged assaults were carried out by Mr Spacey in the course of his work for the organisations connected to the Old Vic, and they are 'vicariously liable' for the alleged assaults carried out in the context of a theatre production. Law firms Carter-Ruck, which is representing Mr Spacey, and Clyde & Co, representing the companies, have been approached for comment.
Western Telegraph
2 days ago
- Western Telegraph
Spacey told actor ‘don't worry about it' after alleged assault, documents claim
Ruari Cannon is suing Mr Spacey as well as two organisations connected to the Old Vic Theatre in London, claiming he suffered psychiatric damage as a result of sexual and emotional abuse. The 33-year-old has waived his anonymity in the claim. In court documents seen by the PA news agency, Mr Cannon alleges that Mr Spacey, who was a 'powerful figure and a world-famous actor and celebrity' at the time, assaulted him in about June 2013, when he was 'a very vulnerable young man'. Kevin Spacey attending Cannes Film Festival (Doug Peters/PA) Oscar-winning actor Mr Spacey has previously denied allegations of inappropriate behaviour and wrongdoing, and details of his defence are not yet available. According to the documents, filed in June, Mr Spacey was working as artistic director at the Old Vic Theatre at the time of the alleged assaults on a production of a play by Tennessee Williams known as Sweet Bird Of Youth, and Mr Cannon was a member of the cast in this production. They claim that Mr Spacey 'took a particular interest' in Mr Cannon for 'reasons of sexual interest' and sent him a 'lavish' gift of a framed poster of the 1985 production of the play directed by Harold Pinter. After the press preview of the show on June 12 2013, Mr Cannon attended a party at The Savoy in London organised by The Old Vic Theatre Company (The Cut) and The Old Vic Theatre Trust 2000. It is claimed that one of the alleged assaults took place at the event. Setting out the allegations, Elizabeth-Anne Gumbel KC, for Mr Cannon, said: 'Kevin Spacey pulled the claimant towards him, turned him around through 45 degrees and placed his left hand on the claimant's buttocks and lifted up the recess material of his suit.' It is alleged that Mr Spacey then pushed Mr Cannon's underwear 'as far up' into his bottom as possible, 'so as to cause pain and distress'. Ms Gumbel added: 'Mr Kevin Spacey pulled the claimant closer to him and whispered into the claimant's ear 'Don't worry about it'. 'Mr Spacey made more uncalled for and unwelcome advances to the claimant during the evening.' The following day, Mr Cannon reported the alleged assaults to his stage manager at the Old Vic Theatre, but no action was taken. According to the documents, it is accepted that Mr Cannon did not ask for any action to be taken, and was scared about how any further action might affect his career. Later that year, during the run of the show, Mr Cannon saw Mr Spacey at the Old Vic bar. Mr Spacey allegedly said to him, 'I hear you have a dirty secret', and then said: 'Open up.' Ms Gumbel said: 'Kevin Spacey then forced open the claimant's mouth with his fingers and thumbs and commented 'quite a bad boy' before the claimant could pull away. 'The claimant then left the bar. The forcing open of the claimant's mouth was another assault for which Kevin Spacey was responsible and for which the second and/or third defendants were vicariously liable. 'Further in 2017 when the Old Vic set up a confidential complaints email on October 31 2017 the claimant reported the above complaint again to the Old Vic.' She added that the alleged assaults were carried out by Mr Spacey in the course of his work for the organisations connected to the Old Vic, and they are 'vicariously liable' for the alleged assaults carried out in the context of a theatre production. Law firms Carter-Ruck, which is representing Mr Spacey, and Clyde & Co, representing the companies, have been approached for comment.
