Cannes rains on Hollywood legends

Two Hollywood legends, one bespectacled and neurotic, the other a whip-wielding adventurer, were given a luke-warm reception at the Cannes Film Festival over the weekend. The new Indiana Jones movie, starring Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett, was cheered by the audience in advance of the screening ­ - some even broke into wordless singing of the theme tune - ­ but, according to the Daily Telegraph, after the end-credits rolled the reaction was "polite, but muted".

It was much the same for Woody Allen's latest offering, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. At the post-screening press conference on Saturday, it was met with a "response, that, if not quite rapturous, was at least a collective sigh of relief" according to the Independent on Sunday.

The IOS claimed the film, which follows a run of stinkers by the director, among them the lamentable Cassandra's Dream, had "regained some of the urbane wit that Allen fans relish, and is likely to be one of his commercially successful films yet". This view was endorsed by the Hollywood Reporter, which compared it with earlier neurotic comedies such as Annie Hall. (Continued below)

Allen, dressed in a scruffy brown jumper, attended the press conference with two cast members, Penelope Cruz (pictured second right), whose character, thrillingly, is shown in a lesbian clinch with Scarlett Johansson's character, Cristina, and 26-year-old Rebecca Hall (pictured far right), the daughter of stage director Sir Peter Hall.

The film revolves around an American who gets romantically entangled with a Spanish artist, played by Javier Bardem, and then winds up in a menage a trois with him and his ex-wife (Cruz). Asked by a journalist whether threesomes were a fantasy of his, Allen (pictured above with his wife Soon-Yi Previn, far left) replied: "It's hard enough to get one person."

Most of the adulation was directed not at Allen but Rebecca Hall, who, among her many other claims to fame, was head-girl at Roedean. One Chicago film critic drooled: "For many of us you are the discovery of this film." Penelope Cruz's reaction to this can only be guessed.