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The 'actress' is in Grozny, shooting a film with the French bon viveur, and hanging out with colourful Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. But, best of all, Steven Seagal is also in townTo a news report concerning Gerard Depardieu's views on the alleged Boston bombers, and a statement so appallingly controversial that Lost in Showbiz can still scarcely believe it. "Speaking in the southern Russian province of Chechnya, where he is shooting a movie with British actress Elizabeth Hurley, Depardieu said: 'I agree with [Chechen president] Ramzan Kadyrov who said that the Tsarnaev brothers have a Chechen last name, but their upbringing is American.'"I'm sorry, but WHAT? Tell me I didn't just read that. And yet, there it is in black and white: "where he is shooting a movie with British actress Elizabeth Hurley".Mine eyes!For a long time, it has seemed as though the "actress" part of Liz's Twitter biography – "mum, model, actress, bikini designer, organic farmer" – were more of a nod to past glories than an ongoing situation which requires a diplomatic or even military response. Indeed, Lost in Showbiz is chastened to admit it has been some time since it checked into Liz's IMDb page, across which even tumbleweed has blown with increasing sparsity since 2002.Even so, this column regards itself as something of a Hurley completist. Mostly it's about discovering something new in the classics, of course: a mistimed gasp in Passenger 57, say, or a brutally cudgeled line in Bedazzled. But any new work is obviously a major event, and these sensational claims of a return to the silver screen demand an immediate IMDb visit. There, we have no mention of Turquoise, the movie she is shooting with Depardieu. But bounty of sorts exists in the form of High Midnight, a Hurley picture said to be in the pipeline and whose synopsis runs as follows: "A broken-down sheriff is forced to join forces with an obsessed Victorian vampire-hunter to defeat an undead force consuming a small frontier town in 1892 New Mexico."Quite how far down the pipeline that will get before Dyno-Rod is summoned I should not like to say, but we seem locked on for Turquoise, given Hurley is already in Grozny. On Tuesday, the Chechen president Instagrammed a picture of the pair of them cosying up to Chanel, his pet white cat.You probably already know that President Ramzan Kadyrov is a major nut for Instagram, upon which he posts frequent snaps that seem almost adorably kooky until you recall that he is basically a warlord-made-good whose record is so troubling that he beats even Vladimir Putin to confected human-rights awards. Aside from treating his fans to regular pictures of him with tigers and scythes and whatnot, Kadyrov has even picked a cabinet minister from his Instagram followers.Nevertheless, this week's Hurley bilateral seems the sort of escalation that demands the finest Foreign Office brains be immediately seconded to the situation room. How long before Liz's radically manscaped fiance, Shane Warne, visits her on set in Grozny, and is co-opted as the star of a presidential Instagram in which Kadyrov appears to be hitting him for six? (My feeling is that Ramzan is a superhumanly gifted athlete in the mould of Kim Jong-il – whose first round of golf famously saw him shoot 38 under par, with 11 holes-in-one – and would take six sixes off a single Warne over.)Then again, perhaps other worlds are already colliding. Having hosted Hurley and Depardieu in the capital on Tuesday, the president's Instagram reveals that Wednesday was reserved for honouring another guest – none other than Lost in Showbiz untouchable Steven Seagal. Oh Steven! Incapable of making a good decision where the former eastern bloc is concerned, the On Deadly Ground legend seems to have been in town to burnish Kadyrov's hardman aura. There are snaps of Seagal dining, and posing with Kadyrov's kids, and a tiger, and some T-shirted heavies who are possibly the cabinet or something. "I told him I watch his movies and I like them a lot," Kadyrov explained. "Nobility. Willpower. Honour. Qualities characteristic of Chechens. So we can say he is almost a Chechen!"Of course, the key question is: have Liz, Gerard, Steven and Ramzan met up as a foursome? Are the out-of-towners maybe even having drinks with the prez tonight? The possibility hangs in the air like a malarial hallucination.What we do know is a little more about Turquoise. Liz is going to play Depardieu's Russian old flame – ZOMG she's going to do a Russian accent! – and she has insisted the film is "an opportunity" to visit Chechnya. "We've made quite an invasion," she declared to reporters, almost as though the cast were Russia or the Mongols, "but we intend to make a great movie."With Hurley, it's always about the work. However, she may wish to bear in mind the backlash suffered by other stars who have palled about with Kadyrov. A couple of years ago, the Chechen leader shipped over a flotilla of stars to help him celebrate his birthday with an extravagant televised concert, one of whom was Hilary Swank. Having initially claimed to have done her "provisory [sic] research" on his human-rights record, Swank eventually professed her attendance was a terrible mistake.So there you have it. Hilary Swank is a multimillionaire, two-time Oscar winner who will do almost anything for an appearance fee. But – and fire up the Meat Loaf soundtrack – she won't do that. No she won't do that. And if some under-researched minion's error means she does end up doing that, then said under-researched minion will find their desk in the lift. I should tell you that Hilary sacked her manager and most of her management team in the wake of her Chechen jaunt.As for Liz – yet to be recognised by the Academy – there are vague hints of a gathering PR storm. Once the Instagrams of her with the president surfaced, a reporter from the Independent tried to cheapen her artistic commitment with a question about Kadyrov, forcing her to declare: "I'm only here to talk about the movie." Mmm. The form book suggests that once the reviews of her performance come out, Liz will only want to talk about human-rights abuses in Chechnya. But until that moment, this situation in the North Caucusus remains developing, and one upon which we'll keep the closest of eyes.Elizabeth HurleyCelebritySteven SeagalRamzan KadyrovChechnyaEuropeGérard DepardieuMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Th 84-year-old director rolled into Cannes this week to discuss his latest film La Danza de la Realidad, a magic-realist memoir of his youth. He talks about his troubled childhood, his passion for psychomagic – and why ageing doesn't touble himMissing, believed lost, Alejandro Jodorowsky rolls into Cannes like a conquering hero. He has a room at the Croisette and a film in the directors' fortnight – a rambunctious sidebar away from the Palais. "I am like the rain, I go where I'm needed," the director explains. "If I were in the big house, with the red carpet and photographers and all the fancy women, I would be ashamed." He has always been happier way out on the fringes.Jodorowsky turned 84 last birthday. He has white hair, bright eyes and a crocodile smile. It is now more than four decades since he thrilled the faithful as El Topo, a mysterious gunslinger in rabbinical black, and 23 years since he last sat behind a movie camera. We thought he was a goner, that it was all over bar the obit. Instead, it transpires, the man is barely getting started."Look at this, I show you something," he says, leafing through the pages of the magazine at his elbow. His tour leads us through a world of glossy advertisements. "Beautiful woman – selling things. Beautiful woman – selling things. The Great Gatsby – selling watches." It is the picture of Leonardo DiCaprio that really gets his goat. "Prostitution!" he roars. "He should be ashamed."Jodorowsky's latest film, La Danza de la Realidad, also feels like the first in that it unfolds as an exuberant magic-realist memoir of the director's own childhood, replete with iguanas, circus clowns and amputees. He shot most of the action in his hometown of Tocopilla, a dirt-poor Chilean village that he found had barely changed in the intervening decades. In a neat generational twist, the director's eldest son, Brontis, plays Jodorowsky's brutish Stalinist dad.The whole thing was undertaken in a spirit of healing. "My father was a monster," he recalls. "A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again. Oh yes, it was a terrible thing that I did. But what I am doing here is recovering them and giving them what they never had. My father had no humanity. So here, look, I am making him human."As a boy, Jodorowsky was bullied for being Jewish and bullied for being bookish. Flight, he decided, was his only option. In Paris, he studied mime with Marcel Marceau and directed Maurice Chevalier in music-hall. In Mexico he outraged the authorities with an avant-garde theatre group. "In Mexico they want to kill me!" he marvels. "A soldier held a gun to my chest."By the early 70s he was a star of American counter-culture. El Topo, a demented peyote western, won an ardent fan in John Lennon and it was Lennon who helped secure the funds for 1973's The Holy Mountain, in which the conquest of Mexico is re-enacted with chameleons dressed as Aztecs and toads playing conquistadors. And yet The Holy Mountain would prove too rich and wild a brew and, since then, Jodorowsky's career has been an infuriatingly stop-start affair. Here at Cannes, another festival picture (Jodorowsky's Dune) charts his endless, agonised attempts to spin a film out of the Frank Herbert fantasy tome. The film was eventually directed by David Lynch, while many of its visual ideas filtered through to Ridley Scott's Alien. Jodorowsky, for his part, was left out in the cold.Such indignities might have undone a lesser man. Yet Jodorowsky claims to be altogether untroubled. The ticking clock means nothing to him. "Anyone who thinks they will get older and die has a big problem," he says. "Tarantino says that he will stop when he gets old because the pictures are for young people, I don't believe it. I am going to live 120 years."Besides, he says, he has always been able to keep himself busy. At home in Paris he writes comic-books, reads the tarot and gives free lectures on his theory of "psychomagic", which strikes me as a peculiarly Jodorowskyan blend of psychotherapy and shamanistic mumbo-jumbo. "Lots of psychomagic in this film! My son playing my father. Psychomagic! The boy in the film is afraid of the night, just as I am. So he paints himself black. Psychomagic! Not afraid of the dark any more." He laughs. "People say I am mad. I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul."Reading this on mobile? Click here to viewFrom time to time, Jodorowsky even pops up in La Danza de la Realidad himself. He plays a kind of wise, white-bearded angel, grinning his crocodile grin and cradling the child in his arms. If he could really go back, what would he say to his bullied younger self?"But this is what I did in the film," he says, as though I missed some crucial point; as if there is no distinction between his film and his life. "I say: 'Listen, don't suffer, I am here. You are not alone because you are with me.' I felt so alone as a boy because no one wanted to be friends with me. But I say: 'I am with you and just listen what you will do. You will be an artist, you will travel. You will be happy.'" Jodorowsky, it turns out, was who Jodorowsky was waiting for all along.Cannes 2013Cannes film festivalFestivalsXan Brooksguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

In The Matrix, after having martial arts virtually uploaded into his noggin, Keanu Reeves famously declared, “I know kung-fu.” Now, the star is hoping we believe that he knows tai-chi – or at least how to make an action movie from it. Reeves appeared at the Cannes Film Festival to launch his directorial feature debut, in which he co-stars alongside rising Asian action star Tiger Chen. Reeves plays a Machiavellian boss who tempts a young Beijing man (Chen) into high-stakes underground fighting. A Chinese co-production, largely shot in Beijing and filmed in three languages – Cantonese, Mandarin and English – it’s chock-socky full of action and a big challenge for a first-time filmmaker, even one who’s an onscreen veteran of action movies. Continue reading…

Hollywood had another good month, at least when it comes to producing local jobs.

The animated film 'Epic' doesn't quite live up to its title.