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Exclusive: Social media stars and the big screen rarely make for easy bedfellows, but French TikTok duo Golo & Ritchie are bucking the trend.

The comic duo has been posting about their lives in the housing estate of La Grande Borne in the commune of Grigny on the outskirts of Paris for the past five years.

Grigny ranks as one of the poorest towns in France and hit the headlines in the summer of 2023 after riots broke out there in response to the shooting dead in the northern suburb of Nanterre of teenager Nahel Mezouk by a policeman, after he fled a routine traffic stop.

Golo & Ritchie’s posts show another side to life in the estate and its diverse community and have steadily amassed them 1.5 million followers on Snapchat, another 661,000 on Instagram, and 578,000 on TikTok.

Their posts are also distinguished by the fact that Ritchie is autistic, which adds an...

Gilles Lellouche arrived at the Cannes press conference for his Competition title Beating Hearts (L’amour Ouf) on Friday with one of the biggest cast delegations of the festival as its 77th edition entered its final strait.

As well as being joined on the stage by co-stars François Civil and Adèle Exarchopoulos and newcomers Mallory Wanecque and Malik Frikah, actors Jean-Pascal Zadi, Elodie Bouchez, Raphaël Quenard, Vincent Lacoste, Alain Chabat, Karim Leklou and Antony Bajon took up the front row of the press room.

They arrived on the wave of an enthusiastic response from the audience at Thursday night’s world premiere in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, which gave it a 15-minute standing ovation.

The modern Romeo and Juliet tale, which took Lellouche 17 years to bring to the big screen, is the actor and director’s third feature after hit comedy Sink or Swim.

“I take great, great pleasure from directing.

Seemingly from out of nowhere, actor turned director Gilles Lellouche throws a Molotov Flanby into the Competition with only his second feature, a terrific and unexpectedly potent piece of genre filmmaking that could, to avoid spoilers, be described as a kind of mash-up of Badlands and La Haine, as if directed by Walter Hill. Throw in a little Eurocrime, from the likes of Fernando Di Leo and late-period Jean-Pierre Melville, and you’re getting close to what Lellouche has achieved here, a romantic banlieue opera that delivers all the gritty, vicarious thrills of the now-standard post-Goodfellas gangster movie but also burrows into issues of class and gender in refreshingly unpredictable ways.

It arrives as a movie seemingly made by committee, since the film is based on an Irish novel — Jackie Love Johnser Ok? by Neville Thompson — and features contributions by fellow filmmakers Ahmed Hamidi and Audrey Diwan. It quickly...

If you took Magnolia, Goodfellas, Boyz n the Hood and perhaps Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, plugged them all into the latest version of ChatGPT and asked it to spit out a brand new film, you could wind up with something like Gilles Lellouche’s (no relation to Claude) swooning French crime romance, Beating Hearts (L’Amour ouf).

A hodgepodge of movie clichés and overwrought scenes, directed with zero tact and plenty of pounding needle drops, actor-turned-director Lellouche’s third stab at the helm after his rather likeable ensemble comedy, Sink or Swim, is less a disappointment than a serious assault on the viewer’s intelligence. The fact that it premiered in Cannes’ competition, rather than in a sidebar “Première” slot, speaks to the general level of one of the festival’s weakest main slates in recent memory.

Sink or Swim was a major hit in France that grossed $40 million,...

This evening the Cannes Film Festival welcomed another world premiere of an ambitious French title with Beating Hearts (L’Amour Ouf). Gilles Lellouche’s competition entry from Studiocanal was greeted with a 15-minute standing ovation inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière.

The modern Romeo and Juliet tale co-stars François Civil, who featured as D’Artagnan in last year’s Three Musketeers reboot, and Blue is the Warmest Color’s Adèle Exarchopoulos. The pair play former childhood sweethearts from different sides of the tracks.

Having gone their separate ways when the boy gets caught up in gang violence and lands in jail on trumped-up murder charges, the couple reconnects against the odds years later.

Further cast includes Raphaël Quenard, Benoît Poelvoorde, Elodie Bouchez, Vincent Lacoste, Alain Chabat and Jean-Pascal Zadi.

The film is adapted from Irish writer Neville Thompson’s 1997 novel Jackie Loves Johnser Ok? which unfolded against the backdrop of Dublin’s tough...

Cannes film festival

Gilles Lelouche’s new movie aims for a Springsteenesque blue-collar energy but buckles under the weight of its own naivety

Gilles Lelouche’s new film is a giant operatic crime drama of star-crossed lovers and hurt feelings; it’s very French, but aiming for some blue-collar Springsteen energy. There are some good performances, and a very serviceable armed robbery scene. But Beating Hearts suffers from a lack of subtlety and bloat, with an increasingly insistent cry-bully sensitive-macho ethic, and a colossally inflated final section belatedly reassuring us of the film’s belief in the power and importance of love. In the end it is sentimental and naive, particularly about the legal consequences of beating your husband half to death in a phone box, however abusive he has been. And I had a strange taste in my mouth after a late scene in which the heroine, working on...

“Beating Hearts” (“L’amour ouf”), an epic crime romance directed by Gilles Lellouche and slated to compete at the Cannes Film Festival, has lured major distributors in key markets ahead of its world premiere.

The sprawling movie, which is budgeted in the $30 million range, is financed, co-produced represented in international markets by Studiocanal. One of the most anticipated and ambitious French movies set for a theatrical release in 2024, “Beating Hearts” was produced by Hugo Selignac at Chi-Fou-Mi, a Mediawan company, and Alain Attal’s Les Films du Tresor.

Studiocanal will distribute the film in Germany and Australia, as well as France, with a release set for Oct. 16. The company has sold it to Cineart in Benelux, Filmcoopi in Switzerland, Feelgood in Greece, Lucky Red in Italy, Lusomundo in Portugal, Kinoswiat in Poland, Greenlight Films in Ukraine, Capella in Russia and Pinema in Turkey. Studiocanal will be closing more deals at the Cannes Film Festival.

Already one of France’s most beloved and bankable actors (“The Stronghold”), Gilles Lellouche is about to graduate as a big-shot filmmaker five years after delivering his sophomore outing, “Sink or Swim,” a B.O. hit which lured more than four million moviegoers (over $35 million) in theaters.

His next movie, “Beating Hearts” (“L’amour Ouf”), budgeted in the €30 million range, is epic in many ways. And not just because of its breadth and running time exceeding three hours. A crime romance loosely based on Neville Thompson’s 1997 novel “Jackie Loves Johnser Ok,” the movie is an emotional rollercoaster spanning over 15 years in the lives of star-crossed lovers. It took Lellouche over a decade to write (alongside Audrey Diwan and Ahmed Hamidi) and four months to shoot with a cast mixing rising and famous actors, a pulsating soundtrack of cult 1980s and 1990s songs, topnotch key crew and dream-like musical interludes created by (La) Horde.

Studiocanal rolled out the red carpet at the Unifrance Paris Rendez-vous this week for actor Gilles Lellouche’s upcoming feature film Beating Hearts (L’Amour Ouf).

First images for the unconventional romance played on the big screen to two packed-out screenings at the swanky Royal Monceau hotel off the Champs-Elysées on Thursday evening.

The modern Romeo and Juliet tale co-stars François Civil, who is currently riding high on the back of his D’Artagnan role in Pathé’s Three Musketeers reboot, and Adèle Exarchopoulos as former childhood sweethearts from different sides of the tracks.

Having gone their separate ways when the boy gets caught up in gang violence and lands in jail on trumped-up murder charges, the pair reconnect against the odds years later.

The picture is adapted from Irish writer Neville Thompson’s 1997 novel Jackie Loves Johnser Ok? unfolding against the backdrop of Dublin’s tough suburb of Ballyfermot in the...

Alain Attal and Hugo Selignac have formed a producing duo known for delivering original, starry French films that probe uneasy subjects that earn B.O. gold and critical laurels. Attal is in Cannes with Un Certain Regard title “Rosalie,” while Selignac has “Omar à la Fraise” in Critics’ Week.

The pair is now about to hit a new milestone in 2024, starting with Gilles Lellouche’s epic romance drama “L’Amour Ouf,” which boasts a budget of €32 million ($34 million) and marks Studiocanal’s biggest investment in a French-language film to date. They also have “And Their Children After Them,” an adaptation of Nicolas Mathieu’s Goncourt Prize-winning novel to be directed by Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma (“Teddy”), which has been boarded by Warner Bros. France and HBO Max and France Televisions, the first French movie to bring together these three partners.

“L’Amour Ouf” also marks the first film co-acquired by Canal Plus,...

Domestic violence drama earns four prizes in Paris.

Xavier Legrand’s domestic violence drama Custody (Jusqu’à La Garde) was named best film at the 44th Cesar Awards in Paris on Friday (23).

Legrand’s feature directorial debut and Venice 2017 Silver Lion winner began the night on a field-leading 10 nominations alongside Gilles Lellouche’s comedy Sink Or Swim (Le Grand Bain), and also won awards for Legrand’s original screenplay, best actress Lea Drucker, and editor Yorgos Lamprinos.

Jacques Audiard was named best director for The Sisters Brothers at the ceremony in the Salle Pleyel, presided over by Kristin Scott Thomas.

The swimming is synchronized in “Sink or Swim,” and so is the scripting: Gilles Lellouche’s feelgood buddy comedy so painstakingly mimics the rhythms and motions of assorted men-in-quirky-crisis farces from across the Channel that it may as well have been titled “The Pool Monty.” Gathering an A-team of French thesps to play a decidedly less well-qualified squad of million-dollar mermen, this story of disenfranchised middle-aged schmoes who decide — for reasons barely clear to them, much less the viewer — to find renewed purpose in water ballet is as harmless as it is silly, but dampened by idle gags, empty characterization and an inordinate two-hour runtime. The reliably charismatic work of its players, notably ringleader Mathieu Amalric, keeps this somewhat soggy macaron diverting, but it’s hard to see audiences showing much interest outside France, where it should do, well, swimmingly.

A chirpily commercial enterprise through and through, “Sink or Swim...

Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp has announced a fifth film in the Marseilles-set Taxi franchise. A release for Taxi 5 is set for January 31, 2018, Europa said via Twitter. Franck Gastambide is directing the latest installment and penning the script with Ahmed Hamidi, and the participation of Malik Bentalha. Gastambide directed and co-wrote Gaumont’s hit comedy Pattaya from earlier this year. He also starred with Bentalha and the duo is expected to lead the cast for the new Taxi. The franchise began in 1998 with Samy Naceri, Frédéric Diefenthal and Marion Cotillard starring. Gérard Pires directed the first film from a script by Besson about a pizza delivery man turned taxi driver who becomes embroiled in a bank robbery investigation. It was remade in 2004 by Tim Story and starred Queen Latifah, Jimmy Fallon and Gisele Bündchen. The rest of the feature series in France included films in 2000, 2003 and 2007 with all four movies...

Luc Besson's EuropaCorp has announced a fifth film in the Marseilles-set Taxi franchise. A release for Taxi 5 is set for January 31, 2018, Europa said via Twitter. Franck Gastambide is directing the latest installment and penning the script with Ahmed Hamidi, and the participation of Malik Bentalha. Gastambide directed and co-wrote Gaumont's hit comedy Pattaya from earlier this year. He also starred with Bentalha and the duo is expected to lead the cast for the new Taxi…...

Luc Besson's EuropaCorp has announced a fifth film in the Marseilles-set Taxi franchise. A release for Taxi 5 is set for January 31, 2018, Europa said via Twitter. Franck Gastambide is directing the latest installment and penning the script with Ahmed Hamidi, and the participation of Malik Bentalha. Gastambide directed and co-wrote Gaumont's hit comedy Pattaya from earlier this year. He also starred with Bentalha and the duo is expected to lead the cast for the new Taxi…...