Seventeen years, that’s a long time to prepare a film, and it’s how long actress-director Maïwenn has spent on “Jeanne Du Barry,” which inaugurates the Cannes Festival today, a film that’s a nod to Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” which was shown here in 2006, but also a nod to the past since real-life Marie-Antoinette became Louis XVI's wife, ending the courtesan's favored place in the court. It is thanks to "Marie-Antoinette"

Director Jesse V. Johnson makes the type of action thrillers that would’ve allowed him to be a force in the action cinema flicks that flooded theaters in the eighties. Johnson’s latest, “One Ranger,” is a mildly-entertaining thriller that would make the ghost of the Cannon Film Group proud.

Thomas Jane is Alex Tyree, an rugged Texas Ranger tough who is recruited by

Moody and always intriguing, Cristian Mungiu’s “R.M.N.” is a tense parable focusing on social unrest and racist intolerance in Romania. 

Written by Mungiu, this a film that focuses on those who set out to hate almost any identity that is different from theirs. These are communities in racial crisis.

Matthias (Marin Grigore), a German

It has been nearly two decades since Donnie Yen last co-directed a film (2004’s “Protégé de la Rose Noire,” with Barbara Wong Chun-Chun). This year, Yen gets in front of and behind the camera with the new release “Sakra,” a martial arts action extravaganza based on Louis Cha’s epic wuxia novel “Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils.”

Co-directed by Kam Ka-Wai, “Sakra” finds Yen starring as Qiao Feng, orphan raised by a couple from the Song Empire who is at war with the Khitan (a minority of the Mongols) a sect of the Liao Empire, Qiao’s true heritage. 

In the Land of High Concept, this has got to be among the more outlandish—but somehow it works. Toni Collette is Kristin, a sexually frustrated mother in midlife who one day discovers her husband in flagrante with a much younger woman, with the paramour’s fake-apology going as follows: “I’m a feminist!” So therefore OK? It’s been quite a week for Kristin, who also learns that her Italian grandfather has recently passed away

The "Strange Case of Jacky Caillou” is the feature film debut from director Louis Delangle. This unique piece is an interesting folktale that pulls off its balancing act of the naturalistic and the fantastic, finding the harmony between the two narrative styles.

Thomas Parigi  is “Jacky” Caillou, a young man who lives with his grandmother Gisele (Edwige Blondiau) in a village high in the Alps.

"BAD AXE" Director: David Siev

David Siev set out to make a documentary about his hometown of Bad Axe, Michigan, but what he wound up chronicling was how the covid pandemic affected his family’s small business. The pandemic saw Siev move back home to his small town from New York, where he and his mixed Asian-Mexican-American

Elizabeth Blake-Thomas’s “Hunt Club” (written by David Lipper and John Saunders) is an exploitation flick with a strong message of female empowerment and the type of picture that was a dime a dozen back in the grindhouse era of the seventies. 

Films like these would feature a band of women (usually trapped in a prison or held by slave traffickers) who are tortured during

“John Wick: Chapter 4” opens with a series of bloody punches and then uses a direct homage to David Lean’s 1962 classic “Lawrence of Arabia” to take the audience into the wild world of the most resilient assassin ever to grace the screen.

Chad Stahelski’s original “John Wick” was wire-tight in its tale of a lone killer seeking revenge. The filmmaker used its violent

The sins of the father weigh heavily in Ben Young’s “Devil’s Peak," a new film that wants to be a modern “At Close Range" but doesn’t have the depth to carry its screenplay to the finish line.

Hopper Penn (son of Robin Wright and Sean Penn) is Jacob McNeely a young man living in Jackson County, NC who is cursed to bear his family name.