In the Directors Fortnight section ("Quinzaine des Réalisateurs"), a thriving alternative to the official selection that is celebrating fifty this year, a war/revenge movie by French filmmaker Guillaume Nicloux, who previously brought “Valley of Love” to the Cannes Festival in 2015. The First Indochina War took place in the fifties. Indochina was a French colony, then, that comprised parts of Vietnam

In Moscow there’s a wall, considered one of the city’s landmarks, that's covered with drawings, tags and writings, all tributes to Russian rock star Viktor Tsoy and his band, named Kino. Tsoy (here played by a German actor named Teo Yoo who so closely resembles the real-life Tsoy that it is uncanny), created Kino together with Mike Naumenko, another figure of Moscow’s rock underground, and gave concerts in a rock club, working with

Someone reading the description for “Yomeddine” and believing that A.B. Shawky is trying hard at tugging at the heart’s strings could be forgiven. There’s something vaguely manipulative about a road movie in which a leper and an orphan are paired together and travel across a part of Egypt together on a donkey-pulled carriage, the world oblivious to them. Doesn't this sound like the working script for a Save The Children ad? A leper goes to visit his family with a young orphan

In the Un Certain Regard category, which was created by honorary president Gilles Jacob to allow for some generational renewal in the festival’s programming grid, “Rafiki,” directed by newcomer filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu. The Nairobi-born director (b. 1980) had just one other feature-length film under her belt, “From a whisper,” before coming to Cannes, in the spirit of what was intended with this selection: brand-new, young

Donbass is a region in Eastern Ukraine that’s occupied by various criminal gangs, the Ukrainian regular army, supported by volunteers, and separatist gangs, supported by Russian troops. In "Donbass," the film, the events that are richly-depicted by Ukraine-born Sergei Loznitsa (“Maidan,” “Austerlitz,” “My joy”) in stunningly-realistic fashion bring the point across, with great clarity, that this war didn’t just happen in the open fields. It happened in the homes, the bunkers, the government offices, the food drives of this community. In fighting this proxy war through the separatist gangs

Last night’s opening ceremony, which was shown to the press corps via simulcast in the Debussy theater, was pure joy, especially if you speak French. French film and theater actor Edouard Baer emceed the event with ironic bonhomie and a piano player who accompanied him as he delivered a spoken-word-style love letter to cinema and to humanity at large. With Anna Karina, the actress from “Pierrot le fou,” (this year’s poster depicts a scene from that movie) watching him in the audience, he played short clips from the film and entertained the audience with quips.

HE'S BAAAACK! Lars Von Trier's "The House that Jack Built" will be shown at the Cannes Festival this year, helping to deliver a shot in the arm, a mixture of adrenaline and steroids, to the official selection. Seven years ago, Von Trier was ejected from the Cannes Festival after fumbling his way, with devil-may-care indecency, through a Q&A with the press following the screening of his film "Melancholia." I hadn't attended

The Cannes Festival just announced this year's jury composition. The members are, Chang Chen (an actor from China), Ava DuVernay (writer, director, producer), filmmaker Robert Guédiguian (“The snows of Kilimandjaro”), Khadja Nin (a songwriter and composer from Burundi), actress Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, and Russian writer-director Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose film “Loveless”

It'll be hard to deny it: the Cannes Festival doth Iranian cinema love. Asghar Farhadi's "Everybody knows," which stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, will open this 71st edition, in a long tradition of showing deference to Iranian cinema. Jafar Panahi, under house arrest in Tehran by order of Iran's judicial courts (he won the top prize at Berlinale for his "Tehran Taxi" in 2015), has a horse in this race, too: his film is called "Three faces."

Asghar Farhadi's eighth film was shot entirely on location in Spain. Laura (Penelope Cruz) lives with her husband (played by Javier Bardem) and their children in Buenos Aires. When they return together to her native village in Spain for a family event, the trip gets derailed after unexpected events bring secrets out into the open. The family, its ties and the moral choices imposed on them are all leitmotifs of Farhadi's films and figure front and center in the script.