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Birthday shoutouts go to James McAvoy (above), who is 35, John Cameron Mitchell is 51, and Robert Smith is 55.

Orphan Black returned to big numbers for BBC America, and has become the second highest rated series in the demo for the network, behind Doctor Who

Seven men you can never date.

In unsurprising news, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron will return as Oscar producers next year.

Boat Wake, My Ass!

The Usps officially unveiled the Harvey Milk stamp today. It will be available May 22nd.

Falling Skies returns to TNT this June, and here’s a first look at Season Four.

Betty Bowers takes a road trip down south.

Out has a preview of its June/July issue with cover boy Matt Bomer, in which he discusses his role in The Normal Heart: ““You’re really lucky as an artist if you get a role that changes you as a person,...

Hollywood and the world's most prestigious film festival, Cannes, have conducted an on-off romance down the years – and now they're closer than ever. But have they got too cosy? As the Croisette opens for business, Xan Brooks investigates

In among the ligging and rigging of last year's Cannes film festival, visitors may have spotted James Toback and Alec Baldwin trudging wearily back and forth along the Croisette. The director and star, it now transpires, were in town to shoot a very meta documentary – a film about their efforts to actually make a film. For a 10-day spell they interviewed everyone from Ryan Gosling to Martin Scorsese, Nicole Kidman to Roman Polanski. Along the way they took the temperature of a festival perched at the intersection between art and commerce. The documentary's title, Seduced and Abandoned, alludes to Baldwin's description of the film industry as "the world's worst girlfriend". But it...

Editor’s note: With This Must Be the Place now officially released in theaters, here is a re-run of our Cannes review, originally published on May 20, 2011. Sean Penn‘s second appearance at this year’s fest – though in truth his first main once, since he was relegated to a side player in The Tree of Life - sees him don his finest goth garb and make-up to take an impressive shot at a Robert Smith type character. He plays Cheyenne, an aging former rock star, who seems happy to live off his royalties in a grand country house in Ireland with his wife (Frances McDormand), though really he is stagnating: depressed or bored, he can’t work out which. He gets an opportunity for respite when his father dies and he travels home to America for the funeral, subsequently learning that his father had been obsessed with tracking down a former Nazi Auschwitz guard who tormented him...

We first came across The Saline Project's work through their series of black-and-white lenticular GIFs, capturing an array of film noir-ish villains.

Intrigued by the force behind these spooky GIFs from the start, we were all the more excited to learn The Saline Project was a four person creative team behind an incredible selection of music videos, including legends like The Cure, Eminem and The Roots. All the music videos look as if filmed in alternate reality between video games and real life, where colors are brighter, surfaces glossier and sounds are thicker. We're also huge suckers for their video descriptions, such as this one for the Mars Volta vid: "We may or may have not illegally travelled to a certain totalitarian police state to shoot elements for this fully animated music video."

The Saline Project is Adam Toht and Ben Toht, 3D artist/designer Jesse Roff, and animator Liam Kirtley.

Exiled European film-makers in the 1930s had little choice but to adapt to America. Nowadays they can be temporary visitors, and not all are at home or have an interesting road trip. John Boorman, Karel Reisz, John Schlesinger, Milos Forman and Louis Malle settled in straight away; Antonioni, Kusturica, and now the gifted Paolo Sorrentino have merely squashed their noses against a glass wall. Sorrentino's The Consequences of Love, The Family Friend and Il Divo were highly individual works set in different areas of his native Italy. This Must Be the Place is merely irritatingly eccentric in the way it locates Cheyenne (Sean Penn), a reclusive American former rock star, in Ireland and then sends him home to America in search of the fugitive Nazi war criminal who tormented his father in Auschwitz.

Penn's character, speaking in a whispering monotone, wearing gothic make-up and a flowing black wig, is apparently...

A lot has happened in the 14 years since Brandy and Monica charmed the world with their Grammy-winning teen rivals hit “The Boy is Mine.” Now they’re back with a new duet – ”It All Belongs to Me” is out now — and are both mothers.

Brandy’s daughter Sy’rai, 9½ (dad is her ex, producer Robert Smith), has the talent to follow in Mom’s footsteps, but the singer isn’t ready to let her — yet.

“She’s into her school work and her education but singing is all she does, watching videos and making up routines,” Brandy, 33, tells People. “I’m seeing the signs,...

Editor: Stephen Jones.

Writers: Peter Atkins, Peter Crowther, Paul Finch, Christopher Fowler, Tim Lebbon, Paul McAuley, Kim Newman, John Llewellyn Probert, Mark Samuels, Pat Cadigan, Scott Edelman, Jo Fletcher, Robert hood, Tanith Lee, Lisa Morton, Sarah Pinborough, Jay Russell, Mandy Slater, and Michael Marshall Smith.

There seems to be a massive resurgence in everything zombie, or zombie-like nowadays. From books such as Craig Dilouie's The Infection, to film e.g. World War Z and even in digital games like "Dead Island," there is no shortage of undead material to get your rotten hands onto. Therefore, the zombie literature genre is a competitive market, one where the creme (cream) thankfully shambles to the top. This is the case with Stephen Jones' version of the coming zombocalypse. Released in paperback form December 7th, Zombie Apocalypse unites several horror fiction writers to believably tell tales of the undead. In no time, London falls,...

A rather bizarre clip has been released of Sean Penn & Frances McDormand in This Must Be The Place. The film deals with a middle-aged wealthy rock star who becomes bored in his retirement and takes on the quest of finding his father’s tormentor, an ex-Nazi war criminal who is a refugee in the Us. It’s one of two films starring Penn scheduled to premiere in Competition at the 64th Cannes Film Festival (the other being Tree of Life of course). This Must Be the Place is helmed by Il divo director Paolo Sorrentino who also wrote the screenplay specifically with Sean Penn in mind, after meeting him at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, where Penn headed the jury. The name of the rock star and his band in the movie is Cheyenne and the Fellows, inspired by Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the look of the character was inspired...

Lars Von Trier's apocalypse story takes on Mel Gibson's bizarre comeback in Peter Bradshaw's list of 10 films sure to have Cannes abuzz

• Peter Bradshaw's picks in pictures

The Skin I Live In (dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

Almodóvar is a Cannes favourite, one of the few directors who draws superstar-level crowds in the streets wherever he goes. Yet he has still to win the big prize. This film reunites him with Antonio Banderas, and is based on a Sadean horror-thriller by French author Thierry Jonquet, published in the UK under the title Tarantula. Banderas plays Ledgard, a plastic surgeon who keeps his partner chained up in his chateau, where he has a secret operating theatre. The theme of obsession will be familiar to admirers of Almodóvar's work, but this looks set to be one of his darkest and most challenging films to date.

The Tree of Life (dir.

Sean Penn reached star status in the 1980's, and in his new film, he's revisiting the decade in a whole new light.

The Oscar-winner stars in the Cannes-selected movie "This Must Be The Place," starring as a retired, Robert Smith-esque rocker who, learning of his just passed father's torture in Auschwitz, sets out to seek revenge on the Nazi who inflicted the damage all those years ago. It'd be a compelling role no matter what for Penn, a serious and artistic choice based in social justice, but the addition of the Cure-inspired backstory adds a new dimension to the film.

Frances McDormand and Judd Hirsch co-star in the Paolo Sorrentino-directed film. It's one of two major projects that Penn will feature in this year; he's also got a starring role in the highly anticipated Terrence Malick film, "The Tree of Life."

Penn was recently offered the role of...

Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, Gus Van Sant ... and Mr and Mrs Pitt. Cannes rolls out a classic red-carpet lineup

• In pictures: the Cannes contenders

The announcement of the Cannes competition list is an exciting event. Rightly or wrongly, no other festival in the world can command anything like the same interest for its lineup-unveiling ceremony. The list is always guaranteed to trigger a canonical debate among critics and observers, an argument about which films and film-makers are thought to be making the grade. And the announcement is accumulating its own theatrical traditions, now that live TV coverage of the Paris press conference – hosted by the festival's ebullient head of selection Thierry Frémaux and its cool, mandarin president Gilles Jacob – itself can be watched online.

The announcement is a time when Cannes re-establishes a kind of cultural brand-identity by rehearsing the names of those heavyweight auteurs in which it has made a long-term investment.

Brad Pitt will be there with The Tree of Life. Johnny Depp will come to launch Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. And Jodie Foster’s The Beaver will arrive with the question of whether troubled star Mel Gibson will too.

These Cannes Film Festival selections come with a built-in high profile, though many other films announced early this morning for the May 11-22 showcase will provoke their own share of attention. After the jump, here’s a look at a few: a comical, troubled pope; a wedding-ruining planet collision; Emily Browning in an erotic fairy tale, and Sean Penn...

Despite the fact that his movie boasts a Talking Heads-related title, Sean Penn in the upcoming This Must Be the Place appears to be channeling a different band altogether. The drain-clog hairdo and lipsticked-pout makes Penn look, possibly intentionally, like pop gothster Robert Smith of The Cure, which is kind of awesome. Maybe this is going to be a Last Days-esque bit of pseudo rock biography.

Actually, probably not. The plot of the movie revolves around Penn’s aging former rock star and his search for the ex-Nazi war criminal that killed his father. Wha-? Well, the writer...

Peter Kramer/AP

Life in front of the camera is familiar territory for singer-actress Brandy Norwood, but it’s territory she says her daughter will not traverse anytime soon.

Sy’rai Iman, 8, does not appear on screen in the reality show Brandy & Ray J: A Family Business – and it is no accident.

“That’s strictly because her father [Robert Smith] and I felt it was best for her to have as much of a normal life as possible,” Norwood, 31, reveals to Parade.

“Of course, you’ve seen her on one episode on For the Love of Ray J, but it wasn’t every day.

Director: Catherine Taylor.

Writer: Julianne White.

Vicious Circle Films will be releasing director Catherine Taylor's first picture, Temptation, to North American audiences June 29th and this Black Tower and Co-Operative Film production offers a fresh take on the vampire, horror genre. Also, this London shot film offers beautiful cinematography, while offering a uniquely feminine view of vampires, their powers, and their ability to blend in with London's nite life.

The film follows central character Isabel (Caroline Haines) after a nite of partying and in to the hands of a recently released serial rapist. Isabel's already bad day has already involved seeing her boyfriend cheating on her with another women and a brutal rape in a dark alley adds a sour note to a nite of socializing and excessive drinking with friends. However, fortunately, or unfortunately, an ancient vampiress intervenes in Isabel's possible demise by killing the attacker with a...

Check out the world premiere of Mike's new video "Put It Down."

What the world needs now is videos, cheap videos. MTV doesn't play them, and VH1 only plays them before noon on weekdays, but we're still watching them, on YouTube and everywhere else. Before the record business started tanking, they were laying out big bucks for mega-productions; now budgets are more modest. Rightfully so, I think; one of the worst things to happen to videos was when, as the art of video-making started to come into its own, MTV began putting the names of the directors on the video, right under the song title and record company credit. On the positive side, this began a kind of auteur era in videos -- Mark Romanek, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Hype Williams -- but, the music business being the music business, once they saw that one guy had a hit using a certain video director,...