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Michael Dwyeron film

U2 to attend 3D preview

U2 are due at the Cannes Film Festival for a midnight screening of their concert film, U2 3D, which was shot on the South American leg of their Vertigo tour last year.

Cannes will show a 55-minute preview of the film, which is still in post-production. The directors are Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington.

"There is no comparison with a traditional concert film seen in 2D," says Owens, a longtime collaborator on the visuals for the band's live shows.

"One minute you are on stage with the band and the next, you're at the back of the stadium. The best way I can describe it for the viewer is that it's like being on the wings of a bird flying around the concert stadium. It's really something else." Meanwhile, the 2D trailer for U2 3D is now on YouTube.

Corbijn gets closer to Curtis

Dutch photographer-turned-director Anton Corbijn - who shot the covers for the U2 albums The Joshua Tree and The Unforgettable Fire, and directed some of their music videos - will also be in Cannes for the premiere of his first feature film, Control, which will be the opening presentation in the Directors Fortnight programme. The film is a biopic of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, who is played by Sam Riley. It follows his rise to fame, his relationships with his wife Deborah (Samantha Morton) and his girlfriend Annik Honore (Alexandra Maria Lara), his problems with epilepsy and his suicide in 1980, on the eve of the band's first US tour. Corbijn directed the music video for Joy Division's Atmosphere.

Once upon release in America

After winning the audience award at the Sundance festival in January, John Carney's Dublin musical love story, Once, was the subject of a bidding battle involving several US distributors.

Fox Searchlight, a division of 20th Century Fox, acquired the rights and will release Once in the US on May 18th. Carney left Dublin last Sunday for a whistle-stop promotional tour of key US cities with the movie's stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová.

On the same day that Once opens in the US, Buena Vista International will release John Boorman's Irish movie, The Tiger's Tail, in the UK.

Slasher flick chopped in half

Originally set to open as a double bill here and in the UK on June 1st, Grindhouse has been split into two movies for separate release outside the US, where the double-bill format fell well short of commercial expectations. Quentin Tarantino has extended his segment, Death Proof, from the 87-minute version shown in the US to a 110-minute version that will be shown in competition at Cannes this month. It is now set for release here on September 21st. The Robert Rodriguez-directed segment, Planet Terror, will be released here "at a later date to be confirmed shortly", according to a statement from the Weinstein Company.

However, splitting the double bill in half is defeating the purpose of Grindhouse, which was to pay homage to the old exploitation B-movies so beloved of Tarantino by showing them on the same programme, complete with mock trailers. Short of making a hasty trip to the US, where Grindhouse is rapidly losing screens, the only prospect of seeing the double bill as it was intended to be seen is most likely to be as an extra on the special edition of the DVD some time next year.

Branson's Casino cameo cut

Movies are routinely cut for airline screenings to protect under-age passengers from "adult content". British Airways has turned censor on Casino Royale for a different reason. Their in-flight version of the James Bond movie has deleted the brief appearance of Richard Branson passing through an airport metal detector in Miami. Branson just happens to be the chairman of rival airline Virgin Atlantic.

Knowing Streep, knowing you

The venerable Meryl Streep will follow one Broadway adaptation with another. She co-stars with Pierce Brosnan in the movie of the musical, Mamma Mia!, which will be shot over the summer, after which she joins Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film version of Doubt, which was staged at the Abbey in Dublin last autumn. She plays a nun who accuses a priest (Hoffman) of paedophilia. John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the play, will direct the movie. He won an Oscar for his Moonstruck screenplay in 1988.