Ken Burns is one of the world”s most well known and respected documentarians, but his films rarely make an appearance in cinemas. He has made an indelible name for himself with his meditative and expansive PBS studies, which tackle broad cultural phenomena ranging from “Baseball” to “The Civil War.”

But Burns feels that there is “a sense of urgency” attached to his latest endeavor, “The Central Park Five,” which warrants a theatrical release. And a tidy (for Burns) two-hour run time makes it possible.

The film, which premieres at next month’s Cannes Film Festival where the hope is to secure a distributor, is the result of a joint familial effort between Burns, his daughter, Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon. It follows the story of the infamous “Central Park Five,” the five young men who were convicted of brutally beating and raping a Central Park jogger in 1989 only to have their convictions overturned after several years served.

In 2003 the five filed a wrongful conviction lawsuit against New York City and the filmmakers hope that the documentary will help to bring the case back into the public eye. PBS also has plans to air the film but the timing will be dependent on the theatrical roll out.

“We’d hope for some kind of harmonic convergence, where this story could be spread on the eve of the trial and potentially affect the outcome,” McMahon told TV guide in a recent interview. “It would seem only fair, given that media coverage affected the outcome of the original trial.”

The teenagers’ confessions were reportedly coerced from a police force that was facing massive public scrutiny and pressure to make an arrest that would stick. The citizens of New York were incensed by the heinous violence of the case and were screaming for the capture of those responsible.

Burns was originally meant to direct the film, which was based on the book his daughter Sarah was writing, “The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding.” It ultimately became a more balanced collaboration between the three, the result of which is said to be a break from Burns”s typical style.

“When people see there’s no narration and it’s really fast paced, they go ‘Wow, this is a departure,’” Burns told TV Guide. “It’s a departure only in the most superficial way. In nearly every film, we’ve struggled to come to terms with America’s original sin, which is race. One only needs to pick up the paper to read about Trayvon Martin, or look at the history books and the Scottsboro Boys, to understand that, unfortunately, it’s not some unique story in American history.”

What will be interesting to trace is the impact the Burns filmand the media at large has on this case versus the sensationalism of the original trial which resulted in hasty and inaccurate convictions. Similarly, the West Memphis Three continue to be a topic of discussion this year as the Peter Jackson-produced “West of Memphis” (which premiered at Sundance) sheds some new light on that case when it hits theaters later this year.

For year-round entertainment news and commentary follow @JRothC on Twitter.

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A few weeks ago I saw “The Avengers.” The next morning, I cranked out a thousand words or so with all my thoughts, I felt, perfectly representative of what I took away from the movie. I felt good about it. Then the internet ate it.

Oh well, it happens, but the gist of the piece was this: “The Avengers” succeeds mainly because its all-star cast, playing all-star characters, gels perfectly, organically, no ego tipping the scales, no “front man” (as it were) emerging from the mix. Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner and Tom Hiddleston work wonderfully off each other and finally bring Marvel to a place DC Comics should have been a few times over by now.*

So on one hand, yeah, the headline here is a joke. The Screen Actors Guild’s nominating committee, and indeed, any “self-respecting” awards-giving body is highly unlikely to pass kudos approval on a film like “The Avengers.” But in the case of a category meant to honor well-oiled machines like this one, perhaps they should.

Truly, this film could have been a mess of mismatched synergy. I think it helps that Joss Whedon was such a singular creative force on the project, having been tapped to both write and direct it (when you’d expect a committee of writers to be credited on something like this). That certainly provides a focus of comedic timing and relationship-building on the page. But I was sort of in awe at seeing this many major forces on the screen, a number of them with their own franchises separately, blend so flawlessly while still standing out separately.

And that’s the trick. That’s what needed to happen for this film to work. At Comic-Con in 2010, Robert Downey Jr. took the stage in Hall H at the San Diego Convention Center with the massive, freshly announced cast and director behind him. He mentioned Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” which he had recently hit theaters. “I think that was probably just about the most ambitious movie I”ve ever seen,” he said. “Marvel Studios is going to take all of their top super heroes and they”re going to put them all together in ‘The Avengers.’ That”s the most ambitious movie.” An overstatement, sure, but I think it gets at the core of why the film has been so compelling in concept and why it’s such an accomplishment in execution.

Best in show? Mark Ruffalo is blessed with a lot of the low-key comedy, so it’s difficult to not say he kind of slyly steals it as Bruce Banner. Chris Hemsworth endeared me to Thor even more (when that’s always been a character I never really cared for). Downey is naturally on fire and comfortable as ever as Tony Stark and Tom Hiddleston is a delicious villain as Loki. But I’d be tempted to say it’s Scarlett Johansson who stands out, which is a huge surprise for me.

In the build-up to the film, taking into consideration the terrible “Iron Man 2” (which introduced Johansson’s Black Widow to the world) and just the overall sense of things, it seemed to me that the actress was quite out of place in this assemblage. I wasn’t buying it. But the character is integrated in a fantastic way here, layered with her own nuance that hints at the potential for a spin-off movie with Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye if they wanted to go there. And Johansson makes it all count.

It might be a weird thing to say about a movie built on the team-up of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and The Incredible Hulk, but yeah, Scarlett Johansson was probably my favorite element of “The Avengers.” (And kudos, too, to her stunt double, Heidi Moneymaker, who deserves a decent chunk of the credit.)

Is “The Avengers” the best film of the superhero sub-genre? I don’t think so. “X2” and Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise certainly remain on the top tier and the case can, as ever, be made for Richard Donner’s vision of Superman. But it’s a fierce franchise starter that does the one thing it needed to do: it establishes a strong, compelling ensemble that really doesn’t deserve to be scoffed at when mentioning awards for same as something that should at least be humored by the conversation.

“The Avengers” opens nationwide Friday, May 4. Check out Drew McWeeny’s glowing review of the film here.

*With DC being under an umbrella providing for exclusive Warner Bros. distribution since, essentially, 1968, there’s just no reason a Justice League movie shouldn’t have found itself in reboot mode already. But that’s a whole other column (most of which the internet ate).

For year-round entertainment news and awards season commentary follow @kristapley on Twitter.

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The auteur: Leos Carax (French, 51 years old)

The talent: There are a couple of eclectic ensembles to be found in this year’s Cannes lineup, but surely none weirder than this one. That weatherbeaten French character actor (and longtime Carax associate) Denis Lavant (“Beau Travail”) takes the lead role here is hardly a surprise. Gallic veterans Michel Piccoli (most recently seen in “We Have a Pope”) and Edith Scob (“Summer Hours”) also make sense. But who would have expected them to share the bill with Eva Mendes and, wait for it, Australian pop pixie Kylie Minogue? The mind reels.

Carax wrote the script on his own. Below the line, Bruno Dumont’s favorite DP Yves Cape (who hit a career high with Claire Denis on “White Material”) is one of two cinematographers on the project; the other, Caroline Champetier, recently won a Cesar for “Of Gods and Men.” Editor Nelly Quettier (who also has some Claire Denis credits on her CV) has worked with Carax since 1986’s “The Night is Young”; production designer Florian Sanson is a relative newcomer, but recently did some impressive work on “Black Venus.” The score, apparently, is by British semi-novelty band The Divine Comedy, because, well, obviously. 

The pitch: As Carax’s first feature in 13 years, “Holy Motors” is aiming to be the comeback story of the festival. Word is that the director, after failing to secure financing for a planned Hollywood project, opted for this as a smaller-scale project to re-solidify his reputation. Smaller, however, does not mean simpler, and the logline for this one reads pretty high-concept: the film covers 24 hours in the life of a man (Lavant), who moves between numerous parallel existences, each one as a wholly different being: man, woman, old, young, poor, rich, businessman, criminal, human, fantastical creature. The official synopsis describes his loneliness and exhaustion at living these multiple lives, and his search for a resting place. Trippy.

The pedigree: This is Carax’s second consecutive feature to play in Competition at Cannes, though “consecutive” is a bit of an odd word to use when 13 years separate the films. “Pola X,” a Herman Melville adaptation of sorts that announced Carax’s full-on embrace of experimental cinema, won no prizes in 1999 but has since gained a minor cult following; his reputation rests, however, on his earlier work, principally two films with his then-lover Juliette Binoche, “The Night is Young” and “Lovers on the Bridge.” One of contemporary French cinema’s most slippery, romantic eccentrics (even his working name is an anagram), he’d boast greater standing if he worked more often, but his return nonetheless has a lot of people excited.

The buzz: With a premise as defiantly oddball as its potentially out-of-practice director, this one’s going to remain an unreadable wildcard until — and, quite possibly, long after — the day it screens. Anticipation is high, perhaps more out of curiosity than confidence. Thierry Fremaux, however, seemed bullishly excited about the film at last week’s press conference — he might know something we don’t. 

The odds: Bookies aren’t overly optimistic about Carax’s Palme chances — Paddy Power currently give him 20-1 odds — which is understandable, given the apparent curio value of the film, which will nonetheless have to out-weird David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” to command the Croisette’s attention. All that could change, as obvious as this sounds, if the film is genuinely terrific — which, given Carax’s form of old, it might just be. A Best Director prize, for example, is a plausible welcome-back gift. Failing that, I think we can all agree that Kylie Minogue is long overdue for Best Actress recognition.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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This weekend “The Raven,” director James McTeigue”s imagined version of horror master Edgar Allan Poe”s final days, makes its way into theaters. A predictable thriller with uneven attempts to elevate itself beyond the confines of a formula while still satisfying the demands of the middle ground, I cannot say that I wholeheartedly recommend it.

However, I find the film’s subject matter and the ideas that inspire it to be somewhat intrinsically intriguing. I do not believe that “The Raven” captures Poe’s tone or essence; it is a bit too shallow for that, lacking the density of those who really wish to engage with his work. There are moments in the film that were awkward to the point of being nearly painful to behold and others that felt like they struck the balance between naturalism and suspense/fantasy. But it is what “The Raven” points to in the broader context of the genre that has been, and is, of interest to me.

In the world of the film – which, in a sense, acts as a metaphor for the creative process itself – the poet’s blood-drenched short stories are brought to violent life through a series of murders inspired by his words. A killer obsessed with Poe is imitating the grisly slayings he describes in his tales, all the while holding the author”s lover hostage.

Said lover stands in as an embodiment of figurative and literal beauty, the one thing that “keeps the darkness that has haunted Poe his entire life” at bay. In order to release her (the bearer of his salvation) from a malice that would suffocate her, Poe (literally) must write. The murderer tasks him with the creation of a series of new short stories, each word a lifeline to the woman who represents vitality and a release from the burden of darkness to the artist.

At the time of the Comic Con press panel for the film last year, John Cusack, who plays Poe in the film, quoted the poet as saying, “There is nothing more fascinating in the world than a beautiful woman dying.” I remember the idea inherent in the quote staying with me for days after I heard it and I thought of it again yesterday as I viewed the film. “There is nothing more fascinating than a beautiful woman dying.”

Why is that fascinating? Certainly Poe had a history of the women in his life dying, his mother, stepmother and wife all passed relatively early in life. But there is something in that idea that feels more relevant in the larger sense. Stunning women are routinely decimated in horror films. So, why? What do they represent?

A beautiful woman (in both cinema and literature) often stands in for a myriad of abstract ideas. She may be grace, salvation or a vision of the divine feminine. She may also represent pure, sexual, life-giving creative potential. She can give birth; she is a receptacle for what her male counterpart wants to leave of himself in the world. So when she is slaughtered, it is also the end of said “life potential.” In that moment she represents both creation and destruction. The combined forces of the human death drive (the compulsion to kill and be killed in order to once again become a part of organic material) and Eros (the desire for sex and life).

I remember when I was a nanny in my late teen years I would watch in fascination as the children in my care would, with painstaking effort, build elaborate Lego or building block homes and other rather abstract structures, only to with a burst of wildly felt glee smash and demolish them. The development was careful, focused and intense and the dissolution a purely felt and unrestrained release of energy.

Now if another child were to come along and do the destroying for them there would be the inevitable tears and laments, wails and cries of heartbreak at the loss of their creation. But some part of me must wonder if the boys and girls were really mourning the annihilation or the opportunity to be the annihilator.

The creation/destruction impulse seems so unapologetically linked in one”s youth when toys and objects are designed to be disposable with the understanding that the impulse to obliterate will be present and more than likely indulged. As adults we tend to revere the former and revile the latter but the truth is that we leave our mark on the world with what we create but what we ruin also follows in our wake. Though we imagine the urges to be discordant, in reality the impulse to create, to build, to design and to improve frequently leads to destructive consequences and burning the land will often renew fertility. It is the balance between the two that is essential to thriving.

Perhaps no genre explores the dance between creation and destruction as vividly as horror. It is obsessed with beauty and death in equal measure. I recently spoke with “The Cabin in the Woods” director Drew Goddard about horror”s tradition of creating archetypes only to lay waste to them. Said archetypes are often figures we admire, young, lovely and vibrant, but also dangerously unleashed. The teens in many a classic horror film are separated from the bonds of society, physically isolated, free from parental control and, as the young are, inherently lacking the inhibitions that would limit indulgence.

Certainly the slasher flicks that “Cabin” takes its cue from were originally cut from moralizing cloth. They punished excess and rewarded restraint. Though the characters and stories have shifted and evolved in recent years (mostly due to audience sophistication), said slasher films followed a pattern that was (consciously or not) designed to remind us that the creative force without the balancing influence of boundaries is ultimately destruction. As much as these films indulge our inner Kali (creator/destroyer), they also caution that overindulgence will lead to demise. That is why the virgin lived – she had self control.

In an interview following a recent screening of “The Raven,” Cusack said that “the horror genre is the language of the subconscious.” Indeed, “The Raven” explores the idea that Poe is living into the creative and destructive impulse simultaneously, as most artists are. But he has become imbalanced and unable to do his work and, in the world of horror, the Gods of harmony are relentless and unforgiving.

The pain of writers block and his inability to produce new work leaves him impotent and bloated with the avarice that would otherwise be released with his prose. The serial killer in the film becomes the corporeal representation of his psyche’s desire to express its hidden recesses at all costs.

Cusack”s Poe must ultimately die by his own sword (his vital imagination). He has indulged in the shadows to a degree that has made them manifest and so it’s both his struggle to give birth to his ideas and the creations themselves which ultimately destroys him. The film translates that into a more literal climax, but the allegory of the story is about the danger of being overcome by one’s creative drives as much as one’s destructive impulses.

If we look at the lives of the artists who seek to plumb the depths of human desires and impulses through the ages, Mozart, Cobain, van Gogh, Caravaggio, Modigliani, Michelangelo, we find that many suffered a similar fate. And so it is that “The Raven” via the horror genre delivers one simple message: from cradle to grave, that which nourishes us may also destroy us, or we it.

For year-round entertainment news and commentary follow @JRothC on Twitter.

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With the rosters for both Critics’ Week and the Directors’ Fortnight both having been unveiled this week — more on those later — the lineup for this year’s Cannes Film Festival is essentially complete, though festival director Thierry Fremaux has promised that there are one or two additions still to come. (Don’t hold your breath for Malick or Paul Thomas Anderson — a title like Cate Shortland’s well-buzzed “Lore,” on the other hand, may be a more realistic wish.)

When people ask me if I’m excited about this year’s Cannes crop, the only sensible answer is yes: what cinephile worth his salt would feign indifference to the prospect of seeing new films from Jacques Audiard, David Cronenberg, Michael Haneke, Michel Gondry, Raul Ruiz and so on? Cannes is never not exciting in that respect, as this week’s list makes pretty clear. Yet I still think this year’s lineup, and the Competition strand in particular, falls short in some respects. Not for lack of big names, but rather for lack of smaller, more surprising ones. With no female directors or debut features in the running for the Palme, the Competition also isn’t as global as it might be: Asia gets just two of the 22 slots, Africa one, South America zero.

Whether this lack of overt risk-taking has anything to do with it or not, this year’s lineup oddly features a wealth of films that I want to see, yet very few for which I’m positively, personally salivating. That made whittling down a list of my 10 most anticipated titles an unexpectedly difficult task: with so many films that I’m looking forward to seeing for roughly equivalent reasons, it was tough to separate them. What was interesting was how many of the films that rose to the top are ones about which I’m rather nervous — I’m not at all confident that all 10 films I’ve picked will work, but the ones that don’t could be all the more intriguing for it. 

Suffice to say there are plenty of titles not on the list that I’m still keen to see — indeed, I have little doubt some of my eventual festival favorites aren’t there either. In any event, it promises to be a stacked and stimulating festival. Check out our new gallery to see my picks, then tell us what you’re most impatient to see in the comments below.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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The auteur: Jacques Audiard (French, 59 years old)

The talent: Though Audiard has never been averse to working with actors on the French A-list, his latest represents his shiniest star collaboration to date, with Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard taking top billing — the Hollywood adoptee’s first lead role in a French-language feature since 2009’s “The Last Flight.” Audiard’s male leads, in recent years, have been rather imaginatively chosen, and this one is no exception: Matthias Schoenaerts may still be an unfamiliar name to many, but the hulking, impressive Belgian actor made a major impact in last year’s Oscar-nominated “Bullhead,” for which he won several festival awards. The supporting cast featueres another notable Belgian, actor-director Bouli Lanners, and relative newcomer Celine Sallette, Cesar-nominated for last year’s Cannes entry “House of Tolerance.”

As for the offscreen talent, Audiard acolytes will be pleased to see most of his creative partnerships intact. As he did on “A Prophet,” Thomas Bidegain co-wrote the screenplay with the director. Cinematographer Stephane Fontaine shot both “A Prophet” and “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” while editor Juliette Welfling (an Oscar nominee for Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) has cut all Audiard’s features. Composer Alexandre Desplat has also been with Audiard from the beginning, long before he became one of the giants of his field — alongside Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” this is his second credit on a Competition entry this year.

The pitch: The crossover success of Audiard’s last two films may have cemented Audiard in some arthouse viewers’ minds as a director of cool, hard-bitten, male-oriented crime dramas, so “Rust and Bone,” adapted from a short story collection by Canadian genre writer Craig Davidson, might strike them as a bit of a departure. His first female-led film since 2001’s “Read My Lips,” it stars Cotillard as a killer whale trainer at a marine park who loses a leg to an Orca; she embarks on a romance with Schoenaerts’s unemployed bare-knuckle boxer. Beyond that, details are sketchy: as exciting as it is to see Audiard getting in touch with his romantic side again, that needn’t come at the expense of his taste for brutality.

The pedigree: That Audiard has risen to the status of one of France’s most celebrated auteurs while making only five previous features in 18 years says much for the command and distinctiveness of his style — it helps that each of his films has, arguably, been better received than the last. Still, “A Prophet” is a tough act to follow: the second Cannes entry of his career (the first, the 1996 WWII dramedy “A Self-Made Hero,” won him Best Screenplay at the fest), it was one of the critical sensations of Cannes in 2009, winning the Grand Prix (the runner-up to the Palme d’Or) and snagging an Oscar nomination the following year.

The buzz: If the last paragraph didn’t make it clear enough, expectations will be sky-high for Audiard’s latest — and with three years apparently the minimum amount of time the director needs to turn around a new film, a below-par effort would be all the more disappointing. (He’s never struck out yet, mind.) No advance word on the film has leaked yet — though it’ll be opening in France virtually simultaneously with its Cannes premiere — but an enigmatic trailer, released earlier this month, impressed many while befuddling a few. An apparent change of pace from a major filmmaker will always raise as many nerves as it does excitement. 

The odds: Audiard was favored by many to take the Palme for “A Prophet”; second-hand jury gossip has it that the voting was close between the film and eventual champ “The White Ribbon.” The sense that the director is owed to some extent is propelling “Rust and Bone” near the top of many bookies’ lists, though juries don’t always think that way. On paper, Cotillard looks a strong contender for the Best Actress prize, though she’d be the fourth major French star in a row to take acting honors at the fest; if the jury feels inclined towards smaller names this year, she and the film could suffer. Schoenaerts, however, with his rumbling career momentum, could be a Best Actor dark horse.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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Guy and I have something in common (other than the fact that we both write for In Contention). Producer David O. Selznick’s seminal Civil War epic “Gone with the Wind” stands out for each of us as one of our most beloved films of all time. The film won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture and has remained a significant part of our cinematic history for over 70 years.

I was introduced to the adaptation one Sunday afternoon as an 11-year-old and soon found myself obsessed with all things to do with the production. I had biographies of Selznick, each of the film’s stars, every “making of” special I could get my hands on and even a “Gone with the Wind”-inspired cookbook.

I was fascinated by Selznick’s compulsion to see his own vision fulfilled, his attention to detail down to the petticoats that each of the O’Hara sisters wore beneath their elaborate dresses and with the directorial hirings and firings along the way. (Although Victor Fleming ultimately received the credit, both George Cukor and Sam Wood took turns at the helm).

The animosity that existed between the two romantic leads, an avarice that through some magic translated to an indelible on-screen chemistry, stands as the first time that I truly understood the world of make-believe that cinema dwells in. There was some part of me that even in my snarky preadolescence was shocked that Vivien and Clark were not as enamored of one another as their counterparts Scarlett and Rhett.

I shut the world out for four continuous days as I devoured Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer-winning novel. And though I was fascinated by the alterations that the characters underwent from page to screen, I discovered that I ultimately preferred Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara to the portraits that Ms. Mitchell originally painted.

“Gone with the Wind” is visually lush with an aesthetic that has been repeatedly imitated over the years. It is grand in scale both thematically, cinematically and emotionally. It addresses the demise of a culture via its own hubris and endemic poisonous beliefs and practices.Though the film has since, rightly, faced criticism for its portrayal of a seemingly idyllic South (I would argue, however, that it presents the image as a falsehood that is inherently and deeply flawed) as well as its presentation of the African American characters.

Via Rhett and Scarlett’s unbearable missteps the film explores the damage we do to our own lives when we lie to ourselves about our genuine nature and what we truly want. And ultimately, it remains one of the most haunting love stories ever brought to life, haunting in that it echoes with the viewer long after the final credits have faded. Scarlett’s final promise to us “I’ll think about that tomorrow” in turn becomes our promise to her. And we do think about it. The climactic confrontation between Rhett and Scarlett is so perfectly in tune with who we understand them to be: willful, arrogant, dangerously protective of their own vanity and cursed with tragically mismatched timing.

But as much as we embrace the film’s willingness to see them through to their inevitable end, many of us refuse to accept that one as adaptable and cunning as Scarlett will not find a way to recapture what she has lost, nor that two humans so perfectly crafted to fit together will be forever lost to one another.

The beauty of the tale is that it continues on in our imagination and that as we age we come to understand Rhett and Scarlett’s vices and shortcomings more and more and, possibly, see them reflected in our own lives. At least I have. I see how my silence, my stubborn inability to express what I am feeling or my failure to recognize what that is until it was too late has damaged some of my relationships, potentially beyond repair.

“Gone with the Wind” continues to resonate for me as emotionally true with characters that are as alive and vital today as they were when the film was initially released in 1939. Rhett and Scarlett are unabashedly flawed, more so than any of the other central characters in the piece. And yet, we are able to see that it is their perceived weaknesses that also make them survivors. They are unapologetic fighters who are capable of forcibly pulling those around them (those who would otherwise flounder and die) up by the roots of their hair if they must so that they may survive as well. Their weaknesses become their strengths and their strengths their weaknesses, as is true for so many of us.

I set that against this weekend’s romantic drama, “The Lucky One,” the latest adaptation from novelist Nicholas Sparks. Sparks is the author who brought us such offerings as “Message in a Bottle,” “Dear John,” and the popular “The Notebook.” It is perhaps somewhat unfair to compare a single release to one of cinema’s masterworks, but a truly successful romance is so rare these days that I thought I would explore the failings that many of these endeavors have in common, as I perceive them.

The main characters in many of our modern tales of love must seemingly be “perfect,” morally upright, gentle, ever forgiving and calm. If they do not begin as such then they are quirky and endearingly misguided initially and ultimately easily brought to heel. The milquetoast Ashleys and Melanies of romantic fiction have taken center stage, whereas the more richly textured and dynamic Rhetts and Scarletts are relegated to secondary “best friend” position.

Certainly that is the case in the adolescent phenomena “Twilight,” which often reads as unbearably preachy. For me, Katniss lost a bit (though not all) of her bite in the cinematic adaptation of “The Hunger Games.” Zac Effron and Taylor Schilling (through no real fault of their own) are nearly unwatchable and unfathomably bland in their portrayals of Logan and Beth, respectively, in “The Lucky One.”

The film itself relies on repetitive plot devices to create dynamic tension: a frustratingly ill-conceived series of misunderstandings, a cartoonish jealous ex-husband, artificially forced danger and an angelic child to bond the pair. War is present as an inciting incident in the story (Effron is an Iraq veteran who believes a photo of a mystery woman has saved his life and as such seeks said woman out), but is only dealt with in the most cursory of measures.

Two of cinema’s greats, “Casablanca” and the aforementioned “Gone with the Wind,” manage to engage with the larger elements of their respective socio-political backdrops even as they weave a gorgeously intricate romance. Though I will confess I find Scarlett and Rhett to be far more equally matched in terms of dimensionality than Rick and Ilsa.

There are a plethora of romantic films released each year in Hollywood, be they comedic or dramatic (I am focusing on U.S. releases because that is where I see the bulk of problematic love stories emerging from), and very few of them are even marginally memorable. Perhaps I am looking upon the past with rose-colored glasses. “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” But certainly there is a tradition of an abundance of forgettable formulaic fair peppered with the extraordinary emerging from Tinseltown.

The enduring love stories seem to be fewer and farther between. The last U.S. romance that truly left its mark on me was 2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Nearly a decade latter I again must ask: Where is the love, Hollywood?

For year-round entertainment news and commentary follow @JRothC on Twitter.

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James Cameron is not a man who believes in boundaries. He”s been pushing the edges of technology as well as his own creative limits (and those of his crew) for years. He recently returned from a journey to the Mariana Trench (a 7-mile-deep canyon and the ocean’s deepest known point). He was in fact the first person in history to make it a solo trip.

Equally impressive is the fact that he helped to design the vessel that made the heretofore impossible journey.

I happen to love Cameron. For me, he is the best possible version of bonkers and gives “no limits” a very good name. Many of us spend our lives imagining the extraordinary. Cameron spends his in relentless pursuit of it. Amidst his other achievements, he is, of course, responsible for the top grossing film of all time: “Avatar.”

“Avatar” advanced the use of both 3D and performance capture technology. The film legitimately altered the way the industry thinks about and conducts its business. Among other things, respected auteur Martin Scorsese was inspired to delve into the world of 3D with last year”s Academy Award-nominated “Hugo” (which for some, at least partially, legitimized the medium), as did filmmakers as varied as Steven Spielberg, Wim Wenders and Francis Ford Coppola.

As in all things, however, there have been some short cut attempts to piggyback on the success of the film, including a lot of less-than-stellar 3D conversions and crass uses of the technology, of which Cameron has been quite publicly dismissive.

In addition to the spectacular technological display that it represents,”Avatar” served as a warning of the dangers that overpopulation and an unsustainable strain on the Earth”s natural resources present. It also functioned as an allegorical chastisement for the practice of colonizing and razing the native materials of an indigenous populace.

It is somewhat ironic, given the film”s larger themes, that The Guardian reports that Cameron is now one of the lead backers for a private company that describe itself as a “commercial space pioneer” whose intent is to extract materials of non-Earth resources. Planetary Resources (the company in question) named Cameron and several other prominent entrepreneurs as members of its “investor and adviser group” in a recent press release. Cameron seems like a prime candidate to be a part of this venture, we imagine at least partially in the hopes of being a part of one of the first commercial trips into space.

It is no surprise that a man as interested in exploration, engineering and technology as Cameron would financially support this project. And though privatized space exploration makes a good deal of sense (given NASA”s seemingly stalled advance), there are several elements of this announcement that give me pause.

First, the irrational part of my brain feels like this is somewhat tempting fate. Did “Avatar” not warn us against plundering other planets for what we do not have ourselves? This is to say nothing of what “Aliens” presents of privatized space travel. I would no more like to see Cameron aid the corporatization of space than I would enjoy watching him contribute to the construction of artificial life. My response to the latter would in all likelihood be: “STOP BUILDING SKYNET.” That said, the more logical part of my brain also sees a few potential pitfalls in the endeavor.

I fear that, given even the potential of an escape into other worlds, we will fail to truly address the issues we face in terms of sustainability. We already do so little in that regard. Now, in all likelihood there will be no indigenous life on the “Goldilocks” planets this mission will seek. But “Avatar” presents a vision of a world as a complex organism in its own right, one with agency and a right to thrive. So are we to be nothing more than parasites, traveling from host to host until we drain the one we occupy of its vitality and then move onto the next?

Is that a hyperbolic response? Absolutely. As an avid science fiction watcher I may have some level of innate trigger paranoia around particular advances. On a more fundamental level, however, I just cannot help but believe that we have far too dangerous a gap between our ethical advancement and that of our technology. And there is a large part of me that feels we need to focus on the former and slow the latter if we are to truly thrive as a species long term.

Having said that, I would not say no to a trip into outer space.

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I’m not sure I’m ready for it, but yesterday’s full lineup announcement brought home the fact that this year’s Cannes Film Festival is less than a month away. It scarcely feels like a year ago that the likes of “The Artist,” “The Tree of Life” and “Drive” entered our lives, but here we are, ready to welcome next batch of potential crossover hits, treasured obscurities and inevitable disappointments.

With that, welcome to our Cannes Check series, in which I’ll individually preview each of the 22 titles in Competition. (Much as I’d love to give similar treatment to Un Certain Regard and other festival strands, I am but one man.) Same as last year, I’ll be covering one film a day, in alphabetical order of the director’s surname. Tidily enough, that means we’re kicking off with the film that itself will be raising the curtain on this year’s festival — Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom.”

The auteur: Wes Anderson (American, 42 years old)

The talent: We’ve come to expect all-star ensembles — with a slightly mix-and-match flavor — from Anderson’s films. His latest is no exception. Regular Anderson lucky charms Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman are joined by a host of A-listers you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in the same film: Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, Harvey Keitel and Bob Balaban, as well as a pair of first-time child actors, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, in the putative lead roles. Roman Coppola, who co-wrote and co-produced “The Darjeeling Limited” in 2007, again had a hand in the script here, while super-producer Scott Rudin continues the partnership he’s maintained with Anderson since “The Royal Tenenbaums” in 2001.

Below the line, cinematographer Robert Yeoman, who has shot all of Anderson’s live-action features, is once more on board — and looks to have more to do here than he did on recent Hollywood assignments like “Bridesmaids.” Editor Andrew Weisblum, fresh off an Oscar-nomination for “Black Swan,” has been with Anderson since “The Darjeeling Limited”; a newer collaborator is ubiquitous composer Alexandre Desplat, who scored an Oscar nod for his first pairing with the director, “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Crucial newcomers, considering how much of Anderson’s reputation rests on his films’ design properties, are production designer Adam Stockhausen (promoted from art direction duty on “Darjeeling”) and costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone.

The pitch: Wes Anderson’s films are styled in such a way that they always evoke roughly the same milieu, regardless of when and where they’re set, but this is an actual period piece. Set in small-town New England in the 1960s, it’s an ensemble comedy sprouting from the story of two amorous kids (Gilman and Hayward) who decide to flee the island community they live in, prompting a town-wide search party to go after them. Bruce Willis plays the sheriff leading the search, Murray and McDormand play Hayward’s parents, Norton plays Gilman’s scout leader and Swinton evidently pops up as a social services worker. The premise promises much of the unhurried, digression-laden quirkiness that is Anderson’s trademark, with a shot of woozy summer romance. It doesn’t look like those who find his work precious — in both the positive and negative senses of term — will be given much cause to change their minds.

The pedigree: Considering his established arthouse brand and relative popularity in Europe, it might seem a little surprising that this is Anderson’s first film to unspool at Cannes — but then his auteur reputation is arguably heftier than his filmography of just six previous features. “The Darjeeling Limited,” which played Venice (but won no prizes) in 2007, gave the director his only previous appointment at one of the European majors.

The buzz: Cannes organizers gave an already anticipated film a major profile boost by handing it the opening night slot, but that can be something of a poisoned chalice — Woody Allen made good on the opportunity last year, but Cannes openers generally have a reputation for underwhelming, particularly when they’re also in Competition. (“Moonrise Kingdom” is the first film to tick both boxes since “Blindness” in 2008; “My Blueberry Nights” is another unhappy precedent.) That said, the film makes perfect sense as a curtain-raiser, promising both lightweight fun and red-carpet star wattage; with any luck, like “Midnight in Paris,” it’ll prove an easily digestible appetizer for the heavier courses to follow. The trailer, meanwhile, has drawn the approximate levels of fluttery excitement and scepticism you’d expect for an Anderson film — “Fantastic Mr. Fox” having earned back much of the critical goodwill lost by the coolly received “Darjeeling.”

The odds: UK bookmakers Paddy Power have the film in midfield, giving it 16-1 odds of taking the Palme. Even that seems a tad generous, influenced more by name appeal than festival logic. Here, the opening-night slot is a drawback: with everything to follow, will the film stick in people’s minds? Comedies rarely triumph at Cannes, and the film may strike the jury as too mainstream for top honors — even if this year’s president, Nanni Moretti, may be more inclined towards whimsy than most. Positive critical buzz, leading into the film’s prompt release date of May 25, is really what Team Anderson is after.

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After catching Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild” at Sundance, I kept finding that the film was sticking with me. I wasn’t particularly enchanted while actually watching it, for some reason, probably because soaking up the richness of the voice and the uniqueness of the world was at the fore, but as I drifted away from it, it kept calling me back. I’m eager to see it again and I’m happy Fox Searchlight continued down a path of un-Searchlight-like acquisitions by picking it up in Park City.

The film was the only Sundance holdover announced as part of the 2012 Cannes film festival line-up this morning, following in the footsteps of films like “Precious,” “Blue Valentine,” “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “Take Shelter” before it. It’s a natural pick and I’ll be curious to see how European festival audiences take to it. Could it signal even louder a potential awards trajectory? Maybe, maybe not. The truth is I don’t know how much of a chance a film like that could have in awards season, but it will certainly be a healthy contender with programs like the Gotham and Independent Spirit Awards, and potentially plenty of love on the critics awards circuit. (Surely young Quvenzhané Wallis will get her share of debut performance love.)

Sundance got the awards party started early when the film won the Grand Jury prize there, but today the San Francisco Film Society announced “Beasts” and Zeitlin as the recipient of its inaugural Graham Leggat Award at the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival (the nation’s oldest fest). Who else will follow suit with similar kudos? And will the awards goodwill stretch throughout the season? We’ll know in a few months.

The award was named after Graham Leggat, the former executive of the San Franciso Film Society who passed away last year. And it’s a bit of a homecoming of sorts for Zeitlin, who can thank Leggat in part for helping him realize the film.

“Benh Zeitlin, one of the many filmmakers whom the Film Society has supported, has completely captured our imaginations and enthusiasm from our first meeting with him,” Society interim executive director Melanie Blum said via press release. “In fact, Graham was part of the original granting panel that awarded Benh one of two SFFS/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaker postproduction grants, totaling $105,000, for Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

Zeitlin will receive the honor at Film Society Awards Night at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco on April 26.

“The film, shot in New Orleans, is a bayou fairytale of sorts,” I wrote about “Beasts of the Southern Wild” at Sundance, “presenting a world familiar yet foreign, an ‘issue’ film without being an issue film at all…It’s dense with thematic substance that could be spun this way or that, which I dig, and the narrative is confident in its fantastical bent to a point that you just have to applaud the spirit of it all…I [came] away with…immense respect and admiration for the assured hand with which the film is conveyed.” Greg Ellwood was similarly enthusiastic at Awards Campaign.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild,” much like “The Tree of Life” last year, has been set for a nice counter-programming release date of June 27 in the US by Fox Searchlight Pictures.

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I didn’t know until I got an AP brief yesterday that musician and actor Levon Helm was so on the ropes in his 16-year battle with throat cancer. Today, the inevitable announcement: Helm has left us. He was 71.

Of course, most know Helm from his tenure as the drummer/sometime vocalist of The Band (immortalized forever by Martin Scorsese’s documentary of their swan song performance, “The Last Waltz”). But Helm also had a steady-enough acting career, beginning in 1980 with a significant part in Michael Apted’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

Indeed, when I think of Helm, it’s rarely “The Weight” or “Up on Cripple Creek” that leaps to mind. It’s actually his work opposite Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager’s right-hand man, pilot Jack Ridley, in Philip Kaufman’s “The Right Stuff” that registers first.

The reason isn’t because Helm was particularly outstanding in the film (though his presence is all over it, given his narrator status throughout). Rather, I find myself thinking back to a high school psychology class taught by my school’s Varsity basketball coach. The mind reels, I know, but while we may have hit the curriculum points necessary for legitimacy, I feel like I mainly remember movie talk and movie screenings randomly held in the class.

One such screening was “The Right Stuff,” and though it was a film with which I was quite familiar (one of Dad’s favorites), I hadn’t actually sat down and watched it beginning to end. Coach was a big fan of the film and, in particular, Helm’s work. I knew Helm’s voice, “Take a load off, Fanny” being quite the ubiquitous song lyric, but I didn’t know who he was or anything.

I remember him so much from the movie, though, because of something Coach said as the film was winding down. He even paused it for emphasis.

If you’ve seen “The Right Stuff,” you’ll recall a moment toward the end of the film as Chuck Yeager, forgotten hero that he was in the wake of the space program, still pushing the limits as a test pilot, still looking to own his part of the sky, sets off on a test run for old time’s sake. Coach paused the video and told us to pay attention to a certain line that, in his view, was the greatest compliment he’d seen one man pay another. “It’s right after the guy driving Levon Helm asks him a question,” he told us.

Ridley and his driver head out in search of Yeager, whose plane has crashed, and the question comes: “Sir, over there. Is that a man?” As Helm’s Ridley looks out in the heat-rippled distance, he sees Yeager alive and well, head held high. A smile creeps across Ridley’s face, almost as if he was never worried about his friend, and he simply says, “Yeah, you damn right it is.”

Great line. And indeed, who was Yeager if not the ultimate “man?”

It’s a film I’ve grown to love, mostly for the story it tells of Yeager. When he glimpses a few sparkling stars in the dark of space at the apex of that last test flight, finally able to reach the heights he wasn’t allowed due to lack of a college education, I get goosebumps. But I’ll always tie Helm to the film for that moment, and for the great presence he is throughout.

Check out the scene I’m talking about below (with the specific moment coming around the 6:30 mark). Right after that, take another look at Helm and company’s performance of “The Weight” from Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,” never a bad idea.

Take a load off, Levon. You’ll be missed.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cq7hf4ylvY&w=640&h=360]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCw3-YTffo&w=640&h=360]

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What do Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Zac Efron and Shia LaBeouf all have in common? Speak up, I can’t hear you above all that high-pitched screaming. If what you’re trying to say is that they’re all set to walk the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival next month as their new films premiere in Competition, then you’d be right. Cue every Cannes-bound journalist throwing a set of earplugs into their luggage.

Of course, it’s not as if those august Cannes selectors have acquiesced to the Twilight generation. All of them are appearing in the kind of grown-up, semi-arthouse fare that is par for the course at Cannes: Pattinson in David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis,” Stewart in Walter Salles’s “On the Road,” Efron in Lee Daniels’ “The Paperboy,” LaBeouf in John Hillcoat’s “Lawless” (formerly “The Wettest County in the World”).

We expect such starry-but-classy North American titles to compete at the festival. We don’t, however, usually expect quite so many of them. Joining the aforementioned films on the Competition list are Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly,” a reunion with “The Assassination of Jesse James” star Brad Pitt; Jeff Nichols’ “Mud,” starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConaughey; and Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” which will be the first Cannes curtain-raiser to vie for the Palme d’Or since “Blindness” in 2008.

With so many U.S.-oriented films in the lineup, it’d be greedy to mourn the absence of Terrence Malick’s latest, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” or Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines,” all of which featured prominently in many Cannes prediction lists. The rest of the world needs some room too, and the selection is predictably heavy on world-cinema titans who have been here many times before.

With “Amour (Love),” Michael Haneke makes his sixth Competition appearance, after finally winning the Palme with his last effort, “The White Ribbon.” Jacques Audiard, whom Haneke beat into second place in 2009, is also back with his Marion Cotillard starrer “Rust and Bone,” though he’s not the most venerable French auteur in the running: that’d be 89-year-old Alain Resnais, whose “You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet” marks his fifth Palme bid, 53 years after his first. (He’s never won the prize.)

Along with Haneke, three former Palme d’Or recipients are back in the hunt. Romania’s Cristian Mungiu returns with “Beyond the Hills,” his first feature since “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” floored the festival crowd in 2007. Just two years after “Certified Copy,” my own favorite film of Cannes 2010, Abbas Kiarostami returns with his fifth Competition entry, “Like Someone in Love” — which continues the Iranian director’s travels away from his homeland, this time into Japan.

None of these directors, however, come close to Ken Loach for the title of most Cannes appointments. The king of British social realism has become an unmovable Cannes fixture over the years, and sure enough, “The Angels’ Share” marks his eleventh Competition appearance — though colleagues who have already seen the film aren’t rushing out to place bets on it. (Incidentally, it’s the only UK title in any section of Cannes this year — a bit of a comedown after “Shame,” “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “Wuthering Heights” rocked Venice last year.) 

The most glaring absence in this year’s Competition lineup as that of any female directors at all — a bit of a blow to the cause after last year’s record number of four. Similarly, while the selectors took a chance on two debut filmmakers last year, none made the cut this time round. Indeed, of the 22 directors in Competition, 16 (including Matteo Garrone, Thomas Vinterberg, Carlos Reygadas and Hong Sang-soo) have been to this particular dance before. The other six mostly include the well-known American and Australians listed at the top of this article — such as Daniels, who was in Un Certain Regard three years ago, and Nichols, who won the Critics’ Week strand last year. Not a year for outsiders, then.

It’ll be up to the Un Certain Regard section to uncover the surprise talents, though familiar names abound there too. Among them are 23 year-old Québecois upstart Xavier Dolan, whose “Heartbeats” was in the same strand two years ago, and who was widely expected to be promoted to Competition status with his new effort “Laurence Anyways.” Also staying put is Argentina’s Pablo Trapero, a 2008 Competition entrant whose 2010 thriller “Carancho” was demoted to UCR, and remains there with another Ricardo Darin starrer, “White Elephant.” It’s not his only film in this strand, either: he’s also a contributor to “7 Days in Havana,” a portmanteau piece that also features Benicio Del Toro, Gaspar Noe and former Palme champ Laurent Cantet on the directors’ list.

Among the newcomers in Un Certain Regard is a certain Brandon Cronenberg, who will unveil his suitably Cronenbergian-sounding debut feature “Antiviral” (a sci-fi effort about harvesting celebrity viruses) in the smaller pool, while dad David brings “Cosmopolis” to the Competition. Meanwhile, following “Precious,” “Blue Valentine” and “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” there’s an apparent slot reserved in this strand for a Sundance sensation — the only Cannes film to have already premiered at another festival. I suspected Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which beguiled critics and took the Grand Jury Prize in Utah in January, would fill that slot this year. I was right.

There’s plenty more to look forward to, including out-of-competition entries from such big names as Bernardo Bertolucci, Takashi Miike and Philip Kaufman — to mention the mammoth “Once Upon a Time in America” restoration I discussed yesterday — but I’ll get to those in due course.

Those of you who were with us last year may remember our Cannes Check series from last year, in which we built our appetites for the festival by individually examining each of the titles in Competition — I’ll be doing the same this year, so look out for that. In the meantime, check out the full lineup below, and roll on May 16.

COMPETITION

“Moonrise Kingdom,” Wes Anderson (opening film)

“Rust and Bone,” Jacques Audiard

“Holy Motors,” Leos Carax

“Cosmopolis,” David Cronenberg

“The Paperboy,” Lee Daniels

“Killing Them Softly,” Andrew Dominik

“Reality,” Matteo Garrone

“Amour,” Michael Haneke

“Lawless,” John Hillcoat

“Like Someone in Love,” Abbas Kiarostami

“The Angels’ Share,” Ken Loach

“In the Fog,” Sergei Loznitsa

“Beyond the Hills,” Cristian Mungiu

“Baad el mawkeaa,” Yousry Nasrallah

“Mud,” Jeff Nichols

“You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet,” Alain Resnais

“Post tenebras lux,” Carlos Reygadas

“On the Road,” Walter Salles

“In Another Country,” Hong Sang-soo

“Taste of Money,” Im Sang-soo

“Paradies: Liebe,” Ulrich Seidl   

“The Hunt,” Thomas Vinterberg           

UN CERTAIN REGARD

“Miss Lovely,” Ashim Ahluwalia

“La Playa,” Juan Andres Arango

“Les Chevaux de Dieu,” Nabil Ayouch

“7 Days in Havana,” Laurent Cantet, Benicio del Toro, Julio Medem, Gaspar Noe, Elia Suleiman, Juan Carlos Tabio, Pablo Trapero

“Trois mondes,” Catherine Corsini

“Antiviral,” Brandon Cronenberg

“Le grand soir,” Benoit Delepine, Gustave Kervern

“Laurence Anyways,” Xavier Dolan

“Despues de Lucia,” Michel Franco

“Loving Without Reason,” Joachim Lafosse

“Student,” Darezhan Omirbayev

“La Pirogue,” Moussa Toure

“White Elephant,” Pablo Trapero

“Confession of a Child of the Century,” Sylvie Verheyde 

“11.25 The Day He Chose His Own Fate,” Koji Wakamatsu

“Mystery,” Lou Ye

“Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Benh Zeitlin         

OUT OF COMPETITION

“Me and You,” Bernardo Bertolucci

“Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath, Conrad Vernon

“Hemingway & Gellhorn,” Philip Kaufman 

MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS

“Dario Argento’s Dracula,” Dario Argento

“The Legend of Love & Sincerity,” Takashi Miike

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

“A musica segundo Tom Jobim,” Nelson Pereira Dos Santos

“The Central Park Five,” Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon

“Der Mull im Garten Eden,” Fatih Akin

“Journal de France,” Claudine Nougaret, Raymond Depardon

“Les Invisibles,” Sebastien Lifshitz

“Mekong Hotel,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul

“Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir,” Laurent Bouzereau

“Villegas,” Gonzalo Tobal

CLOSING FILM

“Therese Desqueyroux,” Claude Miller

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Some time tomorrow the line-up of films for the 65th annual Cannes International Film Festival will be unveiled. Guy will have plenty to say on that as he’ll be covering things from the Croisette yet again, but while speculation about this or that has kept the guessing game lively, we know a few things.

Earlier today it was revealed that a nearly four-and-a-half hour cut of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” will debut at the fest. And ahead of the official announcement, the first trailer for David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” follow-up “Cosmopolis,” adapted from the Don DeLillo novel, reveals that it is an official selection for this year’s program.

I was personally no fan of Cronenberg’s last film, which hit the fall festival circuit. At all. But with this trailer it looks like he’s back in the pocket I like. I mean, it’s about a rich dude (Robert Pattinson) taking his limo across town to get a haircut.

Co-starring are Jay Baruchel, Paul Giamatti, Kevin Durand, Juliette Binoche and Samantha Morton, so obviously the cast stacks up. And I’m eager for Pattinson to break free of the “Twilight” shackles. “Water for Elephants” sure didn’t do it.

Plenty about Cannes tomorrow, but for now, enjoy a sneak preview of things to come below (courtesy of Rope of Silicon and Allocine).

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When I first came to understand that with his latest film, “Magic Mike,” director Steven Soderbergh was embarking on a journey to capture the essence of Channing Tatum”s real life experience as a male stripper in Florida, I was, quite simply, delighted. The whole endeavor sounded just absurd enough to be, well, magically delicious.

I happen to be a huge fan of the bizarre bits of life that exist all around us and I enjoy how Soderbergh finds the elements of the extraordinary, unique and strange that are real and present and builds films around them. He did so with MMA fighter Gina Carano in “Haywire” and with porn star Sasha Grey in “The Girlfriend Experiment” quite recently.

When he decided to move forward with a film that explored the singular world of male stripping I believe I was envisioning whatever the Steven Soderbergh version of a broad comedy is, strange and expansive encounters between eccentric and shirtless men. The film follows Tatum’s titular character as he guides and mentors an upstart (Alex Pettyfer, who viewers may or may not know from such offerings as “I Am Number Four” and “Beastly”) through the go-go world of bachelorette parties and, well…more bachelorette parties, we imagine.

But in fact, Soderbergh’s latest foray into art imitating life, artistically, looks to be his first try at the romantic comedy. Surprising, but also intriguing. There are so few successes in the genre at present that I”d like to see what sort of dish Soderbergh can bring to this particular dinner table.

In other news, co-star Matthew McConaughey has finally found a role where his character is actually meant to have his shirt off. Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Cody Horn and Olivia Munn co-star.

Take a look at the trailer via Apple below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh78SbA1wEc&w=640&h=360]

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Principle photography on Sacha Gervasi’s Alfred Hitchcok biopic creatively titled “Hitchcock” began last Friday in Los Angeles. The film will star Anthony Hopkins as Hitch with Helen Mirren as his wife Alma Reville.

Well, I guess it’s not a true “biopic.” Based on the book “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho” by Stephen Rebello, the film will tell the behind-the-scenes story of Hitchcock’s brilliant thriller. James D’Arcy has been tapped to play “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins while Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Biel will play actresses Janet Leigh and Vera Miles, respectively.

Really, I prefer this kind of a glimpse at a person. The “greatest hits” approach to biopics is tired and rarely profound, but slices of someone’s life such as this can be plumbed thematically to give a rich portrait of who they were. The chance to slow down and focus rather than breeze through the highlights for a quick fix more akin to an Encyclopedia entry than a film isn’t appreciated nearly enough.

Interesting note on the cast: Michael Wincott will play infamous nutbag Ed Gein, whose twisted story has “inspired” everything from “Psycho” to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (which — SYNERGY! — Roth happened to praise this afternoon) to, indeed, the character that brought Hopkins his Oscar: Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs” (as well as that film’s central mass murderer, Buffalo Bill). It’ll be interesting to see how he is worked into the narrative here.

Meanwhile, Fox Searchlight has released, via People.com, the first still of Hopkins in full Hitchcock makeup and attire, and he looks PERFECT. Oscar winner Howard Berger (“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”) and two-time nominee Martin Samuels (“Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”) are heading up the makeup department. I think we can get a little crazy and pencil it in for consideration in that category next season.

As for the trivia we all know: Hitchcock himself never won a competitive Oscar in his career. His 1940 film “Rebecca,” however, won the Best Picture prize, while he was honored with an Irving Thalberg Award in 1968. He was nominated for Best Director five times, for “Psycho,” “Rear Window,” “Spellbound,” “Lifeboat” and the aforementioned “Rebecca.”

“Hitchcock” will be released by Fox Searchlight in 2013. Check out the full shot of Hopkins as the rotund helmer below.

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Tomorrow, at last, will bring the months of Cannes speculation to an end, as artistic director Thierry Frémaux announces this year’s official festival lineup. Anybody with at least half an ear to the ground has some idea what to expect: Walter Salles’s “On the Road” and Michael Haneke’s “Love” (predictably picked up yesterday by Sony Pictures Classics) are among the inevitabilities, but we can hope for a few wild cards too. Last year shook up the formula slightly by adding two debut features to the Competition lineup: reaction was mixed (and neither film won a thing), but will Frémaux  and company take a similar chance this year?

Whatever aces they may have up their sleeves, the festival may well have stolen tomorrow’s thunder with one of today’s announcements. The news that an extended, 269-minute “redux cut’ of Sergio Leone’s compromised 1984 masterpiece (no, I don’t use that term lightly) “Once Upon a Time in America” is to premiere on the Croisette this year rather dwarfs the Competition conversation. Indeed, it’ll be a remarkable lineup indeed if any one of the contemporary selections tops the restoration of Leone’s gangster saga, which premiered at the same festival 28 years ago.

Many of you, I’m sure, have seen “Once Upon a Time in America,” a sprawling tale of childhood friends from New York’s Jewish ghetto, played by Robert De Niro and James Woods, whose relationship shifts with their criminal activities across five decades. None of us, however, have seen it as the Italian master, who died five years after its completion, intended. Leone’s original cut of the epic narrative ran 269 minutes; when daunted distributors protested, he agreed to shave it down to 229 minutes in time for Cannes, where it premiered out of competition to widespread critical acclaim.

Unsurprisingly, a near-four-hour cut still didn’t please commercially-minded studio bosses, who took it out of Leone’s hands and all but shredded it, ultimately releasing a 139-minute cut in American theaters that jettisoned vast swathes of narrative, not to mention narrative cohesion. (European distributors, meanwhile, were content to release the 229-minute version.) Leone was reportedly devastated by the studio’s cut, which was derided by critics who knew what had been lost, and failed to ignite at the box office. The Academy, rather staggeringly, failed to reward it with a single nomination — not even for its lavish craft contributions — though it was the Best Picture runner-up in the Los Angeles critics’ voting, while both BAFTA and the Golden Globes nominated Leone’s direction.

That unkind studio cut has, thankfully, largely fallen out of circulation, with the Cannes edit readily available on DVD — but the film’s reputation as something of a cinematic martyr remains, a testament to the damage that can be done when moneymen wrest artistic control from the filmmaker. After this initial hobbling, the film’s reputation has grown pretty tall over the years: it’s routinely listed as one of the 1980s’ high points, and it’s not uncommon to see it in All-Time Greatest lists, though Leone’s original conception of it has never been made available to us.

Until now, of course. Under the instruction of the late director’s children, Leone’s initial, never-premiered 269-minute cut of “Once Upon a Time in America” has been restored byItaly’s Bologna Cinematheque, with Gucci and (of course) Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation lending a helping hand. Word of the restoration has been tantalizing cinephiles for some time, with both Cannes and Venice mooted as possible premiere venues.

Either would have made sense, but the film’s original festival home clearly won out. As such, the film immediately rockets to the top spot on my Cannes most-anticipated list. As luxuriantly satisfying as the storytelling in the familiar 229-minute film is, it’s still obvious where certain incisions have been made — to see it without even these is an impossibly exciting prospect.

The “Once Upon a Time in America” news overshadows the other major Cannes announcement of the day, which also concerns a late director’s final work. ‘Thérèse D.,’ the swansong of esteemed French auteur Claude Miller, who passed away earlier this month at the age of 70, has been confirmed as this year’s festival closer.

Cannes closing films have a reputation for underwhelming, but this one — which popped up in many a Competition prediction lists prior to Miller’s death — will be more keenly watched than most. Miller, a former protégé of François Truffaut whose taste for cool, character-based thrillers yielded such artistic peaks as “Class Trip” (winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998) and the Ruth Rendell adaptation “Betty Fisher and Other Stories,” was far from a spent artistic force: his 2009 drama “I’m Glad My Mother Is Still Alive” (released last year in the US) was warmly received by critics at the Venice fest.

‘Thérèse D.,’ an adaptation of a 1927 novel by Nobel laureate François Mauriac, is a period drama starring Audrey Tautou as an unhappily married woman who resorts to poisoning her husband. It sounds a rather somber choice of closer — sure to be more of a downer than Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” its corresponding bookend — but the slot is an appropriately prominent one to give an artist whose departure is still being rather sorely mourned in the French filmmaking community. Here’s hoping it bucks the closing-film trend.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter. 

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This past weekend, the deconstructed slasher flick “The Cabin in the Woods” opened in theaters. From the mind of Joss Whedon and his co-writer/director Drew Goddard, the film sets up multiple horror archetypes and then soundly and with a great sense of humor and affection for the genre breaks them down. As a woman who was once deeply enamored of the scary story, the release has called to mind what was, for me, the first moment that a chiller set itself deeply and irrevocably into my psyche.

There are horror films that I have found beautiful, poetic and masterfully crafted and still others that have simply opened a previously unknown gate of fear in me. But it is the sequence in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” described below that forever remains the first time a scene delved into my id and burned itself onto my conscious mind.

As a little girl I had a deep affection for both mischief and horror films. And so it was that I found myself watching a forbidden and forbiddingly gruesome cinematic offering one, oh yes, dark and stormy night with my best friend in a cabin tucked into the woods of South Carolina. My family and I had rented the cabin for a week so that my southern mother could educate her city-slicker children on the ways of nature. She found it necessary to do so after my brother identified a herd of cows as “big cats” on a drive through Vermont (which we referred to as upstate New York).

Now, let me take a moment to explain that as a New York City girl, even the most structured of suburbs was deemed “the forest.” And “the forest,” by all accounts, was filled with nothing but Jason Voorhees and the creature from the black lagoon. As such, my friend Lisa and I assumed that each pine-cone to hit the roof on our Hilton Head rental was actually the work of the angry (though likely misunderstood) “lizard man.”

Like all true horror buffs, we were both attracted to and repelled by the notion of confronting the ice-blooded genetic hybrid we imagined lived in the rafters. The attraction-repulsion dance is one that every true horror fan is familiar with, which may explain why we chose to watch a film about the quintessential dangers of back-woods inbreeding (no not “Deliverance”) in this environment.

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is a relentlessly raw and brutal look at limited dating and breeding options gone awry. And as far as dysfunction is concerned, well, they say the family that slays together…

The film is illustrative of a trend at the time which played into the fears urban dwellers had of both the untamed, uncivilized wilds they had left behind, and ultimately, their own unbidden and primal natures. “Straw Dogs,” “I Spit On Your Grave” and the aforementioned “Deliverance” are all examples of films of a similar thematic ilk, though with varied aesthetic merits.

But all of these films look at what we sometimes imagine our true, stripped-down selves to be: viscous animals driven by base needs at best and a lust for violence (and sexual violence in particular) at worst. Indeed, these films cast the “non-urban” other as little more than guttural beasts, creatures we ourselves must become in order to survive or defeat them. They are darkly salacious invitations to release the veil of culture if only in the confines of a 99 minute run time.

The kills in the “Chainsaw” are stark, viscous, relentlessly cruel and dehumanizing. They leave the viewer with an acute sense of both terror and loneliness. Few films have more vividly captured the idea that the victim is little more than a thing to the killer. A vision of a human slaughterhouse, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” asks us to confront our most base and fundamental fears. It asks us to look at our own cruelty and imagine it turned against us.

Yet the moment in the film that remains branded in my memory is the final confrontation between our heroine Sally and Leatherface when she, in an act of desperation, jumps directly though the glass of a second story window. The pure, unadulterated fear, the hysteria that she expresses remains one of the most realistic responses I have ever seen in a horror film. It is both flight and fight, it is the will to live, and the willingness to die rather than stay for one more moment in that house of abominations. One gets the sense that she will never again recover the girl she was, that some part of her will be forever chained to that dinner table.

It is somehow perfect to me, a viscerally satisfying manifestation of triumph over one’s demons and demonstration of the cost of engaging openly in the metaphorical battle against them. Meanwhile, when my brother turned on the blender in the kitchen just as the credits rolled, I did Leatherface a solid and jumped out of my own skin, saving him the trouble.

It made a sweet little change purse for Grandma Sawyer.

What was your first formative horror film experience? Let us know in the comments section!

For year-round entertainment news and commentary follow @JRothC on Twitter.

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I am increasingly disheartened and disturbed by what appears to be an unstoppable uptick in open misogyny. I”ve touched on this previously in a piece on Women and Oscar, but the subtle and not so subtle flames of gender bias are currently increasing rather than abating.

The female sex seems to be taking two steps back in Congress, in the workplace (where, for many, equal pay is still a longed-for dream rather than a well-established reality) and of course, in the media, where appearance is both target and weapon of choice. We are circling the same drain ad nauseum and ad infinitum in this arena where even women endowed with close to physical perfection are repeatedly subjected to our scathing societal eye.

Just this past week the release of “Titanic 3D” has reignited criticism of Kate Winslet’s perfectly natural and gorgeous body in that film. Though many have been supportive, the Twitterverse, as ever, was at the ready with scathing remarks. Perhaps in an effort to preemptively defend against the onslaught she faced at 22 when she made the film, the actress castigated herself upon viewing the 3D version. “The second it came up I literally went, ‘Make it stop, make it stop, turn it off. I’m blocking it off,'” the actress said to ABC News.”Do I really sound like that? Did I really look like that?'”

She even went so far as to quip that her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio has fattened up while she has slimmed down. And there is of course the ever present discussion of her breasts in 3D, or the censorship of said breasts in China. Ultimately, a large portion of the “Titanic” discussion has been centered around the physical bearing of its female lead.

BuzzFeed recently release a list of actresses who are continually referred to as heavy, which includes the notably tiny Ashley Judd (who took to The Daily Beast to retaliate against media obsession over her “puffy” face), Hillary Duff and a pregnant Jessica Simpson. Though I will confess that I believe a discussion of Jennifer Lawrence’s healthy appearance in “The Hunger Games” versus the starved Katniss Everdeen described in the book has more to do with the stakes for the character than a critique of Lawrence’s appearance. Meanwhile, much of the coverage of the HBO comedy “Girls” has centered on the allure of its cast, particularly the show’s star and creator Lena Dunham.

This is, again, sadly nothing new. For years young girls have been doused with images of Kate Moss (the face that launched a thousand bulimics) and her fellow representatives of “heroin chick” (and how sick is that?), Twiggy before her and countless others after her. Each exalted representations of truly dangerous health habits and impossible standards for any of us mere mortals to meet, not if we intend to eat.

And yet if actresses acquiesce to the trend and become the waifs or wraiths that their careers demand they be, they are equally maligned. Angelina Jolie is, without question, alarmingly slender. But the vitriol she faces is more than a little bit telling. Rather than compassion, we give her censure. We create the standard and then lambast those who stumble in their attempt to meet it.

I sat in an interview the other day with an actress who, without question, is one of the most stunningly beautiful humans I have ever beheld (and is in fact a very well-known current sexual “icon”). In the course of four minutes she referred to herself as fat three separate times. I was saddened and disheartened listening to her talk about herself in those terms.

On a human level, I simply cannot fathom the ungodly pressure she must be under to be, at all times, “perfect” (whatever that may mean). Indeed, it”s fairly common for females to criticize themselves openly and often. It is a toxic habit that most of us develop and then must work to shed — for inevitably, we will be reviled for it. Do a quick search for jokes about women asking the question, “Do I look fat?” Then search for the number of times a female celebrity is mocked for weight gain or censured for having cellulite, stretch marks or some other bodily imperfection.

Women are lambasted for falling into the habit of speaking of their physical attributes with a self-critical eye and yet, they are exposed to the incessant beat of the “self-improvement” drum from early childhood. More than that, if we are to look at some of the current “role models” for young women (“Twilight”‘s Bella Swan, for example), a tendency toward self-deprecation is lauded. The character consistently refers to herself as “plain,” “boring” and otherwise “not good enough” for her (literally) inhumanly hot vampire boyfriend, a trait which is meant to endear the reader/viewer to her. And so the maddening cycle continues. We are to be demure and self-effacing and yet when we are, we are considered insecure and thought to be fishing for compliments.

Though I am sympathetic to the quagmire she must find herself in, it is more than a little bit of a shame that the unnamed actress mentioned above has been so significantly blessed by the Midas touch of genetics and yet is incapable of enjoying it. I wish that more female celebrities would take their cue from “Mad Men”‘s Christina Hendricks and embrace their bodies, their beauty and their unique nature. Though they may have not signed on for it, these ladies have a responsibility to those who, rightly or wrongly, will take their behavioral cues from them. And the media must endeavor to willfully alter the conversation.

For both women and men influence the gender dialogue and contribute to the focus on superficial and undermining assessments of feminine value, worth and appeal. We must endeavor, as much as we can, to shift the focus and refrain from incessant self-critique (as much as many of us, myself included, have mastered the skill) and ever abstain from a toxic attack on other women, particularly public attacks that focus the lens on their looks rather than the issues at hand (don’t get me started on the media response to female politicians).

This is not to say that men are immune from the tide of anonymous cruelty that is currently present in our culture. They do, however, seem to face this particular blade with less frequency. Nor is it to indicate that this is the most crucial issue facing women in today’s world, but it is symptomatic of a larger trend.

As mentioned, HBO”s “Girls” premiered Sunday night and Dunham”s appearance is mentioned (often in cruel terms) at least once as a salient factor in a large majority of the reviews. She is described alternately as “plain, unshapely and unpleasant” and in possession of “a short-waisted, pear-shaped body that makes her desperately unhappy even as she dares us to notice that she isn’t as tall and slim as her best friends” by two widely read (female, by the way) reviewers.

Does the text of the show in some way offer a green light for this discourse? Perhaps. But inherent in that, the reason that the text of the show is what it is is that’s the reality of our culture. What we need to examine is why that is so. When Ray Romano, Bill Cosby, George Lopez or Larry David were given their own shows, were the relevant levels of their sexual attraction the principal topic at hand? No. Nor were they meant to stand in for the entire male sex.

To be fair, dubbing a show “Girls” does somewhat beg the question, “Is this really what girls are like?,” particularly when there is such a decided lack of female-centric programming. But it is said lack of representation that is the real issue, not the size of Miss Dunham”s waist.

Is “Girls” an accurate representation of a generation? It”s an exaggerated, comedic representation of a small portion of the population, just as “Seinfeld” and countless other programs were (and are). Is “Girls” any more a comment on the female gender than “Entourage” is on the male? Should one half-hour comedy bear that kind of burden? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Nevertheless, it is the acrid and petty nature of a certain archaic dialogue rearing its head — not merely in entertainment but, way more importantly, in our culture (as revealed in not just entertainment but politics and social concerns) — that feels most significant to me.

For year-round entertainment news and commentary follow @JRothC on Twitter.

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