I’ve watched all twenty-one films in competition this year and must give credit to Thierry Frémaux and his team for having put together such a strong program. I room with one of France’s most eminent TV critics and there’s been some grousing coming from him and from some around the press rooms about the questionable quality of the films this year. But it seems to me that every year people are complaining about the mediocrity

“Elle,” last to be shown in competition, isn’t the best or the most accomplished film. It made sense to show it last in the festival for several reasons, however: the storied career of Paul Verhoeven, its director (at 77, Verhoeven is the oldest filmmaker among this year’s competition directors and has two major hits under his belt, “Basic Instinct,” 1992 and “Starship Troopers,” 1997), the cast, made up of A-plus-plus actors

The press conference for the new Nicholas Winding Refn film […]

"The Last Face," starring Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem and Adèle Exarchopoulos and directed by Sean Penn, premiered in Cannes this morning. In this romance drama juxtaposed with a humanitarian action story Theron plays the director of an international aid agency who meets a Doctors Without Borders doctor (Bardem), as an armed conflict in Liberia drifts into full-on civil war.

The second part of the Cannes Festival is turning out to be more challenging, quality-wise, than the first where “Ma Loute” and “Mal de Pierres,” an off-kilter comedy and a love drama respectively, were easy to stamp as good cinema. Week two, on the other hand, isn’t all gems. Yesterday, the Dardenne Brothers’s “La fille inconnue” (“The Unknown Girl”) received a lukewarm response. It's a drama about a young woman doctor who, overcome

Before he wrote a novel and directed a film Jonathan Littell was, for a long time, an international aid worker. He managed big-scale logistical operations in Africa and, throughout his life, attended to war fronts from Bosnia to Syria as part of humanitarian relief teams. Littell, who doesn’t consider himself an optimist, is no stranger to the savagery of man so it’s no surprise, therefore, that he should be so persuasive when writing or making films about it.

Like in many of his previous films every scene of “Julieta,” the new Almodovar that premiered in Cannes today, is visually perfect: flawless lighting, pristine combinations of color, evocative sculptures, colorful fabrics that stand in as metaphors for love, aging, masculinity, all of which are a part of the rich ecosystem symbols that propel Almodovar’s films. The venerable, La Mancha-born Almodovar turns 68 next September.

“Personal Shopper” by Olivier Assayas is a movie about ghosts, the ghost that Maureen (played by Kristen Stewart) works for as personal shopper and that of her dead brother Lewis, whom she is trying to reconnect with. Kyra Gellman (Nora von Waldstätten) is an international socialite who needs her wardrobe constantly augmented, so she hired Maureen to regularly

CANNES, France - On Sunday morning a new film slayed the rest of the competition. “Loving,” starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga and directed by Jeff Nichols, moved past festival favorites “American Honey” and “Toni Erdmann” to get to the number one place. Richard and Mildred Loving (Edgerton and Negga) are an interracial couple living in Virginia in the late sixties.

CANNES, France - “American Honey,” which I consider to be the best film out of this still-young Cannes Festival, played here last night. The Andrea Arnold-directed road movie stars newcomer Sasha Lane and Shia Labeouf and Riley Keough (Elvis’s granddaughter) and follows a crew of twentysomethings from all over the country (from Texas to Nebraska) who circle the mid-west selling