The Cannes Festival opened today with the best possible film it could open with: the buoyant and lighthearted “Cafe Society,” directed by Woody Allen. I walked out of this morning’s screening with my spirits raised. But, then became quickly hungry for lunch. In Allen’s perfectly-told, jaunty tale a young man, played by Jesse Eisenberg, moves to L.A. from New York to find work. He meets the boss’s secretary and falls in love with her

As the first lady of cinema gets dressed and ready for her close-up, a brief look at the lineup seems appropriate just before I board my train to Cannes. The selection of the 69th Cannes Festival, which opens tomorrow, is the strongest one in years. Paul Verhoeven's "Elle," starring Isabelle Huppert, holds the promise, for better or worse, of vanquishing the extremes of sadism and survivalism. France's Bruno Dumont

The Cannes Festival just announced who this year’s jury will [...]

There are years when everyone knows which film will win. 2015 was not one of them, although there was some consensus among the major press that CAROL and MIA MADRE were the strongest films, cinematographically and stylistically and the Hou Hsiao-Hsien-directed THE ASSASSIN, the rare film by a filmmaker who's completely in control of his art, would not go home empty-handed. We expected the Coen Brothers-led jury would award them but not

Notwithstanding the lack of one film trailblazing the others as was the case in previous years (MOMMY or LA VIE D'ADELE, as recent examples, HOLY MOTORS a little bit earlier), 2015 has borne a tremendously-strong Cannes vintage. So yes, credit--much of it--goes to Thierry Frémaux and his team for having bravely assembled such an inventive slate of films by filmmakers who express themselves genuinely on the larger issues

CANNES, France - Defining the influences that push someone towards a career as filmmaker isn't an easy task. But where Ethiopian director Yared Zeleke is concerned two events can be said to have been defining ones: a photo he saw in the French city of Cannes fourteen years ago and his emigrating to the US with his father at age ten, a very difficult moment

CANNES, France - The Croisette has been awash in semen since the midnight premiere screening of the new Gaspar Noé film LOVE. The director of ENTER THE VOID and I STAND ALONE said during a sparsely-attended press conference today that he submitted the film to fest a week after the April selection announcement. That this was going to be in 3D was a mystery, even to the filmmaker. Vincent Maraval of Wild Bunch (one of the film’s co-producers) had told him “you should get into 3D” after the success of James Cameron’s AVATAR. What started as a joke between them gained traction and eventually became reality.