Cannes hands out its top prize Sunday after a marathon battle between heavyweights like Quentin Tarantino and Jane Campion, with the critics’ money on lesser-known names from France and Austria.
The notoriously extravagant festival toned down the glitz for this year’s crisis-era bash and was lighter than usual in star power, but it still saw celebs like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie sashay up the fabled red carpet.
Billed as a battle of auteur titans, it mostly lived up to expectations, with Britain’s Independent on Sunday calling it “a superior vintage” and France’s Journal du Dimanche declaring “the return of great cinema”.
Her singing was dominated by a backing track. Her moves were nothing special — defined by much strutting and stripper-like shimmying, with the minimum amount of acrobatics to prove her mettle as a dance-pop queen. Her physical form, still beautiful, didn’t take one’s breath away the way it did when she was 17.
But on Tuesday’s opening night of her “Circus” tour at the New Orleans Arena, Britney Spears, the mighty Aphrodite with the troublesome tawdry streak, nonetheless renewed her claim as one of the world’s most adept manipulators of the public interest. Powering through a 90-minute show that integrated her impetuous teenhits with the more perverse material from the albums she released after a very public breakdown that made her a constant in the tabloids, the Louisiana native flashed her famous good ol’ girl smile at the fans, mostly female, who still find her a worthy patron saint of the erotic arts.
