France figures highly this year at the Cannes Festival. As Auréliano Tonet noted in his lead article in the special Cannes edition of Le Monde, out of the 75 or so films competing for various prizes across all official and parallel programs, 33 are French. And that’s a boon for cinephiles, indeed. Because as the American majors have been busy turning out a circus-styled sequel-and-3-D performance and some key indie-minded filmmakers

The Cannes Festival isn’t just the greatest film festival in the world: it’s also a major commercial player driving the local economy and ensuring the livelihood of thousands.

Here's a look at the arithmetic:

$25,000: that's the estimated value of the Palme D'Or; $50,000: poney up and you will the most expensive penthouse

It's hard not to feel trepidations after our most successful film auteur has become designated to head the world's most beloved film festival. In a rare convergence of schedules, Steven Spielberg has been nominated to preside over the 66th Cannes Festival. “My admiration for the steadfast mission of the Festival to champion the international language of movies is second to none. The most prestigious of its kind, the festival has

What would the Cannes Festival be without a little fracas? Some kind of polemic has been making the rounds of the French media this week concerning the lack of women filmmakers in the official selection at the Cannes Festival--twenty-two films, by male directors all, are vying for awards this year. Things turned nasty when Virginie Despentes, Fanny Cottençon, and Coline Serreau (a screenwriter-director, actress and director respect-

The Cannes Festival announced this morning that Marilyn Monroe would be gracing us with her presence this year--at least, virtually. The festival poster, which gets unveiled around this time of the year, will feature a Marilyn blowing on a birthday cake's single candle, marking this year as a landmark, this festival being the sixty-fifth. The festival's press release accompanying this poster states, "fifty years after her death, Marilyn is still a major figure

“Midnight in Paris” a new film by Woody Allen, will [...]

James Franco’s short film “The Clerk’s Tale” will close Critics’ Week at Cannes. Screen Comment’s Ali Naderzad did a close reading with Franco on the Spencer Reece poem it is based on.

Ali Naderzad - “The Clerk’s Tale” has a hint of sweet hopelessness. It reminds me of Thoreau’s famous sentence “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”I found the following sentence especially striking:

He does this because his acceptance is finally complete—and complete acceptance is always bittersweet. And then, there’s the extraordinary. We are changed when the transactions are done— older, dirtier, dwarfed."