Opposition has seized upon killings that shine spotlight on two big issues: prisons crisis and violent drug trade

As police continued to hunt the gunmen who killed two prison guards at a Normandy toll booth and freed a convict linked to gangland drug killings, the debate on law and order in France has intensified before next month’s European elections.

Both Gérald Darmanin, the hardline interior minister, and Jordan Bardella , the far-right president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, used the same dramatic vocabulary to warn of “savagery” in French society.

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Cannes film festival
First-time actor Agathe Riedinger is a wannabe influencer from the wrong side of the tracks in this forthright and fluent film

Feature first-timer Agathe Riedinger is bringing the TikTok energy for this story of a wannabe Insta influencer-princess from the wrong side of the tracks – but the director is also bringing some pretty old school social realism, exerting its downward gravitational pull. The result is forthright and fluent and fiercely acted by a newcomer lead who, in the time-honoured style of movies like this, is defiant, vulnerable and front and centre of almost every shot. But it also sometimes treads water in terms of narrative, running out of ideas before the end, and its final ambiguity about an ultimate success that is there to be hallucinated rather than achieved feels anticlimactic.

Liane, played by Malou Khebizi, is a 19-year-old with a French and Italian background living in Fréjus in the south of France. She was once given up for foster care by her troubled mother but now taken back home and is now in charge of babysitting her kid sister, whom she is busily turning into a mini-me version of her own brassy, sexualised image. Liane shoplifts and sells the stolen goods – which has paid for her breast-implant surgery and she has also had her lips done. She hangs out with her friends, getting drunk, but is fastidious about how and with whom she’s having sex; she has thousands of followers on her Only-Fans-type insta (although oddly, it doesn’t occur to her to have an actual Only Fans account). Liane also has a poignantly religious sense of her own heroic martyrdom, her ill-treatment at the hands of online haters, men and her appalling mother.

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Deadly clashes have erupted over move to increase number of French nationals eligible to vote in Pacific territory

Deadly violence has erupted in New Caledonia , a French overseas territory in the South Pacific, after lawmakers in Paris approved a constitutional amendment to allow recent arrivals to the territory to vote in provincial elections.

The amendment, which some local leaders fear will dilute the vote of the Indigenous Kanak people, is the latest flashpoint in a decades-long tussle over France’s role in the island.

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Officers complain of overcrowding and violence after two guards killed and inmate freed from prison van

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Hundreds of prison officers across France have held protests after gunmen shot dead two prison officers in an ambush at a Normandy motorway toll and freed a convict linked to gangland drug killings.

On Wednesday morning, groups of prison officers blocked prison entrances across France, while some burned pallets and tyres. Prison officers will hold a minute’s silence at 11am in memory of the killed officers, and in support of the three other officers who were seriously injured in the raid on a prison convoy transporting a prisoner between a courthouse in Rouen and a prison at Evreux on Tuesday.

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Markings include public executions and a sailing ship chiselled into door in 1790s by bored English soldiers

A scratched wooden door found by chance at the top of a medieval turret has been revealed to be an “astonishing” graffiti-covered relic from the French revolutionary wars, including an carving that could be a fantasy of Napoleon Bonaparte being hanged.

Over 50 individual graffiti carvings were chiselled into the door in the 1790s by bored English soldiers stationed at Dover Castle in Kent, when Britain was at war with France in the wake of the French Revolution.

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Unrest flares as lawmakers in France support increasing the number of French nationals eligible to cast ballots in the territory’s elections

More than 130 people have been arrested in New Caledonia, the government said, after violent protests rocked the French Pacific archipelago and Paris adopted the constitutional changes that angered pro-independence forces.

Protests against the changes turned violent on Monday night, with shots fired at security forces, vehicles torched and shops looted in the worst unrest the French overseas territory has seen since the 1980s.

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Cannes film festival
With help from an A-list cast, Dupieux brings his customary mischief to an amiable tale of imposture and role play

Cannes can always do worse than choose a comedy for its opening gala, and the festival is off to an amiable, entertaining start. Quentin Dupieux brings the wackiness onstream with this cheerfully mischievous, unrepentantly facetious fourth-wall-badgering sketch. It’s a sprightly meta gag, a movie about a movie, or perhaps a movie about a movie about a movie – or perhaps just a movie, full stop, whose point is to claim that reality as we experience it inside and outside the cinema is unitary despite the levels of imposture and role-play we bring to it. It is all just one unbroken skein of experience like the endless dolly-track (the temporary rail that lets the camera move smoothly) that Dupieux finally shows us.

There are plenty of laugh lines, though The Second Act would be a bit thin were it not for the rich, creamy thickness of the alpha-grade French acting talent involved. We see a nervy, unhappy guy called Stéphane (Manuel Guillot) open up his restaurant in the middle of nowhere, quibblingly called The Second Act. Two young men are seen walking towards the restaurant: David (Louis Garrel) and his pal Willy (Raphaël Quenard, from Dupieux’s previous film Yannick ). David has a date there with a beautiful woman, whose clinginess and neediness he nonetheless finds a turnoff, so he’s brought Willy along to seduce her and take her off his hands. This woman, Florence (Léa Seydoux) is preparing to meet David, unaware of his plans to palm her off on someone else, and so confident is she that David is the One that she has actually brought her dad with her, Guillaume, played by Vincent Lindon.

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Depuis deux semaines, le brigadier Loïc P., en attente de son placement sous bracelet électronique, travaille au dépôt du tribunal où il a été condamné l’an dernier. Une situation absurde mais parfaitement légale.

L’ancien maire LR de Toulon, rallié à Macron, a de nouveau été reconnu coupable d’avoir bénéficié d’avantages indus de la part du conseil départemental du Var durant de longues années. Son retour sur la scène politique est grandement compromis.