Angelina Jolie: Hollywood won't be the same without her http://t.co/DHZUWRe2dH
— Guardian Film (@guardianfilm) June 2, 2014

Angelina Jolie: Hollywood won't be the same without her

Peter Bradshaw

The Maleficent star is dropping hints that she will retire from acting after her next big project, a biopic of Cleopatra. Departing the screen to concentrate on directing is a big shame for cinema lovers

Angelina Jolie... retiring? This cannot be happening! Photograph: David Gadd/Allstar/Sportsphoto

She is the Sophia Loren of our age, a Hollywood star of hyperreal beauty, statuesque presence and queenly hauteur. She had been away from the screen for a few years, facing down a bit of snarkery for her UN ambassador work and the alleged trouser-wearing prerogative in her relationship with Brad Pitt. But she stunned everyone with her courage and candour in announcing pre-emptive surgery to combat a genetic predisposition to breast cancer. Then this month Angelina Jolie made that sensational return with the new Disney fantasy Maleficent – smacking those uppity X-Men down to second place at the US box office, and showing beguiling new touches of humour and self-awareness that made her more of an icon than ever. Yet now, at very the moment of her comeback triumph, she hints that after one more film, a Cleopatra biopic, her acting career might be all over, and she's concentrating on being a director and UN ambassador. It's the Queen of the Nile – and then that's it.

Oh Ange! Oh no! Say it ain't so!

Jolie has been an A-list movie star for a good 15 years, although it's true to say her last couple of movie credits haven't met with great acclaim. In 2010, in The Tourist, she played a woman of mystery in a supposedly glamorous caper set in Venice, co-starring Johnny Depp; it looked in danger of sinking into the lagoon. Another movie was Wanted in 2008 – an aggressive boys-own action picture with unlovely touches of misogyny. But I very much enjoyed her spy thriller Salt in which she played secret agent Evelyn Salt – a role originally conceived for Tom Cruise. I see that Salt 2 is scheduled for production. It won't be the same without Jolie.

Link to video: Angelina Jolie on Maleficent: 'I was drawn to the evil'
 
Angelina Jolie made her big breakthrough in 1999 with two terrific performances in pretty good movies. She won a Golden Globe and a best supporting actress Oscar for her turn as the super-cool bad girl Lisa in James Mangold's Girl, Interrupted, the inmate of a psychiatric care facility – whose exuberant defiance inspires her fellow patient Susanna, played by Winona Ryder. That same year she was excellent in Mike Newell's comedy drama Pushing Tin, as the beautiful young wife of an air-traffic controller (Billy Bob Thornton); she has an affair with her husband's colleague, Nick (John Cusack). There is a lovely, relaxed spark between feline-sexy Jolie and goofy-unthreatening Cusack.

As her career began, the resulting movies were a mixed bag. She was inspired casting as Lara Croft, the action heroine whose screen career pre-dated the modern predominance of superheroes and Marvel studios. If Angelina Jolie were starting out now, she would almost certainly have to don the lycra in some way – and probably find herself playing second fiddle to some superhero male.

In Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) she played the imperious and Oedipally sexy mother to the great warrior himself, Alexander the Great, played by Colin Farrell. Farrell looked a little out of his depth next to Jolie, like she might at any moment order him up to his room with no supper.

Link to video: Angelina Jolie speaks to UN security council over rape in conflict zones
 
Then the second breakthrough: Doug Liman's comedy thriller Mr and Mrs Smith in 2005, with Jolie and Brad Pitt each playing professional assassins who learn that their next assignment is to kill each other. It's a movie I didn't like much on first release – but every time I see it on television, its energy and knockabout humour keeps me watching. That much-yearned-for quality of "chemistry" is there. It looked very much as if Jolie and Pitt really did fancy the bejeepers out of each other. They got together in real life; their mutual celebrity went supernova, and the cheeky title "Brangelina" was applied to them, like "Bennifer" to Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. (Some incidentally claim the couple-combo handle was invented by celeb journalists in the noughties. Not true. It was invented by F Scott Fitzgerald in his 1934 novel Tender Is the Night: the golden couple Dick and Nicole are at one stage called "Dicole".) Mr and Mrs Smith was a key Jolie role: tough, dynamic, sexy, with a tenderness that did not compromise the heroine's muscular heroism.

Jolie won some respect for her performance in Michael Winterbottom's true-life movie A Mighty Heart in 2007, playing Mariane Pearl, wife of the kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl. She did a terrific job as Grendel's gigantic mother in Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf and won a best actress Oscar nod as the doughty mom in Clint Eastwood's drama Changeling in 2008.

Link to video: Angelina Jolie 'grateful and moved' by reaction to mastectomy
 
It could be that Jolie herself regarded that as the natural break, and from that point she has been foreseeing a post-acting career. Certainly, her feature-film directing debut in 2011, a Bosnian war drama called In the Land of Blood and Honey, was respectfully received. Jolie wrote the screenplay too and defied the doubters with a film that my colleague Andrew Pulver found "sombre, powerful, and undeniably gripping".

So how about that Cleopatra movie? Jolie is the only possible star for this role. And as for who gets to play Mark Antony, my hunch is that our very own Dominic West will climb into the Roman tunic and Ralph Fiennes will play Cleo's former lover Julius Caesar. I'm already looking forward to seeing Jolie making that triumphal entry into Rome. But will Jolie really leave it there? Surely she can intersperse her directing projects with juicy acting roles. A whole new vista of drama and comedy, not to mention romance, is opening up for her in her 40s. This is her time!

Angelina Jolie Suggests She’ll Quit Acting After Portraying Cleopatra – LISTEN HERE! http://t.co/cQtkCnVOky
— Gossip Cop (@GossipCop) June 2, 2014

Dargis, Bradshaw and Perez on Tree

Critic’s Notebook

Malick’s Film Adds a Dose of Sincerity to the Festivities

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Brad Pitt plays an angry father in “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick's rumination on life itself, which elicited a decidedly mixed reaction at Cannes this week.

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: May 16, 2011

CANNES, France — In “The Tree of Life,” a cosmic head movie of the most ambitious order, Terrence Malick reaches high, his ecstatic camera and thoughts soaring. Shown on Monday morning at a press screening at the 64th Cannes Film Festival, where it was met with pre-emptive, harshly insistent boos and a vigorous rejoinder of equally determined applause, the film directly addresses the larger questions of existence that are woven throughout Mr. Malick’s work. It seeks to affirm the beauty of a world in which God is present in all things.

“The Tree of Life” is Mr. Malick’s first film since “The New World” (2005), a title that could work for this new movie as well. Running 2 hours 18 minutes, it is a personal, impressionistic work — beautiful, nonlinear, trippy, flawed — that unfolds largely in fragmented flashbacks, tracing not only the arc of a single life but also that of creation itself. As the title suggests, Mr. Malick has nothing less in mind than the origin of life, a beginning (or Beginning) in which vaporous swirls, gurgling lava and fiery explosions give way to the sight of a meteor hitting a planet (presumably Earth), an explosive vision that Mr. Malick audaciously, riskily, joins with the image of a pregnant woman’s belly.

The issue isn’t merely that Mr. Malick visually connects the impregnated planet, as it were, and the expectant woman, an association that sets a Mother Earth motif in motion. It’s also in the seriousness and sincerity with which he makes this connection: The film is an affirmation of Mr. Malick’s belief in the power of cinematic images to express the sublime (the cinematographer is Emmanuel Lubezki) and, perhaps, of his faith in the audience to meet him with equivalent seriousness.

It also serves as a reminder of how few contemporary filmmakers engage questions of life and death, God and soul, and risk such questioning without the crutch of an obvious story. It isn’t that these life questions aren’t asked in our movies; they are, if sometimes obliquely. Rather it’s the directness of Mr. Malick’s engagement with them that feels so surprising at this moment, and that goes against the mainstream filmmaking grain.

It’s this bluntness, along with the stunning, kaleidoscopic images of outer space (some derived from the Cassini mission to Saturn), that summoned up for me Stanley Kubrick’s cosmic explorations in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Certainly the films are different — formally, experientially, qualitatively — yet each also concerns concepts of God. In “2001” God has been replaced by science, which with the emergence of the monolith, is ultimately confronted by a different (extraterrestrial) God altogether. In “The Tree of Life,” God is everywhere and nowhere — in a ray of sun, a blade of grass.

The film opens with a quotation from the Book of Job — “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?” — taken from a passage in which God, like a hectoring, aggrandizing father, challenges Job with questions. It’s a section that Walt Whitman, as readers of the poet have long pointed out, seems to answer in “Song of Myself” (“In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass”), a work that Mr. Malick may have drawn on, given how both the poem and the film exult in a cosmic oneness with the world and are more circular in form than linear. Any number of the poem’s lines (“The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag”) could describe images from the film.

The rest emerges elliptically, including an early scene of a woman, Mother (Jessica Chastain), receiving terrible news of a death. Shortly after in film time, though years later, her oldest son, Jack (Sean Penn), now middle-aged, reflects on his childhood, a meditation that involves fiery visions of primordial life (dinosaurs included) and leads to the image of his mother’s pregnant belly. This family portrait eases the film into a sustained, mostly pacific interlude from Jack’s childhood with his two brothers, mother and father (Brad Pitt). It’s an imperfect Eden, however, one in which an angry father and gentle mother roam instead of dinosaurs, and, for better and sometimes worse, embody the tug between nature (a father’s harshness) and grace (a mother’s love). It’s a beautiful if hermetic vision that I admire for its ambition if finally not for its philosophy.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 17, 2011, on page C1

Cannes 2011 review: The Tree of Life

Prehistoric and cosmic visions aside, Terrence Malick's film is an unashamedly epic reflection on love and loss

• 
• • Peter Bradshaw
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 May 2011 12.55 BST

Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick's Cannes 2011 offering
Terrence Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory, and a gasp of horror and awe at the mysterious inevitability of loving, and losing those we love.
1. The Tree of Life
2. Production year: 2011
3. Directors: Terrence Malick
4. Cast: Brad Pitt, Fiona Shaw, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn
5. More on this film
Sean Penn has a central but minor role as Jack, a careworn 21st-century corporate executive who is now disenchanted with his life. At the moment of crisis, he is carried back to an ecstatically remembered 1950s boyhood in smalltown America. He remembers his relationship with his demanding, disciplinarian father, played by Brad Pitt, and the brother who died at the age of 19: the news is brought to his distraught mother (Jessica Chastain) via an official communication – the telegraph delivery boy thrusts it into her hands and walks quickly away – so he appears to have died on military service.
Jack realises that time, far from healing the wounds of loss, only makes them more painful. Along with the dream-lit tableaux from his childhood, he is vouchsafed extraordinary visions of geological time and the unknowable reaches of the universe, in comparison with which his loss is meaningless. And yet meaning has to be found if the pain is not to be unendurable. In a sense, the purpose of these gigantic visions is to anaesthetise the pain of being alive and not understanding.
Brad Pitt dominates the bulk of the film as Mr O'Brien, who appears on the face of it to be a God-fearing family man with a button-down shirt and crewcut, brusquely but sincerely in harmony with his gentle, beautiful and profoundly religious wife. Chastain has a voiceover at the very beginning asking her sons to prefer God's grace to the beauties of nature, as the truer path. But O'Brien is far more complex than first appears: he is angry with his boys; he respects the severity of traditional churchgoing belief, but aspires to riches and worldliness, taking out patents in the aeronautics industry and dissipating the family's means in the process.
He challenges his boys to hit him, to toughen them up, and does not hesitate to hit them for disobedience and discourtesy. He plays the organ in church and is a disappointed musician; his frustration and rage simmer from every pore. His boys feel fear as well as love: Malick shows how they have fused into the same emotion. They are encouraged to respect his violence and secretly to feel contempt for their mother's gentleness, and yet their fascinated alienation expresses itself in one startling scene involving an incursion into the parental bedroom.
And there are the baffling and bizarre symphonic passages of non-narrative spectacle, prehistoric jungles, arid deserts, galaxies and spiral shapes – Kubrickian landscapes of wonder. Weirdest of all is the engorged river in which a wounded dinosaur lies prostrate; another dinosaur comes along, plants its great foot on the other's neck and then moves heedlessly on. Is this the only message of the universe – pure survival? But then how is it we want something other than survival? What do we want to survive for? And Malick appears, through sheer crazy excess, to bring his movie closer to the ultimate question: why does anything exist at all?
This film is not for everyone, and I will admit I am agnostic about the final sequence, which suggests a closure and a redemption nothing else in the film has prepared us for. But this is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.

Plus one more from The Playlist by Rodrigo Perez

Rodrigo Perez:
When discussing Terrence Malick’s “The Tree Of Life” one must be careful of not reaching a tipping point with language. While Malick’s most spiritual and experimental film, to say the drama is narrative-less and or “mostly dialogue-free” (as some critics have implied) would be erroneous. Yes, like a cosmic hymnal, there are long stretches of only stunning celestial imagery and grand operatic music that harkens back to the creation of all things, but even then, there’s always a whispering voice-over imploring the universe for answers. At times heavenly, reaching a state of grace and utterly radiant visually and sonically (reaching some Kubrick-ian “2001: A Space Odyssey” levels of awe-inspiring next-level shit), the parts the make “Tree Of Life” frustrating is that the whole does not quite hold up to the some of its occassionally deeply-moving and deeply affecting parts.

And while, yes the impressionistic picture is more experimental than past Malick works, more loose and abstract with form, it is not unrecognizable. A picture in eternal search of questions itself unable to reconcile or answer, ‘Tree Of Life’ is an often rudderless picture in search of itself. Set in 1950s Texas around a family of five, the domineering, impatient father (Brad Pitt), the empathetic and godly mother (Jessica Chastain) and their three boys, “Tree Of Life” is split up into three movements: creation, the past (Texas) and the present where Sean Penn intermittently appears as one of the older boys still troubled and haunted by his youth. But rather than acts or scenes each movement is like a fluid vignette that seems to dip in and out of consciousness like restless sleep that keeps shifting its dreams.
And while more stream and brooks of memory than traditional narrative, “Tree Of Life” is not without its story and though the picture wanders restlessly, aggravated with itself like the testy and tempestuous children in the family in search of love, approval and belonging, there is a good 40-minute chunk that begins around the 2/3rds mark (forget acts) that’s devoted to the film’s core family.

Maddening at its core is the sense that Malick’s fluttered breath picture teeters on the edge of a luminous greatness never before captured in cinema, but it fails to ascend to those lofty heights. It’s a gorgeously expressive film unable to articulate itself and the inexpressible. Whenever the picture tends to settle into a tonal groove it quickly dims itself like wind blowing out a candle. Notions that the film devolves into self-parody are, in the writers opinion, incredibly overblown, however the Sean Penn sequences are the weakest and the easiest to invite ridicule. But the ambitious picture isn’t any more pretentious than past Malick film’s it’s just more, well, ambitious and much grander in scope.
Yes, like many of Terrence Malick’s film “The Tree Of Life” may age like fine wine, but there’s no denying while its heart and soul are like a peek into God’s window, it is but a flirtatious glance and ultimately unsatsifying; its tricky ending moving, but not quite as angelic and heart-stirring as it (and we) wants (want it) to be. Echoing similar visuals and themes from Darren Aronofsky‘s “The Fountain,” one can argue, while very different, Malick’s picture is less successful in its aims as it communicates rage, longing, love, resent and questions about the universe and the meaning of life, but it never amounts to too much other than fleeting emotions and feelings.

Oscar talk for this picture will surely fade come the fall unless serious contenders fail to emerge; its just not that kind of picture (but Pitt may have a shot). Fox Searchlight has a difficult sell on their hands as evinced already from the somewhat mixed reaction out of the arthouse-friendly Cannes critics. Malick preaches to his apostle-like choir and most of them will swoon with every note, but it’s possible this picture could be even less financially successful than his previous efforts. One gets the sense that throughout the miles and miles of footage that was shot, a near-perfect, more traditional Malick picture exists, but unfortunately, its not the one that’s up there on the screen.
Still, for all its minor, but aggravating issues—again, this is a picture that hints toward pure cinematic divinity, but doesn’t quite get there—Terrence Malick’s “The Tree Of Life” is a truly powerful experience that invites multiple viewings and interpretations and the filmmaker has not lost the skill to deliver awe-inspiring sequences. Arguably the reason why this picture doesn’t work is because it’s Malick’s angriest film (hear me out, this is relative). The sea churns, the universe cries itself awake like a difficult birth in its Nova episode-like creation sequences and these somber (and jaw-dropping visual scenes) echo the themes of childhood and and parental resent and lingering emotional disquietude. An overall melancholy, yet frustrated mien seems to stir in its troubled heart asking the unanswerable questions: why does the beauty of life give us so much pain? And why if it’s ultimately worth all that hardship must it end? There’s a lot to love in Malick’s soul-searching, meaning-of-life questioning almost-masterpiece, but its obliqueness, does sometimes keep us one step emotionally removed. One thing’s for sure, the wildly praising and dismissive reviews (particularly J. Hoberman’s) are the biggest disservice to Malick’s work and the film itself and to outright lump it all together as a success or failure and leave it at that misses the point completely. [B]

Cannes film festival 2011: the big guns and Brangelina are out

Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, Gus Van Sant ... and Mr and Mrs Pitt. Cannes rolls out a classic red-carpet lineup

• Peter Bradshaw
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 April 2011 17.13 BST

Pitt stop ... Brad Pitt in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, which will play in competition at Cannes 2011. Photograph: Merie Wallace/AP/Fox Searchlight

The announcement of the Cannes competition list is an exciting event. Rightly or wrongly, no other festival in the world can command anything like the same interest for its lineup-unveiling ceremony. The list is always guaranteed to trigger a canonical debate among critics and observers, an argument about which films and film-makers are thought to be making the grade. And the announcement is accumulating its own theatrical traditions, now that live TV coverage of the Paris press conference – hosted by the festival's ebullient head of selection Thierry Frémaux and its cool, mandarin president Gilles Jacob – itself can be watched online.

The announcement is a time when Cannes re-establishes a kind of cultural brand-identity by rehearsing the names of those heavyweight auteurs in which it has made a long-term investment. In Cannes this year will be Pedro Almodóvar, Lars von Trier, Nanni Moretti, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Ari Kaurismäki, Paolo Sorrentino and Gus Van Sant. Terrence Malick's long-awaited The Tree of Life is to play in competition: Malick is not one of those American directors Cannes is especially associated with – such as the Coens or Van Sant – but he won the Director's prize in Cannes in 1978 for Days of Heaven. And Cannes and its corporate sponsors adore Hollywood celebrity and – starring Brad Pitt as it does – The Tree of Life will undoubtedly provide a colossal Brangelina-paparazzi storm on the red carpet.

The out-of-competition lineup includes Jodie Foster's weird-sounding film The Beaver, starring Mel Gibson, Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (On Stranger Tides), the Sarkozy biopic The Conquest. And, of course, the whole festival is to be kicked off with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. As to this last film, well, there are no massive expectations – but Allen has always had an indulgent sponsor in Cannes: his film can more or less be relied on to supply some confectionery for the opening night, and plenty of stars for the red carpet.

So far, the surprising omissions from the list are Andrei Zvyagintsev's Elena, about an old woman attempting to rescue her alcoholic son from poverty, Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps, about a night nurse who runs a bizarre psycho-therapeutic bereavement service, and Brillante Mendoza's Prey, starring Isabelle Huppert as a woman abducted by an Islamist separatist group. But the whispers are that at least one of these films – probably Alps – will be added to the competition list in the coming weeks.

There is some British interest. Lynne Ramsay makes her Cannes competition debut with We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapted by Ramsay and Rory Kinnear from the best-selling novel by Lionel Shriver and starring Tilda Swinton, John C Reilly and Ezra Miller as the eponymous Kevin. Ramsay has been a prizewinner for her short films in previous Cannes festivals, but this is her major debut. In fact, it is her first full-length feature since Morvern Callar back in 2002. It must surely be a personal boost for Ramsay, having famously been once attached to the movie version of The Lovely Bones, a project taken over by Peter Jackson. Ramsay found the experience disagreeable and bruising. But in or out of Cannes, it is a pleasure to welcome back this superb director, whose Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar announced her as a major talent at the beginning of the last decade.

We can, however, be in absolutely no doubt as to who the star of Cannes will be: Lars von Trier is certain to rule the Croisette conversations with his mysterious movie Melancholia, which the master of mischief has described as a "beautiful film about the end of the world". My colleague Xan Brooks has already blogged about Von Trier's genius for winding us all up.

The trailer is fascinating though, as Xan says, Von Trier is a master of misdirecting the press with these cheeky hints. When I discovered the title of Lars von Trier's new film, I wondered if it might be an allusion to the director's depression, which was solemnly announced and widely discussed when his sensational horror movie Antichrist came to Cannes two years ago. Apparently not: his depression is evidently in abeyance, or at any rate announcements about it are in abeyance. Similarly in abeyance are, apparently, plans to make the third in the projected Dogville movie trilogy – this too was once earnestly discussed at Cannes press conferences, but now the Von Trier caravan has passed on. Well, I have to say the trailer makes this movie look great. No other director can give me a feeling I can only describe as sinking-butterflies-in-the-tummy: a feeling that I am about to be hit with a brilliantly concealed sucker punch.

Pedro Almodóvar's La Piel Que Habito, or The Skin I Live in, reunites the director with Antonio Banderas and is a revenge drama about a plastic surgeon tracking down the men who raped his daughter. It is based on the 2003 novel Mygale by the French author Thierry Jonquet. There are some Spanish TV news clips online about the production here, here and here, but these are for Spanish speakers only. It looks like a much darker, more politically flavoured movie than Almodóvar's other works.

It had been expected to feature out of competition, but Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is in the running for the Palme d'Or, and it will be interesting to see the odds that the bookmaker Paddy Power offers on this. It must surely be the odds-on favourite. Starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain, it is reportedly a symbolist, even surrealist film and a radical departure for Malick. Set in the 1950s, it centres on a boy in the midwest who grows up to be an adult lost in the modern world. This film, too, is bound to have thousands of cineastes milling around on the Croisette after the screening, excitedly debating its meaning. As I write, we are still being told that Tree of Life will actually have its world premiere in the UK in advance of the Cannes outing. This is a fascinating prospect for this director's British admirers (I am one), but I can't believe that Malick or his distributors would spike their global guns in this way.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are double-Palme winners, and their Le Gamin au Vélo, or The Boy With a Bike, starring Cécile De France and Jérémie Renier, looks very much as if it will be a return to their classic theme: parenthood. Cyril is a 12-year-old boy searching for the father who abandoned him in a children's home. He forms a complicated friendship with Samantha, a woman who runs a hairdressing salon. Any Dardenne movie is guaranteed respectful attention at Cannes, but these directors are not in the business of offering us the shock of the new.

There are two Italian film-makers at Cannes. Nanni Moretti is the director whose sad and beautiful film The Son's Room (2001) is still, in my view, the best Palme winner of the last decade: the Palme of Palmes. His new film is Habemus Papam, or We Have a Pope, a comedy about the relationship between the newly elected pope and his therapist, starring Michel Piccoli and Moretti himself. The Italian trailer is online here.

Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be the Place will, for my money, be one of the hottest tickets in Cannes. Sean Penn stars as a wealthy and faintly Robert Smith-like rock star in retirement in Dublin, who decides to travel to the US and search for the fugitive Nazis who persecuted his father. Hollywood names and an American setting will take Sorrentino out of his comfort zone, and European arthouse directors can sometimes come a cropper with pop music and pop culture. But this promises to be a fascinating film.

Gus Van Sant is a Palme winner for his nightmarish, Columbine-inspired movie Elephant (2003). Many had expected his new movie Restless, starring Mia Wasikowska, to be in competition. Instead, it is opening the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Why is this? Well, the trailer unmistakably announces it as one of Van Sant's more mainstream Hollywood-friendly pictures, such as his Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester. It is also co-produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. I wonder if Thierry Frémaux thought this a flimsier film, more appropriate as a glamorous opener outside the competition? We can only speculate.

Australian author turned director Julia Leigh is making a startling Cannes debut with her Sleeping Beauty, based on her own novel: a nightmarish thriller about a university student drugged and coerced into prostitution. It might be the hit of the festival, but it is high-risk stuff. There is something about Cannes that brutally magnifies failure.

Among the other directors, Nuri Bilge Ceylan has his Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Aki Kaurismäki is there with Le Havre, about a man who attempts to help an immigrant child in the French port city. Kaurismäki is a director traditionally, if tacitly, entrusted with the tricky responsibility of providing some laughs at Cannes, and sometimes they can be in very short supply.

The Japanese director Naomi Kawase was a Grand Prix winner at Cannes in 2007 for her much admired film The Mourning Forest. Her latest film, Hanezu no Tsuki, is reportedly set in AD 500 – aside from that, nothing much is known. More will undoubtedly emerge in the next few weeks, including the lineup of the Director's Fortnight and Critics' Week sidebars.

On paper, this looks like a classic Cannes year, with familiar big names: Variety commented of one Cannes that it was an "auteur smackdown": and that is really what we hope and expect for in every Cannes list – a massive meeting up of powerfully original film-makers.

CANNES 2011

Opening Film
Midnight In Paris, dir. Woody Allen (Out of Competition)

Competition
The Skin I Live In, dir. Pedro Almodovar
House of Tolerance (L’apollonide - Souvenirs de la maison close), dir. Bertrand Bonello
Pater, dir. Alain Cavalier
Footnote, dir. Joseph Cedar
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu ), dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
The Kid With A Bike (Le Gamin Au Velo), dirs. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Le Havre, dir. Aki Kaurismaki
Hanezu No Tsuki, dir. Naomi Kawase
Sleeping Beauty, dir. Julia Leigh
Poliss, dir. Maiwenn
The Tree of Life, dir. Terrence Malick
La Source des Femmes, dir. Radu Mihaileanu
Hara-kiri: Death Of A Samurai, dir. Takashi Miike
We Have a Pope (Habemus Papum), dir. Nanni Moretti
We Need to Talk About Kevin, dir. Lynne Ramsay
Michael, dir. Markus Schleinzer
This Must Be The Place, dir. Paolo Sorrentino
Melancholia, dir. Lars Von Trier
Drive, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn

Out Of Competition
The Conquest, dir. Xavier Durringer
The Beaver, dir. Jodie Foster
The Artist, dir. Michel Hazanavicius
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, dir. Rob Marshall

Un Certain Regard
Restless, dir. Gus Van Sant [opening film]
The Hunter, dir. Bakur Bakuradeze
Halt auf freier Strecke, dir. Andreas Dresen
Hors Satan, dir. Bruno Dumont
Martha Marcy May Marlene, dir. Sean Durkin
The Snows of Kilamanjaro, dir. Robert Guedeguian
Skoonheid, dir. Oliver Hermanus
The Day He Arrives, dir. Hong Sang-soo
Bonsai, dir. Cristian Jimenez
Tatsumi, dir. Eric Koo
Arirang, dir. Kim Ki-duk
Where Do We Go Now?, dir. Nadine Labaki
Loverboy, dir. Catalin Mitulescu
Yellow Sea, dir. Na Hong-jin
Miss Bala, dir. Gerardo Naranjo
Trabalhar Cansa, dirs. Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra
L’exercice de l’etat, dir. Pierre Schoeller
Toomelah, dir. Ivan Sen
Oslo, August 31, dir. Joachim Trier

Midnight Screenings
Wu Xia, dir. Chan Peter Ho-Sun
Dias De Gracia, dir. Tekla Taidelli

Special Screenings
Labrador, dir. Frederikke Aspock
Le Maitre Des Forges De L’Enfer, dir. Rithy Panh
Michel Petrucciani, dir. Michael Radford
Tous Au Larzac, dir. Christian Rouaud