A celebrity from the age of 11, Elizabeth Taylor was practiced at public relations for almost all her life, so there aren’t many personal revelations in Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes. But Nanette Burstein‘s elegantly constructed documentary, mostly in Taylor’s own words backed by illuminating archival images, works as a lively bit of film history about movie stardom in the volatile 1960s as the studio system was fading and the media exploding.

The film — which premiered at Cannes in the Cannes Classics sidebar — is based on 40 hours of recently rediscovered audiotapes, recordings Taylor made in the mid-1960s for a ghost-written memoir (long out of print). It was the most frenzied moment of her fame, when she was coming off the paparazzi-fueled scandal that was Cleopatra. Taylor, who died in 2011, recalls her many marriages — four when she made these recordings, since she was on the first of two to Richard Burton — and her career, from her start as a child in Lassie Come Home (1943) through her Oscar-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

As she did in Hillary, about Hillary Clinton, and The Kid Stays in the Picture, based on Robert Evans’ autobiography, Burstein stays out of her celebrity subject’s way. Taylor’s voice is playful, almost girlish. Occasionally she is blunt, but more often seems cautiously aware of being recorded. Richard Meryman, the Life magazine reporter doing the interviews, is heard asking questions at times, but Taylor is firmly in control, at least on the surface.

Beneath that you can tell how beautifully Burstein and her editor and co-writer, Tal Ben-David, shaped the visuals. The archival photos and news clips offer a telling backdrop of images and sound bites, often more informative than what Taylor says — from shots of crowds filling the streets of London to see her on the day of her second wedding, to the actor Michael Wilding, to film of her in mourning black at the funeral of her beloved third husband, the producer Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash. The visual exceptions are the clichéd, recurring establishing shots of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder, next to a martini glass.

Moving chronologically, Taylor begins with her desire to act even as a child. Photos from that time offer a reminder that she was always astonishingly beautiful. These early sections are fine but bland. She was too young to be married the first time, to Nicky Hilton, she says, and the second marriage just didn’t work out. George Stevens gave her subtle direction and bolstered her confidence when she made A Place in the Sun (1951). When she made Giant with him five years later, he berated her, telling her she was just a movie star and not an actress, a charge that often dogged her.

Taylor becomes sporadically more biting as the film goes on, displaying a sharp-tongued wit and personality. That is particularly true when she talks about her marriage to Eddie Fisher, the first of her marital scandals, covered endlessly in tabloids. It was public knowledge that Fisher and his wife, Debbie Reynolds, were the Todds’ best friends. Shortly after Mike Todd’s death, Fisher left his wife, whose image was always cheery and wholesome, for Taylor. “I can’t say anything against Debbie,” Taylor sweetly says on the tape, and without taking a breath goes on, “But she put on such an act, with the pigtails and the diaper pins.” She says of Fisher, “I don’t remember too much about my marriage to him except it was one big frigging awful mistake.”

Burstein includes some enlightening sidelights from that period. A news clip of the recently married couple has them surrounded by journalists on the steps of a plane, with one reporter asking Fisher about his bride, “Can she cook?” Even as a tease, who would dare say that now?

That fuss was nothing next to Cleopatra (1963), now notorious as the film so over-budget it almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox, and the set on which Taylor and Burton, each married to other people, indiscreetly sparked to each other from the start. The Vatican newspaper weighed in on the affair, disapprovingly. Taylor says her own father called her “a whore.” In one of the film’s more telling scenes, she says of their affair, “Richard and I, we tried to be what is considered ‘good,’ but it didn’t work,” a comment that at once plays into the moralistic language of her day and resists it. These signs of Taylor’s savvy awareness of herself as a public personality are the film’s most intriguing, if scattershot, moments.

The film also shows how besieged the couple was by the paparazzi, at a turning point in celebrity culture. Occasionally other voices are heard in archival audio, and in this section George Hamilton says of the press, “They were not going for glamour anymore. They were going for the destruction of glamour,” suggesting a longing for the old pre-packaged studio publicity days. But Taylor herself is never heard complaining. A realist, she made hiding from the paparazzi into a game for her children so they wouldn’t be frightened.

The recordings end at the point where she is assuring Meryman that she and Burton would be together for 50 years. The film then takes a quick trot through the rest of her days, including rehab at the Betty Ford Center and raising money for AIDS research. But the last word should have been Taylor’s. There is a private Elizabeth, she says. “The other Elizabeth, the famous one, really has no depth or meaning to me. It is a commodity that makes money.” The movie star Taylor is the one who most often comes through in the film, but that is engaging enough.

Billie Eilish has been singing about looking — and being looked at — for nearly half her life.

Now 22, she broke out at 13 when her song “Ocean Eyes” went viral on SoundCloud; “Bad Guy,” the smash single from her star-making 2019 debut album, scoffed at the suspicions of a crush’s girlfriend: “You said she’s scared of me? I mean, I don’t see what she sees.”

Eilish is still pondering the illusory nature of perception on “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” her third studio LP in a career that’s already brought her nine Grammys, two Oscars and more than 100 million followers on Instagram. The album opens with “Skinny,” a breathy ballad in which she observes that “people say I look happy just because I got skinny.” Disappointed but not surprised, she’s continuing her thoughts on celebrity from 2021’s “Happier Than Ever,” which arrived as part of a wave of high-profile records (including ones by Olivia Rodrigo and Lorde) questioning the healthiness of pop’s social media era.

“The internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny,” she sighs in “Skinny,” “And somebody’s gotta feed it.”

Yet as its title suggests, the ravishing “Hit Me Hard and Soft” moves beyond looking to explore the more tactile pleasures and risks of Eilish’s other senses. Sequenced intentionally, no doubt, right after “Skinny,” “Lunch” is a funky come-on about enjoying a woman’s body — “She dances on my tongue / Tastes like she might be the one” — while the rootsy “Wildflower” compares her involvement in a love triangle to the torture of being burned alive: “You say no one knows you so well,” she goes on, “But every time you touch me I just wonder how she felt.”

With 10 songs in just under 45 minutes — a study in crispness here in the age of “Cowboy Carter” and “The Tortured Poets Department” — Eilish’s album gives the impression of someone who’s accepted the unnatural demands of stardom and wants to figure out how to lead a full life in spite of them.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” mostly upholds Eilish’s signature electro-goth sound: the blend of folky guitars, glassy synths and programmed beats she’s been developing with her brother and producer, Finneas, since the two began making music in their parents’ house in Highland Park. But the newfound emotional liberation in her storytelling extends to the adventurous structures of tunes like “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” which starts out as a low-key soul shuffle before transforming into a propulsive rave jam, and “Bittersuite,” which makes good on its title with three distinct parts.

In an unusual decision for this proudly self-contained duo, Eilish and Finneas welcomed contributions in the studio from their touring drummer, Andrew Marshall, and the Attacca string quartet (though both fit seamlessly into the siblings’ established sonic universe). What registers as a bigger shift is the gutsiness of Eilish’s singing: Long known as a committed whisperer, she belts here in a way we’ve never heard from her before; it’s a total thrill to witness her climb up, up, up in “The Greatest,” a thrashing rock song about unrequited love in which she congratulates herself for surviving “all the times I waited for you to want me naked.”

That survivor’s chutzpah surfaces again in the skulking “The Diner,” which she narrates from the imagined perspective of a stalker; the song is filled with unnerving details: “I came in through the kitchen looking for something to eat / I left a calling card so they would know that it was me.” Yet Eilish, who presumably drew from real-life experiences she’s discussed, delivers the song with a smirk. She even offers her version of a breezy summertime bop in “Birds of a Feather,” with a promise of never-ending devotion over lush acoustic guitars set to an easygoing groove.

“I want you to see how you look to me,” she tells her lover — a fresh application for an old instinct.

Francis Ford Coppola’s 40-year passion project “Megalopolis” has finally arrived, but critics are divided on whether the science fiction epic was worth the wait.

The film, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival, has received mixed reviews from festivalgoers, with some calling the drama “staggeringly ambitious” and others dubbing the long-awaited movie “absolute madness.”

Deadline and The Guardian report “Megalopolis” received a seven-minute standing ovation Thursday night. Coppola, 85, first conceived the film in the 1970s and development began in 1983. After several false starts and cancellations, the “Godfather” filmmaker revived the project in 2019 and used $120 million of his own money to fund it.

The ensemble cast includes Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter and Dustin Hoffman.

The film follows an architect who “wants to rebuild New York City as a utopia following a devastating disaster,” according to IMDb. The movie is a “Roman Epic fable set in an imagined Modern America,” according to the film synopsis on the Cannes website.

Driver plays Cesar Catilina, a “genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future,” but Mayor Franklyn Cicero, played by Esposito, “remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare.” Emmanuel plays the mayor’s socialite daughter, Julia, “whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.”

Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ trailer abuzz ahead of Cannes Film Festival debut

In the caption for the movie’s trailer on YouTube, Coppola said, “Our new film MEGALOPOLIS is the best work I’ve ever had the privilege to preside over.”

‘Megalopolis’ Rotten Tomatoes score matches critics’ split

Critics are split evenly down the middle on the star-studded film. On Rotten Tomatoes, 50% of 24 critics’ reviews were positive.

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