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.

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.