All the latest news from the Croisette

12.09pm: Here's a report on Roman Polanksi's Prada short film. And here's Peter Bradshaw's review of Antiviral, the debut from Brandon Croneneberg.

11.57am: Peter's filed his review. It's a four star number.

11.38am: And here's Charlotte Higgins's interview with the director of Pinochet drama No.

11.33am: So the Aussies are doing well in this press conf - Dominik and Mendelsohn both very funny and self-deprecating. Pitt's suggestion that we don't have press conferences before 1pm doesn't seem to have garnered the groundswell of popular support he perhaps would have expected.

They're now saying it's not totally a coincidence it's coming out in an election year.

11.22am: In case you missed …

A gallery of last night's red carpet action

Peter Bradshaw's verdict on some footage screened last night of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained

Four stars for Ken Loach's The Angels' Share

Another day six gallery

Three stars for White Elephant from Peter

11.20am: Dominik explains how the id, the ego and the superego relates to his film. He also says he hopes that it tells you to have good mental health.

11.17am: Update on the press conference: the director has said he likes violence in films (hold the front page); Brad Pitt has said - in response to a question about how he can square being a father and playing such a violent man - that he'd rather play someone who shoots people in the face than, say, a racist. He's also said that he doesn't feel troubled by the symbiotic relationship between art and commerce in Hollywood. So now you know.

11.09am: Here's some Twitter snippets on the film:

@zlobuster Killing Them Softly = boring them deadly.

‏@daveyjenkins A kind of nasty pulp/noir NASHVILLE. Fun, though politically like being preached at through a bullhorn.

@robbiereviews KILLING THEM SOFTLY is a scorcher: real American crime cinema. Tough, violent and nihilistically funny. Loved it. #cannes

@firstshowing Dominik's Killing Them Softly - Brutal as f-k! But also lacking a bit. Felt way too short, oddly. Typical hit-and-kill kind of crime flick.

‏@erickohn KILLING THEM SOFTLY would make a great double bill with THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE, both period pieces about recession-era 2008. #cannes

@charlesgant Killing Them Softly's "crisis in the economy" not-so-sub text: messaging you can enjoy and then feel smart for finding it too crude. Clever!

‏@yo_damo Liked but didn't quite love Killing Them Softly; some very good hardboiled set-pieces and Brad Pitt is excellent

@GuyLodge KILLING THEM SOFTLY (B-) Blinding dirty-70s homage taken to stylistically suspended present, all to add stunningly banal Obama surtext? Why?

@XanBrooks Cannes screening: Killing Them Softly. supple, punchy hit-man noir from the front-line of recession America. Ray Liotta goes through hell

11.07am: The press conference has kicked off. Our own Charlotte Higgins is inside and will file the full story later. If there's any breaking hot potato quotes, I'll try and serve them up.

11.05am: Anyway, while I've been wittering on, Pitt and co walked past. He hammered on the window trying to get my attention, but I was busy, so I just kept on typing. Later, Brad, later.

10.52am: The film itself is a blood-lust-tastic crime thriller set in 2008 round New Orleans. Directed by Andrew Dominik, with whom Pitt teamed up for The Assassination of Jesse James by Robert Ford the Coward, it's a tale of sweaty crooks and desperate junkies, cracked codes of honour and the primacy of cash.

I spoke to Peter Bradshaw and Jonathan Romney as they came out of the screening: both were pretty enthusiastic. Me, I'm not so sure, less because of the undeniable glamourisation afforded to repeatedly shooting someone through the head, or the fact the only woman in it (for half a scene) is a hooker, but because the endless spliced political campaign footage (primarily Obama) feels too on the nail for me. This is allegory for dummies, which shoves the irony about the recession hitting hitmen just as bad as the rest of us down your throat a little over-insistently. The music cues, too, are aren't just on the nose, they slap you around the face. Still, great gamey performances, especially from Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn as the scummier crims in an ensemble that also includes Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini and Richard Jenkins. It's a good film; I'm not convinced it's the masterpiece of crime cinema it's probably about to be hailed as.

10.47am: Good morning and welcome to the latest Cannes liveblog. I'm ripping back the reigns from Andrew Pulver as he gets the train down to the south of France, where he'll grab the baton (or, perhaps, just a baguette) from me and I'll fly home.

I'm back in the press room, which is currently humming with slightly inelegant excitement as Brad Pitt is about to walk past, on his journey from the Killing them Softly photocall to the press conference.

10.47am: Good morning and welcome to the latest Cannes liveblog. I'm ripping back the reigns from Andrew Pulver as he gets the train down to the south of France, where he'll grab the baton (or, perhaps, just a baguette) from me and I'll fly home.

I'm back in the press room, which is currently humming with slightly inelegant excitement as Brad Pitt is about to walk past, on his journey from the Killing them Softly photocall to the press conference.

Singing, writing and all those walkers marching off up Grindsbrook Clough. Maybe the hamlet will produce a ballet next. Or a mural. Or an epic film

Small but beautiful Edale in the Peak District is making its cultural mark, with successes in the worlds of music and books.

If anywhere was ever inspirational, it is this gentle hamlet in the wonderful bowl of Pennine hills where most walkers summon up their courage and set off up Grindsbrook Clough or Upper Booth on the 270-mile (430km) Pennine Way.

But it is very small, with a population at the last census of 316, so it's great that two of these have recently won fame. I'm hopeless at percentages but I think that's 0.6 recurring of the total, so well done Bella Hardy and Mark Wallington.

The latter is the author of The Uke of Wallington, an account of his tour of the UK with his ukelele, which must have driven some people mad but was generally a success. So much so, that BBC Radio 4 chose it as their Book of the Week last week.

The serialisation ended just nicely for the launch of this year's Edale Folk Festival which saw Mark reading from the book to neighbours on his home ground. Meanwhile Hardy chose the festival to launch her new album which is a series of love ballads to the Derbyshire Peak.

The tracks mix her own compositions with songs from a collection called The Ballads and Songs of Derbyshire, published in 1867, with titles such as Bradwell's Lost Daughter, The Drunken Butcher of Tideswell, Castleton Gypsies, Fin Cop, Peak Rhapsody, Ilam Lullaby and Lament for Derwent Village. The album itself is called The Dark Peak and the White, reflecting the different moods of the national park, whose authority gave Hardy a hand with a grant from its well-stewarded sustainable development fund.

Anyone who has been to Crowden in winter will know that it isn't all lambs and bluebells and gentle greenery in this part of the world.

Edale is conscious of these talents and appears to be nurturing new ones. A highlight of the recent commemoration of the Kinder Scout mass trespass in the valley was the lively presence of children from Edale primary school, in their pillar box-red sweaters and wearing masks of the birds, from peregrine falcons to red grouse, which live on the moors above them.

They were wide-eyed when told that their grandparents had been banned from much of the moorland because of spurious fears about the grouse and water catchments. Maybe the seeds of a story or a song, maturing in 2020, were sown.

You can hear Hardy's songs with an interactive map here. The Uke of Wallington read by Hugh Dennis is on BBC Radio's Listen Again until Friday, 25 May.

Brandon Cronenberg's hypo-horror of celebrity disease-obsession should fit Cannes perfectly. I doubt it will go viral

The appearance of a laborious and derivative body-horror satire by David Cronenberg's son Brandon – showing among other things the exploitative replication of celebrity DNA – officially takes the Cannes film festival beyond satire. Antiviral is set in a dystopian future-present in which obsession with celebrity has reached such neurotic levels that fans eat specialist steaks and burgers created with cultured cell-lines from celebs' bodies. Worse still, the real hardcore believers get themselves injected with viruses and diseases that once lived inside their idols – all to get up close and personal with the stars.

Caleb Landry Jones plays Syd, a pale and haunted young man employed by the corporation which markets celebrity viruses; his employer has an exclusive licensing arrangement with the world's biggest female star, Hannah Geist, played by Sarah Gadon (Carl Jung's wife Emma in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method). We never find out what Hannah is famous for, which is maybe the point. Syd is one day given the important job of reporting to Hannah's hotel suite and picking up a sample of a new disease she has. Obsessive and addictive, Syd injects himself with it – Brandon Cronenberg shows so many wince-making closeups of injections he may have invented a new sub-genre called "hypo horror" – and finds that this sickness he shares with Hannah is more serious than he thought.

It is possible that Brandon Cronenberg was inspired by the real-life case of movie star Gene Tierney who in 1943 contracted rubella, while pregnant, from an infected fan who had sneaked out of quarantine to get her autograph at a Hollywood Canteen event. Tierney's child was born with disabilities which caused Tierney herself to suffer from severe depression and become bitterly disenchanted with the business of celebrity.

But celebrity is an easy target, and it's tricky to take seriously a satire featuring imaginary celebrities, played by real actors who of course want to be famous. Our alleged obsession with celebrity is a fashionable talking point – but it's far from clear how interesting or indeed accurate the notion is. Are we so much more obsessed than the 30s and 40s, with their fan mags? It's not proven. Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome.

Rating: 2/5

Timo Vuorensola's Nazi space romp is the most high-profile film to use crowdsourcing for both development and finances. Is this to blame for those lukewarm reviews?

If you've ever fancied yourself as a Hollywood screenwriter, producer or even star, the film section of crowdfunding site IndieGoGo might just be the place for you. Browse through the fledgling movie projects touting for cash in the past few months, and you might have come upon opportunities to pick up a writer's credit for $50 on the British post-apocalyptic drama Remnants of a Disaster, or an executive producer's credit on the Kiwi documentary God Is Incredible for $500. The director of comic book tale Super Day recently promised to shave his head if the film's campaign reached its $3,500 target, with donors permitted to scribble their names on his newly bald pate.

Amid the silliness, the site addresses a very real need. Movies cost an awful lot of money to make, and not everybody who wants to make movies has an awful lot of money. Some of these features may provide the opportunity for the next Kevin Smith or David Lynch to take their first step on the film-making ladder. And yet one cannot quite imagine either of the above offering to pass over creative duties on Clerks or Eraserhead for less than the cost of dinner for two at a half decent curry house, as at least one IndieGoGo project has promised recently.

A shift in terminology may even be in order: crowdfunding, via which film-makers reach out for help with the financial costs of a particular project, is becoming increasingly blurred with crowdsourcing, via which wannabe producers engage fans via the internet to become part of the creative process of putting together a new movie. Kept separate, each has its place. When one becomes contingent upon the other, creating a sort of "crowdeverything" hybrid, it gives the film projects in question an unsavoury air of mercantile desperation.

"There is a real dark side emerging," says British independent film producer and screenwriter Ant Neely. "I am seeing crowdfunding campaigns that offer 'a line in the film and an IMDb credit' for a big enough donation. The thought of casting someone because they can pay, as opposed to their abilities, is really very sad."

Neely and his wife Sloane U'Ren (a director) took a different approach to getting their science fiction-cum-period drama flick Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads, on to the big screen – they simply sold their house. While he accepts that getting a movie financed is an incredibly difficult process, Neely doesn't believe the crowdeverything approach is the way forward.

"It's an interesting concept and arguably connects a film-maker directly with the audience," he says. "However, we're not comfortable with having movies made by committee. I'm not saying selling your home is any more of a sensible strategy though!"

If one film has a chance of escaping the crowdsourcing/funding ghetto, it's Iron Sky, a comedy romp about space Nazis from Finnish director Timo Vuorensola and a supporting online crew of thousands which is released on Wednesday in UK cinemas (more of which later). The €7.5m film will be shown in more than 70 countries this year and stands a good chance of making a profit for its legions of financial backers. Despite its origins, Vuorensola says his film eschewed the cash-for-credits approach.

"I have to say that I've been seeing this kind of thing a lot," he says. "They always start out cool and everybody is really excited for two weeks but then there's a mess of everybody doing something. If you want to crowdsource you have to be very dominant – I've always made it clear with Iron Sky that this is not a democracy, this is a dictatorship.

"With our film the idea was to use the community to develop ideas and issues that are problematic rather than get them working on the script. We needed lyrics for the national anthem of the moon Nazis, and I don't speak German, so it was something we put to the community. They knew what I was looking for, and they were able to let me know if something that someone had written was getting close."

Since this interview was conducted, it has emerged that the Iron Sky is to be released for just one day in the UK, a decision which producers have blamed on the distributor, Revolver. "The fact that they are releasing Iron Sky for just one day (in the middle of the week) shows a great disrespect for us, the film-makers, who have been slaving to make this film as cinematic – with big special effects, sounds and great action – as possible," reads a statement on the movie's website. "It's also a major middle finger to the fans, followers and investors who have been following the production for years and now suddenly have only a few hours to run to the theatre, and then enjoy their quickly rushed DVD and Blu-ray release."

Might the decision be linked to lukewarm early reviews for the film? And does the critical indifference which has greeted the project emanate from its crowdsourced origins? If so, the Iron Sky team are showing no sign of having got the message: their statement asks fans to email Revolver in protest at the short UK run. There's something to be admired, at the very least, in the producers' determination and audacious, barefaced belief in people power. Shouldn't critics take account of the film's meagre budget and reward its struggle in the face of adversity, rather than gloat over its failures?

Guardian film writer Andrew Pulver, who handed Iron Sky a two-star review at the Berlin film festival last year, says reviewers often do give low-budget fare an easier ride but reckons in the case of Iron Sky "the comedy just wasn't there".

He adds: "Cinema going back to (Robert Rodriguez's) El Mariachi has benefited from people reviewing the budget. Critics are supposed to be detached, but you tend to absorb the conditions under which the work is made. However in the case of Iron Sky the special effects were great, but after the first five minutes it really fell apart.

"The wider story is that 95% of filmmakers can't get the money they want, and crowdfunding is the latest thing. It was the same a few years back with microbudget and people like Terence Davies doing films for pennies: the first few who get on the bandwagon have done well but then you get the lemming-like rush. I find the thought of people surrendering control over their film – to treat it like it's a commodity – very bizarre. Giving someone a role as an extra is one thing, but writing is a very difficult art. It's like selling off articles in newspapers."

• Iron Sky is released in UK cinemas on Wednesday. Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads was shown recently at the London film festival, and also at the London independent film festival, where it won best film.

The French-Polish filmmaker surprised Cannes with a short film for the Italian fashion house

Roman Polanski introduced the premiere screening of his collaboration with Italian fashion giants Prada on Monday (22 May) by telling the audience the three-minute film was an "anti-commercial".

In his speech, delivered in French, the director added that he wanted to prove he "can make short films as well as long films." The film, titled A Therapy, was announced as a complete surprise before the screening of his 1979 film Tess, which was showing as part of the Cannes Classics section.

At odds with the majority of fashion shorts, Polanski's film is heavy in dialogue.

A suave, melodramatic Helena Bonham Carter, draped in a fabulous purple fur coat, swans into the office of Ben Kingsley, who plays her silent psychoanalyst.

She removes the coat, kicks off her Prada shoes, drapes across a chaise lounge and recounts a dream surrounding typically Polanski themes of loneliness and anxiety.

Kingsley drifts off, besotted with Bonham Carter's coat, which hangs on a hat rack. He approaches it, caressing the fur with personable affection before slowly putting it on and fully embracing his fantasy. "I'm a very lonely person," Bonham-Carter says, "I think it's because I'm rich, and daddy left me everything."

At the end the message reads "Prada Suits Everyone," while Bonham-Carter asks: "What does it all mean?"

The notion of a "fashion film" has grown in recent years; Prada have previously worked with Jordan and Ridley Scott, and in 2010 Dior hired David Lynch and Missoni hired Kenneth Anger to shoot their 2010 A/W selection.

Though its characters are self-indulgent fantasists, Polanski's film is witty, sharp, stylish and wonderfully camp. As a brand/artist match, it's near perfect. As Polanski says, "It's very refreshing to know that there are still places open to irony and wit and, for sure, Prada is one of them."

• Watch Polanski's A Therapy here.