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

(Short notice is Screen Comment's new column. It is exclusively devoted to short films) Australian filmmaker Jacobie Gray has directed a vivid, modern-day period piece of a relationship of the kind that Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick were famous for. “The Beehive” explores the affinity between an artist and his muse. Gray portrays the avant-garde culture of the New York art scene in the sixties through a modern retelling

Joaquin Phoenix is in full beast mode in Lynn Ramsay’s “You were never really here,” a head-scratching drama whose action begins in Cincinnatti, curiously, and moves to New York City. Phoenix is muscular, wears a scowl for much of the film, a glint of evil in the stare. There’s a little bit of something for everyone in this film: a sexually-deviant governor, murders with a hammer, underage prostitutions, ghosts, PTSD and battle scars.

The characters in director Fatih Akin’s movies are flawed, they use drugs, they take a contrarian approach to life, they survive life rather than live it (and they listen to fantastic music). While studying the humanities in college Katja (Diane Kruger, in a very strong performance) enjoyed the instant gratification of chemicals and fell for her drug dealer, the virile and handsome Nuri (Turkish-German actor Numan Acar).

Every year at the Cannes Festival the “Pierre Angénieux ExcelLens [...]

The first thing that I noticed while watching Kantemir Balagov’s new film “Tesnota” (“Closeness” in the original russian) is the performance by lead actress Darya Zhovner. Her Ilana, the character from whose point of view the film is told, is a tomboy who works in her step-father’s garage and whiles away the days hanging out with her boyfriend. Zhovner, for whom this film represents a first role (she graduated from Moscow’s Art Theater