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.

Many short films tend to be comedy-oriented but not all of them are funny. An exception is “Lemon,” which was shown as part of shorts program at the last Tribeca Festival. In the twelve minutes that make up its length I found myself laughing more often than I do during some feature-length films.

Written and directed by Timothy Michael Cooper (“Concierge: The Series”) “Lemon” provide

CANNES FESTIVAL, Palais — I was on the press balcony sitting at a table, with a friend, on the last Friday of the festival. I was half-working, half-resting, until the next screening. Some colleagues were nearby, taping an on-camera interview. To my left, a handsome, elderly man sat writing on a sheet of paper with a pen, a contrasting sight to this Mac-toting journalist. He looked a little more than seventy springs.

In a short ceremony on Sunday the jury of the Cannes Festival, which marks its seventieth birthday this year, announced the winners, with Ruben Oestlund winning the Palme D'Or for his film "The Square." This year the jury's choices seemed more in line with those of the press than in years past. Many of us present at Cannes this year were hoping that "The Square" would get the top prize, or that Diane Kruger, who makes her official debut

Last night the Un Certain Regard prizes were awarded during a ceremony in the Debussy Theater. UCR, an unwieldy hodgepodge of decent and lesser films, is the non-competition program of the Cannes Festival's official selection. But it's not without the occasional gem. Filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's "A Man with Integrity," a dark portrait of a man standing up against the corruptive influence of a company angling