Elton John said Saturday that the hardest thing to watch in "Rocketman", the biopic of his life that premiered at the Cannes film festival, were the parts about his family life. "It's hard to watch the family stuff. The drugs stuff I can handle because I did it, but the family stuff is touching," he told Variety in an interview on the warts-and-all movie about his wild rock 'n' roll years. The film won an extended standing ovation in Cannes, with critics hailing its honesty and the way it deals frankly with the British singer's struggles with drugs, alcohol and his own sexuality. "Part of the reason I became the addict that I was (was) because of my background," said the 72-year-old megastar. "I really value the fact that (my parents) stayed together for me when they were unhappy with each other.... I've come to understand the circumstances that they went through and I'm not angry or bitter about that whatsoever," he said. "But it did leave a scar and that scar took a long time to heal, and maybe it will never heal totally." John had a much-publicised eight-year feud with his formidable mother Shelia Farebrother, who he accused of trying to interfere in his life, but they buried the hatchet just before her death at the age of 92 in 2017. An only child, John was raised by his grandparents until he was six before moving in with his parents. They divorced when he was 14. The movie also explores the singer's long and successful songwriting partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin, which produced seven consecutive US number one albums between 1972 and 1975. "The wonderful thing is the relationship I have with Bernie, which is the glue of the movie," the singer said. "We've been together for over 50 years and to have this relationship being so strong... means a lot in this kind of business that we work in."

Amazon Studios has acquired the U.S. rights to “Les Misérables,” the new film from writer and director Ladj Ly, Variety has learned. The sale comes following the movie’s world premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday evening, where it earned sterling reviews from critics who were dazzled by Ly’s look at a life in the projects. Netflix was also believed to be pursuing the film, with insiders pegging the final price for the pic at $1.5 million. It’s a major sale for a small French-language movie, an achievement that’s all the more remarkable, given that it marks Ly’s feature-length narrative film debut. In a largely favorable review, Variety‘s Guy Lodge wrote that the film “simmers with urgent anger over police brutality” and compared Ly’s work to that of Spike Lee. Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti co-wrote the film alongside Ly, with Toufik Ayadi and Christophe Barral of SRAB films producing. Wild Bunch is handling international sales. CAA Media Finance represented the U.S. rights and also reps Ly. Ly is a native of Montfermeil, a suburb of France best known as the location of Thénardiers’ inn in Victor Hugo’s classic novel “Les Misérables.” The director became well known for his web documentaries showing the often brutal realities of living in a downtrodden community. “Les Misérables” is inspired by the 2005 French riots, a three-week period of civil unrest characterized by violence, looting and car burnings. The film examines the tensions between neighborhood residents and police that helped inflame the rioting. It centers on Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), who has recently joined the anti-crime brigade in Montfermeil and his two partners. The men find themselves overrun during the course of an arrest. Amazon was one of the biggest buyers at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, shelling out tens of millions for films such as the Mindy Kaling comedy “Late Night” and the Adam Driver political thriller “The Report.”

He’s going from sex symbol to bat symbol. Sources tell Variety that Robert Pattinson is in negotiations to play “The Batman” in Matt Reeves’ forthcoming superhero film, which hits theaters June 25, 2021. While sources say it’s not yet a done deal, Pattinson is the top choice and it’s expected to close shortly. Warner Bros. had no comment. Pre-production on the Warner Bros.-DC Comics pic is expected to start this summer. Reeves, the filmmaker behind the last two “Planet of the Apes” sequels, assumed “Batman” directing duties from Ben Affleck in January 2017 and has been developing the elusive project ever since. Affleck and Warner Bros. began discussing the actor-director leaving the Caped Crusader behind following “Justice League,” allowing Reeves to pick his own Bruce Wayne. Reeves will produce “The Batman” with his “Planet of the Apes” collaborator Dylan Clark. Pattinson was cast even as Reeves continues to polish a final version of the script.

Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have finally met their match. The debut of Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment’s “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum” should end “Avengers: Endgame’s” reign at No. 1 with an estimated $56 million from 3,850 North American locations. The threequel took in $22.67 million on Friday. “John Wick: Chapter Two,” the previous installment of the franchise, opened to $30.4 million in February of 2017. Keanu Reeves stars in “John Wick 3,” alongside franchise returnees Lawrence Fishburne and Ian McShane and newcomers Halle Berry, Anjelica Huston, Asia Kate Dillon, and Lance Reddick. Chad Stahelski returned to helm the neo-noir thriller, with a script from Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Colllins, and Marc Abrams. “John Wick 3” holds an A- CinemaScore and 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “Avengers: Endgame,” on the other hand, should notch around $29 million in its fourth weekend in theaters for the second place spot. “Endgame” is currently sitting at around $2.5 billion worldwide — the second highest-grossing film of all time, behind “Avatar” with $2.78 billion. Another new offering for the weekend, “A Dog’s Journey,” is debuting to about $8 million and No. 4 from 3,267 domestic sites. The follow-up to 2017’s “A Dog’s Purpose” sees the return of Dennis Quaid and Josh Gad, and was directed by Gail Mancuso from W. Bruce Cameron, Cathryn Michon, Maya Forbes, and Wally Wolodarsky’s script. “A Dog’s Purpose” debuted somewhat more strongly, netting $18 million in its first weekend on its way to a $64 million total. Like the first film, “A Dog’s Journey” is based on Cameron’s novel of the same name. The comedy drama is a co-production between Amblin Entertainment, Reliance Entertainment, Walden Media, and Alibaba Pictures, with Universal distributing. “A Dog’s Journey” has an A CinemaScore with a 50% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Warner Bros.’ “The Sun Is Also a Star” is opening this weekend at 2,073 North American sites, having taken in $1.04 million on Friday. The teen drama stars “Grown-ish’s” Yara Shahidi and Charles Melton and follows a young couple that falls in love despite one of their families facing deportation. Tracy Oliver wrote the screenplay with Ry Russo-Young directing. The second frame of Warner Bros.’ “Detective Pikachu” will likely take third with about $22 million. It’s taken in $69 million domestically in its first week of release, in addition to another $112 million from overseas markets. Meanwhile, Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson’s con woman pic “The Hustle” should rustle up another $6 million in its second weekend to land in fifth place. That numer will tack onto its current total of about $18 million.

By the standards of long-running series, “Game of Thrones” maps onto its decade unusually well. This is a very small thing. That the fantasy show, which ran with a sort of mathematically pleasing symmetry from 2011 to 2019, is more authentically of the 2010s than, say, “Mad Men” (2007-2015) or “Killing Eve” (2018-the future) is of interest only to media scholars or to those who take pleasure in number games. But it’s also not nothing. That “Thrones” so thoroughly dominated effectively an entire one of the ten-year spans by which we measure history feels proper. As it approaches its final episode, to air May 19, the show is evincing reactions that both prove the hold it has over viewers over its decade run, and that do something more. The general consensus on the series’ endgame — that its portrayal of putative heroine Daenerys slipping into the behavior of a thuggish war criminal is a betrayal of the universe viewers thought they knew — feels like the general public metabolizing one more parting blow from a historical moment that has already eroded the sense of secure and predictable political reality. One aspect of the “Thrones” reign that has gone a bit underexamined is the artistic context in which it emerged — an Obama-era ferment that made use of a quiet moment in political history to imagine a counter-universe of petty feuds and of endless, thrilling villainy. In 2011, “Thrones” narrowly preceded “Homeland.” The Showtime Emmy-winner was the first in a wave of shows of various genres and degrees of quality that used federal-level American politics to stage similar stories, in which canny operators manipulating the levers of power took advantage of a climate of chaos and of their opponents’ weakness to amass power. On “Homeland,” Claire Danes’ Carrie Mathison was entangled in a struggle with one such operator, in the form of Damian Lewis’ Nicholas Brody; on “Scandal” and “Veep” (which began in 2012) and on “House of Cards” (2013), corruption was so endemic that those who’d elsewhere be the villains were our protagonists. “Thrones” fit into this wave of shows, and did not. Like them, it was a critically-regarded awards magnet and a near-instant zeitgeist hit. Also like them, it provided the thrill of political transgression during an unusually staid moment, dreaming up a government awash in the messiness so pleasantly unavailable in waking life. Unlike them, though, it did not literally — or, in any purposeful sense, allegorically — depict American politics. And it featured easily rootable moral centers, from the supporting cast (dogged, stoic Arya; wise, soulful Tyrion) to the two leads, duty-bound Jon Snow and visionary Daenerys Targaryen. From its start, “Thrones” had a sourer vision than any of its near-peers, but also seemed, to some eyes, to bear far more sweetness. Both glimmered with something other than perfect virtue at times, with Jon often a bit feckless and Daenerys driven by a politics that centered her righteousness, but both, too, were the photogenic protagonists of a series on which they were as often shown to be, comparatively, in the right, and deeply sympathetic besides. Their flaws, not so deep to make them villains, were what made them human. “Scandal,” “House of Cards,” and “Veep” had no such characters falling so well short of outright villainy (Olivia Pope was sympathetically lovelorn, but she was also horrifically complicit in high crimes; Claire Underwood wanted to help people, but her ambition had a body count). And they also have nothing more to accomplish: All have wrapped up in the past thirteen months, to the end more or less honoring the pact they made with their audience to depict a world shot through with moral compromise. All three (“Homeland” has a season left) also ended serene in the understanding that they can be said to have somehow “predicted” the political world of today, unimaginable when the decade began. (That “Veep” lost its balance in the Trump era is a matter of degrees of villainy and not of fundamental sensibility.) As “Thrones” concludes, it inverts the formula of shows it is like-but-not: A vocal segment of its audience feels as though a compact they’d entered has been violated precisely because the show so perfectly suits its moment. Which is not to say that “Thrones” has been trying to make statements about the particular world we inhabited in the years it aired — addressing the manner by which politics are practiced throughout history, it has matters more sweeping, or at least less specific, on its mind. But its vision of a state of affairs in which entropy rules, one in which chaos is so endemic that even would-be heroes are sucked into incompetence or derangement, came preposterously on time. Daenerys’ coming to be governed by a vengeful streak that had always been present doesn’t rhyme with any one political figure precisely, but evokes a tone of cruelty that thrives at our moment; vastly less-commented-upon but similarly striking is Jon’s shirking of seeming responsibility, a choice that has come to seem irresponsible and perhaps even weak. That this, too, could be an intentional reversal of tropes — that the heroic conqueror can be more vicious than her rivals and that the glamorously glowering prince can be saddled with insecurities as a way of examining the stories we tell ourselves about those who lead us — has been somewhat lost in the reaction to the show’s final season. If “Thrones’” final season met its political moment with astounding clarity — falling, just as the world did from Brexit to Orban to Duterte to Trump, into an all-out melee of hatreds before the decade closed — it was actually an imperfect fit for its cultural moment. It began as a peer of “Scandal” and “House of Cards” but ended, having enraptured an audience without parallel on TV, a peer of nothing but the “Star Wars” and Marvel universes. A viewership that large will necessarily have a flattening effect. As the audience passes understandings of characters back and forth like trading cards, “Star Wars’” Rey becomes an icon of discovering one’s power, while Marvel’s Captain America stands in for rectitude and sacrifice. Those franchises, part of a shared heritage that spans back decades and that are ultimately rooted in the joys of predictability, can bear their characters becoming memes. “Thrones,” which sought a massive audience through its staggering investment in visual grandeur and its sweeping story, probably could not have. It, for instance, put forward a central figure was both motivated by a compelling liberation theology and by less laudable impulses — and saw her read, in manners the show sometimes played into, as a meme-ready figure who was an easy analogue for Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elizabeth Warren at various moments. Standing unscathed after emerging from flames or being passed around on the shoulders of her loving subjects, Daenerys was power, potency, freedom, with the swell of the music eliding just how much she needed her subjects’ fealty. Who cared? We at home loved her too. Like Rey or Captain America, Daenerys came to stand for one powerful thing, even when the story George R. R. Martin had written poked out from behind the epic David Benioff and D. B. Weiss shot to try to tell us otherwise. And what’s more 2010s than that? One wants to resist making the story of a ten-year-span all about Trump, but the concept of an arc-bending-towards-justice narrative growing so compelling that one is convinced a dark subtext isn’t there — only to be gracelessly jerked back at a pivotal, painful moment — recurs again and again in the story of our time. Watching the streets of King’s Landing burn beneath Daenerys, invisible in the sky and finally unknowable even as an icon, viewers were pulled, so viscerally as to provoke nightmares, into the chaos their queen had emptily promised to resolve. Even those who thought the moment tracked could understand why fans were angry; so many people had felt some version of this narrative hairpin in the preceding years. The comfort “Thrones” provides even its disillusioned fans is that it will end — and that even if that ending is unspeakably dark, that it can exist as a closed-ended story to be debated, and re-evaluated, and shifted off the coming “Best of the Decade” lists if need be. Offscreen, the pain of heroes unable to meaningfully fight back, and of the flames of madness coming to govern the world won’t end with this series, or even with the ten-year period it so perfectly encapsulated. “Game of Thrones” was the show of its moment — and that moment threatens to continue after “Thrones,” and after the “Thrones” decade.

@Londons Pride - I responded above and sent you the proofs you were looking for. Still looking for this...thanks!

@Londons Pride - sent

Apologies for the repeat post, but it looks like my @kunkun didn't go through correctly! still interested

@Londons Pride - I'd love to get an invite...happy to provide ratios etc!

Hi @kunkun - I'd be interested. I can send proof of ratio on two other private trackers if needed. Thanks for doing this!

Would love the opportunity for this account. I have and am looking for older foreign films, which I'd love to share and continue to acquire.

Hey @godfader4 - would love an HD-torrents invite happy to provide ratio etc on other private trackers

The early Champions League eliminations of Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid are disappointing in a sporting sense and also in a financial sense. The losses in the last 16 could see the two capital city sides miss out on up to 45 million euros. Last year, for example, Real Madrid earned 85.5m euros from their triumph in the tournament, while they took in 86m euros the season previously. In that same 2016/17 season, Atletico Madrid collected around 67m euros for reaching the semi-finals, where they lost to Los Blancos. The economic situation has changed this year and the prize money has gone up, with the amount for the winner up to around 115m euros. Having gone out so early, Real Madrid are set to earn around 70m euros for this season's efforts, while Atletico Madrid are to earn around 67m euros. The exact figures won't be known until later as there are a number of variables involved, but it's likely that the two Spanish sides will take in around 45m euros less than the winning team.

As Liverpool prepare for their latest Champions League adventure in Munich tonight, the troubled career of their former goalkeeper Loris Karius shows no sign of improvement. A year ago, Karius was part of the Liverpool line-up easing past Porto in the last 16 of Europe’s premier competition. Now it has emerged the keeper is in dispute with his current team Besiktas, his agent contacting FIFA claiming he has four months worth of unpaid wages outstanding by the Turkish club. Karius signed a two-year loan deal with the Turks last summer, hoping to revive his career after the calamitous Champions League final when he made two extraordinary errors in Liverpool’s 3-1 defeat to Real Madrid. Unfortunately, his form has not been good. He has been heavily criticised by supporters, and last week his manager Senol Gunes said he was only picking him because there is no alternative, claiming Karius ‘lacks motivation’. Now it has emerged Karius’ agent contacted FIFA last month to complain the 25-year-old is owed around £1 million in wages. There is anticipation the world governing body will intervene. The goalkeeper finds himself isolated in Turkey, Liverpool aware of his predicament but with no plans to cut short his loan spell, hoping matters will be resolved. Besiktas’ coach, however, has not held back in his criticism. "Karius has gone a bit stagnant, something is wrong with his electricity, motivation, enthusiasm for the game,” said Gunes. "He does not really feel a part of the team. "It's something we haven't been able to work out and, of course, I am partly to blame for this.” A FIFA spokesman confirmed they are investigating the complaint from Karius. “We can confirm that we have received a claim from the player Loris Karius against the club Besiktas,” said a FIFA spokesman. “The matter is currently being investigated and consequently we cannot provide any further comments.” Telegraph Sport approached Besiktas for comment but did not reply.

Winning the CL with Juve to swing it for Ronaldo? I’m not trying to open up the impossible debate about Messi vs Ronaldo, but for those that do love to compare the two, would Ronaldo winning the Champions League with Juventus be the thing that would swing voters in his favour? Long way to go etc, but it would be a bit bananas. For what it’s worth I think they represent the two wonderful types footballers. Messi is born with it and plays like he’s five years old (seriously, watch his childhood videos on YouTube, the moves are the same). He’s got a smile on his face and loves it. Ronaldo is at the limits of every aspect physically and is a product of amazing dedication and hard work. He obviously had talent too but he wasn’t born to be this Ronaldo, his sheer bloody mindedness turned him into the man he wanted to be. Tonight I think he can take a f**king bow. Marvellous footballer.