CANNES – Telenovela has never seemed more inviting than it does in a brief scene midway through “Heli,” which plants our gormless title character in front of an unseen television set blaring the busy hubbub of Spanish soap opera, its shrill dramatics amplifying the violent silence that courses through Mexican director Amat Escalante’s third feature. This kind of deadpan reference to more conservative forms of Latin culture is a note often played in new Mexican cinema, ascribing authenticity to a film’s worldview by way of absurd contrast — though reality is as flattened in “Heli” as it is heightened in telenovela.

The ongoing Mexican drug war has already given us some startling visions of social disease from the country’s itchier young filmmakers — notably Gerardo Naranjo’s “Miss Bala,” a sensation at Cannes two years ago thanks to its impassively coiled gender politics and widescreen vistas of conflict. Few, however, have gone for the jugular quite as brazenly as Escalante does in this non-linear tale of a working-class family brutally punished for unwitting cocaine trafficking, which looks set to remain a talking point throughout the festival — though certainly no further — for its highly calculated flare-ups of extreme physical sadism. Cannes-attuned Twitterati may already know the most eyebrow-raising of these; I shall keep it unspoiled here, though it’s hardly a revelation to relish. 

The extended opening sequence, shot and edited with nervy, languorous precision, is already a fair indication that we’re not heading in a sprightly direction: when stripped corpses are hung from highway overpasses, trouble tends to follow. Or indeed precede. Escalante takes his time assembling the whos, whens and whys of this grisly act, with nuance, social specificity and even basic motivation slipping between the tangram cracks.

The parable that emerges from this determinedly oblique construction is simple enough. Young factory worker Heli lives with his wife, child, father and 12-year-old sister Estela, whose precocious affair with 17-year-old police cadet Beto proves the family’s undoing. As a kind of voluntary Police Corruption 101 exercise, dim-witted Beto hoards part of a confiscated cocaine stash in Heli’s water tank, only to be grimly apprehended by his most sophisticatedly corrupt seniors, who have unorthodox new methods of wrist-slapping. The graphic carnage that follows is perhaps surplus to the requirements of what Escalante, per the press notes, insists isn’t a message, but sounds distinctly like one: drugs get you in trouble, and female sexuality has its problems too.

On this evidence — I confess I haven’t seen the director’s previous films, one of which, “Sangre,” won the FIPRESCI Award in Un Certain Regard in 2005 — Escalante is at this stage only half a provocateur. “Heli” executes its shocks with sleek, gasp-inducing effectiveness, but neither it politics, nor its shifts in physical perspective, ever surprise or disorientate us. (That’s not something you could say about even the weakest work of Escalante’s friend and producer Carlos Reygadas — to whom he’s obviously in thrall, not least in the film’s oddly shoehorned-in stabs of nutso humor and anti-charismatic non-professional cast.) 

Brillante Mendoza’s muscular, broadly comparable “Kinatay,” another nightmarish study in warped authority, was aesthetically scrappier than Escalante’s film, but that’s because his camera demonstrated genuine curiosity about what it was looking at and why. All sandy surfaces and doomy lilac clouds, “Heli” could hardly be more pristinely framed and lit by cinematographer Lorenzo Hagerman, but its glassiness is a cop-out, objectifying characters that are already objects in a rigid moral composition. Supremely accomplished and subtextually tidy, “Heli” leaves us, even at its ugliest, comfortably numb.

It’s been a rocky couple of weeks for Reese Witherspoon. Everything looked nice and peachy as the wonderful “Mud” starring the actress was set for release. Then on April 19, she was arrested in Atlanta following a dispute with a police officer. Soon enough the infamous “do you know who I am” video made its way out and everyone naturally took their shots.

Well, while it may have been a rocky couple of months, nothing turns it around like booking a gig on a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. And according to Deadline, Witherspoon has done just that, landing a role in the director’s upcoming “Inherent Vice,” adapted from the Thomas Pynchon novel set in 60s/70s Los Angeles.

Others already on the cast include Joaquin Phoenix (hot off an Oscar nomination for Anderson’s 2012 film “The Master”), Owen Wilson and Benicio Del Toro. Speaking of Phoenix, this will bring Witherspoon back to the screen with her “Walk the Line” co-star. She won an Oscar in 2006 for her performance in the film as June Carter. She’s already signed on to work with that film’s director, James Mangold, again, in “Three Little Words.”

I imagine Witherspoon and Anderson have been trying to work together for some time. In 2010 it was reported that the actress was negotiating for a role in “The Master,” presumably the role Amy Adams eventually took.

CANNES – The first press screening of the Cannes Film Festival is traditionally, in not-particularly-French parlance, a bit of a bunfight: always in the Salle Debussy, the smaller of the festival’s two showcase screens, it tends to fill up fast with fevered, not-yet-red-eyed journalists scrambling for the last available seats with a workable sightline, while outside, the snaking queue of lowly yellow and blue badgeholders nervously hopes there’ll be any seat at all for them. (Lest you think I’m sneering, I’m one of them: for me, at Cannes, blue clearly is the warmest color.) 

Today, however, was a little different. Journalists strolled calmly into the Debussy, the queue moving crisply along behind them. Remarkably, empty seats speckled the theater even as the familiar festival intro cued up on screen. That first-day buzz just wasn’t quite there, and it wasn’t (only) because of the gusty, rain-spitting weather outside. It certainly wasn’t for any lack of requisite showmanship or pizzazz on the part of the festival’s chosen opener, Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby,” which tumbled onto the screen like a super-sparkly catherine-wheel, flashing gold and noise and going ah-ah-ah as it shot across the sky-y-y. (Katy Perry’s “Firework” was the unofficial song of last year’s Cannes, but it’d have been just as fitting here.)

No, “Gatsby” was a suitably exciting curtain-raiser — the only problem was that its own curtain had already been raised. Having opened in the US last Friday and been widely screened for the press elsewhere, it’s the first Cannes opener in a long time not to enjoy world premiere status — a slight buzzkill for a festival that, in recent years, has kicked off proceedings with the first public screenings of “Up,” “Midnight in Paris” and “Moonrise Kingdom.” (Okay, “Robin Hood” and “The Da Vinci Code” too, but hey, they were still first.) US and UK critics largely stayed away; even those of us there were pleasantly relieved of the pressure to cobble together first reactions. 

Does it matter? Depends how far inside you want to play baseball, I guess. The public doesn’t much care whether or not the festival gets the first crack at “Gatsby.” Much as we critics might like to imagine otherwise, they’re not hanging on our every verdict. Many are more interested in red-carpet snaps of Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan gussied up in their Wednesday best than the movie itself, and those certainly aren’t contingent on the screening being a world premiere: the stars will look as pretty today as they did last week, after all. 

World premiere or not, meanwhile, it’s hard to see how Cannes could have found a film more expressly tailored for party-starting duties than this one. I rather liked “Gatsby,” as it turned out, but that’s beside the point: it could have been a catastrophic glitter bomb and still provided the appropriate spirit of cinematic celebration. More than any other festival on the scene, Cannes unapologetically balances art and commerce with unapologetic ease, giving an unfeasibly generous platform to austere, barely distributable auteur visions (like tonight’s Competition opener “Heli” — more on that to come) whilst partying ’til dawn with the money men.

Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” pulls a not-dissimilar trick: a thoroughly eccentric auteur vision cushioned in the plushest mainstream trappings money can buy, it’s a film equally fascinated by its own artistry and the commerce that enables it, wholly reliant on studio wherewithal to bring its most florid, singular ideas to life. Much as he did in his still-enthrallingly odd “Moulin Rouge!” — which, not incidentally, opened Cannes back in 2001 — Luhrmann has used his ringmaster smarts to game a major studio into making an all-singing, all-dancing art film.

Not an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s culturally concrete novel so much as a naive, individually decorated totem to  it, it’s the film Jay Gatsby might well have made of his own life: earnest in its excess, undisciplined in its beauty, blithely unaware of its own limitations. It’s both improvable and unrepeatable, which is exactly what you want from a festival opener. It’ll be a sorry Cannes if nothing beats “Gatsby” for intellectual and emotional cling (though I was more moved than I expected to be by its core romance, the aggressively flat stylization of which absorbs our own interpretive nuances rather than imposing many of its own), and a spectacular one if we’ve forgotten its loveliest illustrative strokes by the festival’s end.  

Excess seems to be the buzzword at Cannes this year, perhaps appropriately considering that Hollywood’s blockbuster overlord Steven Spielberg is presiding over the jury — a coup the festival has pursued for some time. Already, Croisette rumors are pegging the director as the festival’s own Gatsby: his vast personal yacht is the source of much gossip, with some even claiming he’s demanded that Competition films be screened privately for him there.

Spielberg won’t be required to pass judgment on “Gatsby,” at any rate, but he is being served Steven Soderbergh’s lurid diamante spectacle “Behind the Candelabra,” which takes the politics of materialism quite seriously, while still going to town on the furs and hairspray. Cannes is embracing compromise and fusion in the production sphere with an HBO film in Competition, but they could hardly have found a shinier one. Un Certain Regard, meanwhile, kicks off with Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring,” a nattily dressed (though structurally stark) film about the literal commodification of celebrity.  

Film festivals, as much as any other facet or offshoot of the movie industry, are feeling the crunch of economics: programmes and accreditations are tightening, while studios and sales companies are picking the films they promote at, the fest with greater frugality. “Gatsby,” already well on its way to recouping its mammoth production costs after a hit first week in Stateside cinemas, flies (or perhaps drives) recklessly in the face of such wallet-watching. It’s a glorious advertisement for romantic, increasingly outmoded cinematic heft, and the kind of big-screen-dependent film Cannes, in its capacity as an annual litmus test for the state of cinema, is understandably keen to place front and center — a projected image of success. Warner Bros. may not have seen much worth in holding the film back just one week for a Cannes debut — but rather like Gatsby’s own summer extravaganzas, there’s not much to be lost here from arriving fashionably late.

(Welcome to Cannes Check, your annual guide through the 20 films in Competition at this month’s Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off today. Taking on a different selection every day, we’ll be examining what they’re about, who’s involved and what their chances are of snagging an award from Steven Spielberg’s jury. We’re going through the list by director and in alphabetical order — next up, Steven Soderbergh with “Behind the Candelabra.”)

The director: Steven Soderbergh (American, 50 years old). In the 24 years since he won the Palme d’Or for his very first feature, Soderbergh has balanced independent and Hollywood filmmaking with more success (and more daring) than just about any American director of his era: it’s hard to think of anyone else who would follow up a candyfloss “Ocean’s Eleven” sequel with a two-part, nitty-gritty biopic of Che Guevara. Born and raised in the South, Soderbergh began studying animation and making 16mm shorts while still a teenager. After graduating high school, he headed straight to Hollywood, where he eventually found work as a freelance editor; in 1985, he directed a concert video for rock band Yes, which earned him a Grammy nomination and higher profile on which to build his debut feature “sex, lies and videotape” — which, in addition to the Palme, earned Soderbergh his first Oscar nod.

He continued through the 1990s with a series of smallish, idiosyncratic features, none of which gained him much traction until his 1998 Elmore Leonard adaptation “Out of Sight” was feted by critics and proved his dexterity with sexy genre material. 2000 proved his annus mirabilis, with mainstream smash “Erin Brockovich” and narcotics thriller “Traffic” both earning him Oscar nominations, and the latter the win, for Best Director. Since then, he’s been prolifically plugging away on a “one for them, one for me” basis, alternating between films as small as “Bubble” and ones as slick as the Danny Ocean franchise. He’s already hit our screens once this year (and competed at the Berlinale) with his sly Hitchcockian thriller “Side Effects” — he claims it’s his final theatrical feature, but who believes him?   

The talent: Megastars Michael Douglas and Matt Damon both have a history with Soderbergh. Douglas was an integrated member of the “Traffic” and “Haywire” ensembles; Damon had a starring role in “The Informant!,” turned up in “Contagion” and is a regular member of the “Ocean’s” gang. The film also has colorful rules for such big names as Rob Lowe, Dan Aykroyd (where’s he been?) and an unrecognizable Debbie Reynolds; former TV stars Scott Bakula (“Quantum Leap”) and Paul Reiser (“Mad About You”), as well as Broadway hunk Cheyenne Jackson, are also in the mix.

The film marks Soderbergh’s first collaboration with name screenwriter (and sometime director) Richard LaGravenese: an Oscar nominee at the start of his career for “The Fisher King,” his subsequent credits include “The Bridges of Madison County,” “Beloved” and this year’s undeserved teen flop “Beautiful Creatures.” As usual, cinematographer “Peter Andrews” and editor “Mary Ann Bernard” are Soderbergh pseudonyms. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who obviously has a lot to work with here, is a two-time Guild nominee whose more distinctively-dressed previous credits range from “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” to “Showgirls.”        

The pitch: Soderbergh’s first post-“retirement” release is also his first made-for-television film — though this HBO production is being released theatrically outside the US. Soderbergh says he went the small-screen route because LaGravenese’s script was “too gay” for the Hollywood studios, and curbing the gayness certainly isn’t an option when the subject of your movie is piano virtuoso and Vegas legend Liberace, a figure for whom the term “flamboyant” isn’t quite sufficient. The world’s highest-paid entertainer for a good portion of his 40-year career, Liberace vehemently denied his homosexuality to the media all the way up to his AIDS-related death in 1987, though he was effectively hiding in plain sight, maintaining a string of expensively kept (and silenced) live-in lovers. “Behind the Candelabra” is adapted from the memoir of Scott Thorson, who was just a teenager when he moved in with the fiftysomething icon; they enjoyed a tumultuous five-year relationship before Thorson sued Liberace for palimony. Douglas plays Liberace, Damon plays Thorson; while the ensemble is substantial, this is essentially a two-headed relationship drama.    

The pedigree: This is Soderbergh’s fourth turn in Competition at Cannes: since winning the Palme with “sex, lies and videotape” in 1989, he has also competed with Depression-era coming-of-age “King of the Hill” (my personal favorite among his films, for whatever that’s worth) in 1993, and the aforementioned “Che,” which won Best Actor for Benicio Del Toro, in 2008. Soderbergh was initially reluctant to premiere “Behind the Candelabra” in Competition, but was persuaded to do so by festival director Thierry Fremaux — an indication of the esteem in which he’s held at the festival. And indeed everywhere else: the career appreciations prompted by his threatened retirement and the strength of recent, audience-friendly films like “Magic Mike” and “Side Effects” have ensured his reputation is in pretty fine fettle.   

The buzz: I’ve already seen “Behind the Candelabra,” and am still under embargo, so it’d be pretty disingenuous for me to assess “buzz” for it. But the fascination of Michael Douglas playing a camp icon and the believe-it-or-not extremes of Thorson’s story would make it one of the Competition’s most keenly awaited entries even if weren’t supposedly the last thing we’ll ever see from Soderbergh at a film festival. Meanwhile, it’s not the first HBO movie to premiere in Competition at Cannes — “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers” played in 2004 — but the first from an A-list director. As production models shift within the industry, it could prove something of a trailblazer.  

The odds: Even if it’s a theatrical feature for Cannes purposes, will jury president Steven Spielberg want to throw his weight behind a TV movie? That’s the question, as in every other respect, the narrative for a win here is quite strong: it’d be sweet to see Soderbergh’s career (as he’s defined it to us, anyway) bookended with a pair of Palmes. If the top prize (for which Jigsaw Lounge offers 14-1 odds) is a bit of a stretch, though, a sentimental Best Director or Prix du Jury win is quite conceivable. Meanwhile, Michael Douglas could be right in the thick of the Best Actor discussion. 

The premiere date: Tuesday, May 21.   

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up the lone Italian entry in this year’s Competition lineup: Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty.”

PREVIOUS CANNES CHECKS:

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s “A Villa in Italy”

Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis”

Arnaud des Pallières’s “Michael Kohlhaas“

Arnaud Desplechin’s “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian”

Amat Escalante’s “Heli”

Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past”

James Gray’s “The Immigrant”

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Grigris”

Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive”

Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin”

Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color”

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Like Father, Like Son”

Takashi Miike’s “Shield of Straw” 

François Ozon’s “Young and Beautiful“

Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska”

Roman Polanski’s “Venus in Fur”

The annual migration to the South of France has begun. As you read this a global film audience is converging for the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and this year’s red carpet extravaganza features a number of highly anticipated titles for film lovers on both sides of the Atlantic. All eyes will be on new flicks from Joel and Ethan Coen, Roman Polanski, Sofia Coppola, James Gray, Steven Soderbergh, Alexander Payne, James Franco (that boy just can’t take a vacation) and Nicholas Winding Refen among others.

Both Guy Lodge and Gregory Ellwood will be covering the event HiFix and In Contention from opening night film “The Great Gatsby” (a good $50 million of few of you might have caught it last weekend) to Jérôme Salle’s closer “Zulu” (a film that far less of you will likely see).  As a kick off to our coverage, check out Lodge and Ellwood’s most anticipated films in the story gallery embedded in this post. Then, vote on which movie you’re most interested in hearing about in the poll below.

To get the latest word from Cannes follow Guy Lodge and Gregory Ellwood on twitter at @GuyLodge and @HitFixGregory.
 

(Welcome to Cannes Check, your annual guide through the 20 films in Competition at this month’s Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on May 15. Taking on a different selection every day, we’ll be examining what they’re about, who’s involved and what their chances are of snagging an award from Steven Spielberg’s jury. We’re going through the list by director and in alphabetical order — next up, Roman Polanski with “Venus in Fur.”)

The director: Roman Polanski (French-Polish, 79 years old). “Chinatown.” “Rosemary’s Baby.” “Repulsion.” “The Pianist.” “Knife in the Water.” “Tess.” Et cetera. The oldest director in Competition, Polanski hardly requires an introduction, whether you associate him first with his crafty, unnerving cinema or his infamous legal troubles. Born in Paris to Polish parents, he moved with family back to Poland shortly before the Second World War, narrowly escaping the Krakow Ghetto after the German occupation — experience he drew upon in his 2002 Palme d’Or winner “The Pianist.” In 1959, he graduated from the National Film School in Lodz, Poland, having already earned considerable attention for his student shorts; in 1962, he struck gold with his debut feature “Knife in the Water,” an international hit that scooped an Oscar nomination. After a brief stint Britain (that produced one of his best films, “Repulsion”), Hollywood came calling in 1968 with “Rosemary’s Baby”; he’d make only one more American studio film whilst dabbling in Europe, before statutory rape charges brought about his permanent exile from the US. Since then, his international career has alternated between very high highs (“Tess,” “The Pianist”) and some dismal lows (the notoriously expensive bomb “Pirates”), but 2010’s “The Ghost Writer,” premiered in the midst of his 2009 house arrest in Switzerland, kept his stock high going into the current (and his eighth) decade. “Venus in Fur” is his 21st feature.

The talent: Polanski has stayed true to the film’s origins as a two-hander: Matthieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Seigner star. Amalric, who also shares the lead in rival Competition film “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian,” is one of France’s premier contemporary actors — best known for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (or, depending on your cinematic inclinations, “Quantum of Solace”) won Best Director at the festival three years ago for his film “On Tour.” Former model Seigner, who has been married to Polanski since 1989, has starred in three of the director’s previous films — as well as “In the House,” “La Vie Rose” and, coincidentally enough, “The Diving Bell and the Butterly.”

The script was written by Polanski with original playwright David Ives. Producer Alain Sarde, whose association with Polanski began with 1976’s “The Tenant,” while the below-the-line team is heavy on Polanski regulars. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman and editor Herve de Luze, both Oscar nominees for “The Pianist,” also both have other films in this year’s Official Selection: Edelman shot Chinese Competition entry “A Touch of Sin,” while de Luze cut Guillaume Canet’s “Blood Ties.” Naturally, this isn’t the only Cannes 2013 credit for ubiquitous composer (and five-time Oscar nominee) Alexandre Desplat: he also scored festival closer “Zulu.”   

The pitch: Polanski’s career has an interesting sub-strand of chamber-film adaptations of celebrated, claustrophobic contemporary plays: he tackled Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden” in 1994, Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage” (filmed simply as “Carnage”) in 2011 and now David Ives’s “Venus in Fur,” which left Broadway less than a year ago. Beginning life as an Off-Broadway production, and eventually winning a Best Actress Tony Award for rising stage star Nina Arianda, the play is a self-reflexive riff on the landmark 1870 erotic novel “Venus in Furs” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s  — the man whose work inspired the term “masochism.” Amalric (replacing initial choice Louis Garrel in a role that has been played on stage by Wes Bentley and Hugh Dancy) plays a director mounting an ambitious stage adaptation of the novel. Unable to cast the lead, he’s at his wits’ end until a new, seemingly inappropriate actress (Seigner) turns up in his office and swiftly turns the tables on him — a power shift that mirrors the one in the novel. As with “Carnage,” the 90-minute film (the shortest in Competition) plays out in real time. Incidentally, it’s his first chiefly French-language film since “The Tenant” 37 years ago.

The pedigree: Polanski’s auteur standing hardly needs to be underlined, but it’s interesting to note that he’s only been in Competition at Cannes twice before. First came “The Tenant” in 1976; 26 years later, of course, came “The Pianist,” which eventually made him one of only three men to win both a Palme d’Or and a Best Director Oscar for the same film. (The other two, incidentally, are Delbert Mann for “Marty” and Billy Wilder for “The Lost Weekend,” one of many films to share the inaugural Palme in 1946.)

The buzz: Perhaps regarded with more curiosity than confidence, depending on how you responded to “Carnage”: some found it flat and trifling, others (particularly within the European critical contingent) thought it rather more substantial. Much depends on how significantly Polanski and Ives have reinterpreted the play for its Transatlantic transfer: as it stands, the casting could be younger, but the play’s playful sexuality could make for a film that hearkens back to Polanski’s more dangerous work.

The odds: One of the longer shots for the Palme on paper: even if it’s a successful adaptation, chances are the jury will find this miniature production a tasty morsel rather than three-course cinema. Jigsaw Lounge duly offers odds of 40-1. Its best shot at an award may be Best Actress for Mrs. Polanski, if she makes the most of an electric lead that many bigger stars would have been itching to play.

The premiere date: Saturday, May 25.   

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up another former Palme d’Or winner in this year’s Competition lineup: Steven Soderbergh’s “Behind the Candelabra.”

PREVIOUS CANNES CHECKS:

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s “A Villa in Italy”

Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis”

Arnaud des Pallières’s “Michael Kohlhaas“

Arnaud Desplechin’s “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian”

Amat Escalante’s “Heli”

Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past”

James Gray’s “The Immigrant”

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Grigris”

Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive”

Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin”

Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color”

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Like Father, Like Son”

Takashi Miike’s “Shield of Straw” 

François Ozon’s “Young and Beautiful“

Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska”

Will Smith recently revealed that he turned down Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-winning western “Django Unchained” because his character “wasn’t the lead” and didn’t get to “kill the bad guy.” It was, in a word, movie star logic.

And that’s fair enough. Even if there are those of us who think a movie like that is just what a guy like Will Smith could use at this point in his career, his career is his own. But I guess he still had a hankering for the wild west (if “Wild Wild West” didn’t beat it out of him, that is), as he is reportedly eying a remake of Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.” But, well, it’s not that simple…

Smith’s “Wild Bunch,” according to The Wrap, would be a modern retelling. It would involve cartels south of the border and would follow a disgraced D.E.A. agent who assembles a team to go after a Mexican drug lord and his fortune. The original film was nominated for two Oscars, for Best Original Score and Best Original Screenplay.

Now, I should say I don’t consider Peckinpah’s film to be the crown jewel of the western genre that so many others do. But I do think it’s a singular piece of filmmaking that probably doesn’t need a remake. At the same time, the air of being untouchable might be wearing off the director’s filmography a bit after Rod Lurie saddled up to a “Straw Dogs” remake a few years back. And doing it in a modern setting will make it all go down a bit easier, I imagine. (Though it might have gone down even easier by taking the “Assault on Precinct 13” or “Fort Apache, the Bronx” route, remakes of/films inspired by westerns that didn’t evoke the original directly.)

It’s funny, though, because in discussing his plans to remake the French film “36th Precinct” recently, “Out of the Furnace” director Scott Cooper mentioned “The Wild Bunch” specifically as the sort of film that shouldn’t be touched. Doing so is “a really bad idea,” he told me. I imagine he had the attempted reboot in mind as this is a project that has been bouncing around for a while. “End of Watch” director David Ayer was hired to write a script at one point and Tony Scott was developing it with “L.A. Confidential” and “Mystic River” writer Brian Helgeland once upon a time.

I bring all that up simply because that is going to be a big part of the story here, and I put the question to you: Is remaking “The Wild Bunch” a bad idea in principle? Vote in our poll below.

Smith will next be seen in M. Night Shyamalan’s “After Earth” this summer.

Soon enough you’ll get to decide for yourself on “Star Trek Into Darkness.” Will you be delighted as a general moviegoer or up in arms with a large sect of Trekkies who have gotten bent out of shape? I’ll be interested to find out (and we’ll inquire on Friday), but for now, some fun with J.J. Abrams.

One guy taking the reins on both the “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” franchises remains fascinating/crazy to me. I have no real deep love for either but it’s still just…weird. Anyway, Abrams stopped by “The Daily Show” yesterday to discuss the two entities and the differences between them. Stewart is a “Trek” fan and that made for some fun conversation, but they also get into Stewart’s upcoming directorial effort.

If you weren’t aware, Stewart will be taking the summer off from “The Daily Show” to direct “Rosewater,” based on Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy’s 2011 book “And Then They Came For Me: A Family”s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival.” It’s the true story of a Canadian-Iranian journalist Bahari, who was accused of planning to overthrow the Iranian government and arrested for four months in 2009. Months before his capture, Bahari appeared in a “Daily Show” sketch, in which correspondent Jason Jones pretended to be a spy. Bahari’s captors even used some of the footage against him.

The film will be up for sale to international buyers at the upcoming Cannes Film Market. Scott Rudin and Gigi Pritzker are producing.

Abrams praises Stewart’s script for “Rosewater” in part two of the interview below. Stewart also asks for some pointers. It’s his directorial debut after all, and hey, if you’re looking for pointers on how to succeed as a director, I guess you could do worse than to ask the guy who was handed “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” right?

When that fake list of Cannes titles went up a few weeks back, just a day or two before the official line-up was unveiled, I was hoping one particular title was true: David Gordon Green’s “Joe.” Alas, it wasn’t. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan (hot of an amazing performance in “Mud,” directed by Green’s former North Carolina school mate Jeff Nichols) and it’s part of what I feel is a new period for Green as an artist, taking what he’s learned (and the relationships he’s built up) to date and finding more fertile creative territory. His next film sure seems to be an extension of that.

And indeed, “Manglehorn” has already attracted a high-caliber actor in Al Pacino (who himself could use a bit of a change). In the film, Pacino will star as A.J. Manglehorn, an eccentric man who tries to come to terms with a past crime that cost him the love of his life. The script was written by Paul Logan from a story by Logan and Green. Worldview Entertainment has been announced as the film’s financier. The film goes into production in Los Angeles this all.

Other films on Worldview’s slate include three upcoming Cannes world premieres (linked to Guy’s Cannes Checks on each): James Gray’s “The Immigrant” (Guy’s Cannes Check here), Arnaud Desplachin’s “Jimmy P.” (Cannes Check here) and Guillaume Canet’s “Blood Ties.” They were also in business with Green on “Joe.”

And worth noting, Green has another film bouncing around the festival circuit as of late after a Sundance bow that we’ve written about plenty. That film is “Prince Avalanche,” one of our under-the-radar summer movies. It’s next set to play the Seattle International Film Festival and will hit theaters on August 9.

More from the Cannes Film Festival as it gets rolling later this week. Watch for Guy’s thoughts on festival opener “The Great Gatsby” tomorrow and a review of Sophia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring” on Thursday.

Via New York Times op-ed, actress Angelina Jolie had this to offer tonight:

“My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman…

“Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.”

Read the rest here.

I struggled with posting this because it’s not movie-related (or even entertainment-related) and it seems like a weird way to use HitFix resources, but the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t really resist. After all, “Star Trek Into Darkness” is set to hit theaters on Friday and capture the imaginations of space freaks the world over, while at the same time, we have the homecoming of Commander Chris Hadfield and company from a few months’ stint on the International Space Station — real-life heroes of the cosmos. And Hadfield in particular has been doing what I think is some Pulitzer Prize-worthy work up there. Let me explain…

If you haven’t been following Hadfield on Twitter (yes, he’s been Tweeting from orbit — brave new world), you’ve really missed out on some pretty amazing images of our planet. You may have heard of Hadfield recently as a video of him singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” went viral this weekend, but I’ve been following and enjoying his perspective for months. He’s dropped plenty of insight along the way, but the crown jewel of all that is the rare gift of a series of images that captures the earth in ways we’ve just never seen (at least amassed in a collection such as this), and what is that if not journalism at its purest?

I’m not kidding when I say I think he deserves some sort of commendation for this. Because behind every image was the perspective of a (true) world traveler, with plenty of time and care put into it. Every new shot was just an awe-inspiring click of the mouse, and while I’m happy he’s home and I know he’ll be putting up some stuff he never got around to posting while in orbit, I’ll miss that daily check-in with one of Canada’s finest. (He’s also, by the way, been doing a lot of great work via satellite with classrooms, really doing his part to reignite a spark of passion for the space program in the youth, something we could definitely use.)

So I thought I’d share my enthusiasm with a list of my favorite Hadfield shots via his Tweets and words. You can check them out below (with some thoughts from me scattered here and there), but I encourage you to dig into Hadfield’s months-long archive of material at Twitter and feast your eyes on more. Hadfield ended up with over 880,000 followers eventually. It was just, in a word, awesome.

Welcome home to Hadfield and his crew and thanks for the perspective. It was invaluable. And you’re home just in time for “Star Trek!”

(Click on any of these for a larger view.)

The first thing that sticks out about many of the images is the vibrant color of the world. Some of the photos look like artwork you could hang on your wall…

African saltwater marsh – an incredibly complex ecosystem like nothing I’ve ever seen. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) March 8, 2013

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Morning jet traffic over San Francisco. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 6, 2013

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Tonight’s finale: The Andes mountains have an unbelievable richness of colour and texture when viewed from Earth orbit. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) February 1, 2013

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Tonight’s Finale: People ask to see stars – my camera does its best in dim light. Our atmosphere glows in the dark. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 12, 2013

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Little nuggets like the following are great and informative, too. I believe Commander Hadfield Tweeted another night photo recently noting the obvious difference in light bulb usage in another area, but this one in particular, given history, is fascinating…

Berlin at night. Amazingly, I think the light bulbs still show the East/West division from orbit. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 17, 2013

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Tonight’s Finale: I have no idea what this Brazilian outcrop looks like on the ground, but from orbit, it’s a brain. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 11, 2013

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I mean, look at this. This looks like something out of “2001: A Space Odyssey”…

Tonight’s Finale: Canadarm2 blushing with the dawn. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) March 29, 2013

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I love the many snow-covered landscapes Hadfield captured during the winter. They look like gorgeous black and white photography…

Crazed patchwork of farms in Central Asia, a monochromatic 3D hallucination in the snow. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) March 14, 2013

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Spaceships glowing blue in the dawn as we leave Florida headed across the Atlantic. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) May 12, 2013

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Tonight’s Finale: Italy, heel and toe. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 10, 2013

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I love stuff like this. You can see how fragile key islands are, the sand beneath the crystal clear water, etc. I also love the Florida Keys, so…

The Florida Keys look especially vulnerable from orbit. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) March 29, 2013

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Erie on the left, Ontario on the right, Niagara Falls in the middle. I love this perspective shot. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) March 15, 2013

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Tonight’s Finale: Morning in NYC. Downtown Manhattan casts quite a shadow. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 6, 2013

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Remember what I was saying about hanging it on your wall…

A lot of the Australian Outback looks like somebody spilled something on it. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) February 8, 2013

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San Francisco – from orbit, the geologic fault lines are readily visible. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 6, 2013

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These mouthwatering generous folds of icing are actually Saudi sand. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 3, 2013

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And I love something like this, too, because all along the river, you can see how fertile the ground is, with the desert on each side. Just amazing…

Tonight’s Finale: The Nile and the Sinai, to Israel and beyond. One sweeping glance of human history. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

– Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) March 20, 2013

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js And again, that’s just a sampling. I really encourage you to kill a few hours one day just looking through the rest. And I believe Hadfield has more coming that he didn’t get around to posting up there. It sure would make one hell of a coffee table book.

So thanks again, Commander. You’re pretty freakin’ awesome.

One of the most fascinating projects in James Franco’s compelling and vast arsenal as of late is an adaptation of William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.” The film is set for the Un Certain Regard section of the upcoming Cannes Film Festival and is the first big screen adaptation of the novel, widely considered one of the greatest ever written.

It’s kind of amazing that an adaptation has never happened, and it’s fascinating that Franco is the guy to do it. He’s put together a great cast including Danny McBride and Tim Blake Nelson. Franco himself also stars.

A trailer has finally been released in advance of the fest, which kicks off next week. It’s interesting, providing a little insight into the tone of the piece (which builds intriguingly in just these brief moments) and whets the appetite as journalists prepare to hit the Croisette. Guy Lodge and Greg Ellwood will be there covering for HitFix and In Contention, so be sure to keep an eye out for all the reviews and interviews from the south of France.

Check out the trailer for “As I Lay Dying,” courtesy of Yahoo! Movies, below.

(Welcome to Cannes Check, your annual guide through the 20 films in Competition at this month’s Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on May 15. Taking on a different selection every day, we’ll be examining what they’re about, who’s involved and what their chances are of snagging an award from Steven Spielberg’s jury. We’re going through the list by director and in alphabetical order — next up, Alexander Payne with “Nebraska.”)

The director: Alexander Payne (American, 52 years old). Two-time Academy Award winner Payne has cultivated a reputation as one of contemporary American cinema’s premier humanists — though critics disagree over the level of intended misanthropy that has cut through his work since his openly satirical early films. Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska — the region that defined his work up until 2004’s California-set “Sideways” — to Greek-American parents, Payne majored in Spanish and History at Stanford, before completing his Masters’ at the UCLA Film School. After completing several shorts (including a segment in Playboy’s erotic compilation “Inside Out”), Payne made his feature debut with the 1996 abortion-debate satire “Citizen Ruth,” which premiered in competition at Sundance. Greater acclaim (and his first Oscar nod) came with his 1999 follow-up “Election”; “Nebraska” is only his fourth feature since then, but his critical standing has remained steadfast throughout. Returning from a seven-year gap in 2011 with “The Descendants,” his most mainstream work to date, Payne was welcomed back with a second writing Oscar and career-high box office. Previously closely allied with writing partner Jim Taylor (with whom he also contributed to the screenplays of “Jurassic Park III” and, er, “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry”), Payne went without him on “The Descendants.” On “Nebraska,” meanwhile, he’s off writing duty entirely. 

The talent: For his last few films, Payne has alternated between employing major marquee stars (Nicholson, Clooney) and elevating underused character actors (Paul Giamatti), and he’s taken the latter course on his latest. Payne’s debut gave a plum role to Laura Dern; 17 years later, he’s called on her 76-year-old father Bruce — an Oscar nominee in 1978 for “Coming Home,” but one who has since been largely relegated to TV (“Big Love”) and B-movies (“Coffin Baby,” anyone?). Dern wasn’t Payne’s first choice for the role: that’d be the now-retired Gene Hackman. Sharing the lead is TV comedy actor-writer and former “Saturday Night Live” alum Will Forte, whose film credits to date haven’t gotten much more distinguished than “Rock of Ages.” He’s not the only person more famous for TV work in a cast that also includes another “SNL” alum in Emmy-winning comedy writer and “Breaking Bad” star Bob Odenkirk, as well as Mike Hammer himself, Stacy Keach. 

The screenplay on Payne’s first non-Payne-scripted project is by little-known Bob Nelson, whose most prominent previous credit is as a writer on Magic Johnson’s short-lived late-night talk show “The Magic Hour.” Producing partners Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger’s previous credits include “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Ruby Sparks”; this is their first collaboration with Payne. Below the line, cinematographer Phedon Papamichael also shot “The Descendants” and “Sideways.” Editor Kevin Tent, who has cut all Payne’s features (and received an ACE Award and an Oscar nod for “The Descendants”) is also back on board. No composer is credited, which suggests Payne may be relying, as he did in his last film, on pre-existing music.   

The pitch: Lest the title raise your hopes, “Nebraska” is not a conceptual adaptation of Bruce Springsteen’s seminal album of the same name, though we can surely count on a similar degree of Midwest melancholy. Like “About Schmidt” and “Sideways,” “Nebraska” is a male-driven road movie; like “Schmidt” and “The Descendants,” it focuses on parent-child relations, though the father-son angle is new for him. Dern plays a cantankerous, alcoholic old-timer in Billings, Montana who is duped into believing he’s won a million-dollar sweepstakes prize, and convinces his estranged son (Forte) to trek with him to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his winnings. Naturally, they get waylaid along the way in a small Nebraskan town where Dern’s character has unfinished business. It seems a typical setup for Payne, with ample scope for semi-sour comedy and laughter-through-the-tears bonding. What’s interestingly different this time round is that Payne, against studio Paramount’s wishes, is presenting the film in black-and-white for an “iconic, archetypal look.” After initially being handed Nelson’s script simply for the purposes of recommending a director, Payne has been sitting on it for several years, biding his time after “Sideways” so as not to make two road movies in a row. Paramount evidently expects it to be worth the wait; the film has already been scheduled for release on the prime awards-friendly date of November 22.       

The pedigree: Payne has been in Competition at Cannes once before, with “About Schmidt” in 2002 — it left the festival empty-handed, but was widely admired by critics. “Schmidt” and “Nebraska” aside, Payne has largely steered clear of the European festival circuit, and as universally well-regarded as his films have been, one could argue that his critical fanbase is American-led. “The Descendants” perhaps inspired more of a critical backlash than Payne’s previous features, with some mourning the edgier comedy of his earlier work, but we’re still talking a minority movement here.

The buzz: Strong. For those who found “The Descendants” a little too slickly Academy-packaged for their liking, the new film’s monochrome look, absence of star casting and, of course, its return to Payne’s home state exude a back-to-basics appeal. The premise, however, still promises the emotional accessibility of his more mainstream work. Its announcement in the Competition lineup was greeted with more surprise and excitement than most, as several Cannes pundits had determined it wouldn’t be ready in time, and was likelier to premiere in Toronto.

The odds: Even if early reviews prime the film as the Oscar player Paramount is hoping for, that doesn’t make it any likelier that the festival will begin furnishing its award cabinet: from “No Country for Old Men” to Payne’s own “About Schmidt,” Cannes juries are often reluctant to reward films that seem likely to garner U.S. awards success further down the road. Then again, Spielberg is the festival’s most mainstream jury president in several years: if he resists any counterintuitive urges, and indeed zigs where many are expecting him to zig, Payne seems a likely beneficiary. Jigsaw Lounge grants him reasonable Palme odds of 10-1, though a likelier-on-paper award — and one that would take the film out of the Palme running, under current festival rules — would be the Best Actor prize, either for Dern alone, or jointly with Forte.   

The premiere date: Thursday, May 23.   

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up the latest from one of three former Palme d’Or winners in this year’s Competition lineup: Roman Polanski’s “Venus in Fur.”

PREVIOUS CANNES CHECKS:

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s “A Villa in Italy”

Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis”

Arnaud des Pallières’s “Michael Kohlhaas“

Arnaud Desplechin’s “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian”

Amat Escalante’s “Heli”

Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past”

James Gray’s “The Immigrant”

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Grigris”

Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive”

Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin”

Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color”

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Like Father, Like Son”

Takashi Miike’s “Shield of Straw” 

François Ozon’s ‘Young and Beautiful’

Well, I’ll say this for BAFTA: they know how to make an apology. You may remember that the British Academy came in for some flak last year when they announced their film award nominations — and beloved local actress Olivia Colman, who otherwise cleaned up on the UK awards circuit for her shattering lead turn in Paddy Considine’s “Tyrannosaur,” wasn’t on the Best Actress list.

Fans and professional peers alike voiced their dismay on social media and in public, and BAFTA stood accused of being out of touch with their own industry. A little over a year later, and BAFTA’s TV awards ceremony has made it up to the humble star, handing her two awards for her dramatic and comedic work on the smaller screen in the past year: Best Comedy Actress for the Olympic-themed sitcom “Twenty Twelve” and Best Supporting Actress for the courtroom drama “Accused.” She’s the first actor ever to take two BAFTAs in one night.

Colman accepted with her usual self-deprecating charm (“I’m not even the funniest one in our program,” she remarked of her comedy win) and a sly reference to last year’s disappointment. “Turns out it does mean a lot,” she quipped in her first acceptance speech, to a roar of approval from the crowd. Later on, she pointedly thanked her “Tyrannosaur” director: “You know why, Paddy.” Among those voicing their approval was her “Hot Fuzz” director Edgar Wright, who tweeted: “I really think BAFTA should go for the hat trick and retroactively give Olivia Colman the award she should have got for ‘Tyrannosaur.'”

Colman ruled the night even when she wasn’t accepting awards, as a number of other winners and presenters referred affectionately to the actress; currently starring in top-rated police drama “Broadchurch” (due to be shown on BBC America later this year), she seems to have officially attained national treasure status. What a difference a year makes. Next up: a role opposite Tom Hardy in big-screen thriller “Locke,” from Oscar-nominated writer-director Steven Knight.

At the typically low-key and loose-tongued ceremony — one where presenter Romola Garai introduced an award with a casual quip about the 23 stitches she’d recently had on her vagina — other big winners included 32-year-old star Ben Whishaw. He took the Best Actor award for his Shakespearean turn as Richard II in “The Hollow Crown” — and appeared genuinely overwhelmed to have beaten such veterans as Derek Jacobi and Toby Jones, nominated for his turn as Alfred Hitchcock in “The Girl.”

Jones’s co-star Sienna Miller lost in the Best Actress race to rising ingenue Sheridan Smith — who also stole Miller’s thunder, to Olivier Award-winning effect, on the West End stage recently when they co-starred in Terrence Rattigan’s “Flare Path.”

Hit US shows, meanwhile, weren’t totally shut out of a very British evening. Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” a word-of-mouth hit among hip Brits long before it hit UK satellite TV, took the Best International category, beating “Homeland” and “Game of Thrones.” “Thrones,” however, got its comeuppance by taking the evening’s one public-voted trophy, the Audience Award — beating a range of homegrown product, including Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony (which, incidentally, also lost the live-event coverage to the Paralympics). Seems even the British agree that America just does it better right now. 

Meanwhile, in an interesting reversal, America’s favorite British TV show, “Downton Abbey,” was left out of the BAFTA nominations entirely. Perhaps the Emmys could follow their lead?  

Full list of BAFTA TV winners:

Best Actor: Ben Whishaw, “Richard II: The Hollow Crown”

Best Actress: Sheridan Smith, “Mrs. Biggs”

Best Comedy Actor: Steve Coogan, “”Alan Partridge: Welcome to the Places of My Life”

Best Comedy Actress: Olivia Colman, “Twenty Twelve”

Best Supporting Actor: Simon Russell Beale, “Henry IV, Parts I & II: The Hollow Crown”

Best Supporting Actress: Olivia Colman, “Accused: Mo’s Story”

Best Drama Series: “Last Tango in Halifax”

Best International Program: “Girls”

Best Miniseries: “Room at the Top”

Best Single Drama: “Murder”

Best Comedy Program: “The Revolution Will Be Televised”

Best Situation Comedy: “Twenty Twelve”

Best Features Program: “The Great British Bake-Off”

Best Reality or Constructed Factual Show: “Made in Chelsea”

Best Soap or Continuing Drama: “EastEnders”

Best Entertainment Program: “The Graham Norton Show”

Best Entertainment Performance: Alan Carr, “Chatty Man”

Best Current Affairs Program: “This World: The Shame of the Catholic Church”

Best News Coverage: “Granada Reports: Hillsborough – The Truth at Last”

Best Sport or Live Event Coverage: “The London 2012 Paralympic Games”

Best Factual Series: “Our War”

Best Specialist Factual Program: “All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry”

Best Single Documentary: “7/7: One Day in London”

Audience Award: “Game of Thrones”

(Welcome to Cannes Check, your annual guide through the 20 films in Competition at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on May 15. Taking on a different selection every day, we’ll be examining what they’re about, who’s involved and what their chances are of snagging an award from Steven Spielberg’s jury. We’re going through the list by director and in alphabetical order — next up, François Ozon with “Young and Beautiful.”)

The director: François Ozon (French, 45 years old). Perhaps the friskiest, wittiest member of France’s current auteur elite, Ozon has experimented with a variety of formal and tonal approaches over his 14-feature career — though expert manipulation of perspective and a preoccupation with complex human desire tend to bind even his most disparate projects. Born in Paris into a bourgeois intellectual family, the candidly gay director studied filmmaking at the city’s famed La Fémis school — also the alma mater of French masters ranging from Alain Resnais to Claire Denis to another of this year’s Palme contenders, Arnaud Desplechin. Ozon made his name on the festival circuit with a series of acclaimed shorts, notably the Cesar-nominated “A Summer Dress,” which was released in the US alongside his spikily satirical 1998 debut feature, “Sitcom.” Since then, he’s rarely rested more than a year between features, bouncing between opposing trademark modes of thoughtful, low-key character study (“Under the Sand,” “5×2”) and heightened, often high-camp pastiche (“8 Women,” “Potiche”) — with the odd film, notably the recent “In the House” (released mere weeks ago in the US), fusing the two. Influences range from Chabrol to Hitchcock to Fassbinder (directly adapted in 2000’s “Water Drops on Burning Rocks”), while LGBT themes are present more often than not.  

The talent: 23-year-old lead Marine Vacth, a former model, has only four film credits to her name, the first of which was Cedric Klapisch’s 2011 comedy “My Piece of the Pie.” More established names in the cast include Frederic Pierrot (best known for significant supporting roles in “Polisse” and “I’ve Loved You So Long”), Cesar winner Geraldine Pailhas (who starred in Ozon’s”5×2″) and British veteran Charlotte Rampling — who arguably owes her late-career rejuvenation to her starring roles in Ozon’s “Under the Sand” and “Swimming Pool.”

Ozon, as usual, wrote the screenplay himself. Producers Eric and Nicolas Altmayer also steered the director’s last two films, “Potiche” and “In the House.” Cinematographer Pascal Marti, here working with Ozon for the first time, is best known for his collaborations with director Cedric Kahn. Returning from “In the House” is editor Laure Gardette, who recently won a Cesar for her work on multi-stranded 2011 Cannes Jury Prize winner”Polisse.” Composer Phillippe Rombi, meanwhile, has been a regular Ozon collaborator since 1999’s “Criminal Lovers.”       

The pitch: Plot details are being kept tightly wrapped on this one: the official synopsis describes the film only as “a contemporary portrait of a teenage girl, in four seasons and four songs.” Dig beneath this coyly evasive line, however, and it appears that Ozon, after giving audiences a relatively easy time in “In the House” and “Potiche,” is back on sexually frank, button-pushing form: Vacth plays a 17-year-old girl who decides, freely and for her own amusement, to become a prostitute. That’s all we know, and the enigmatic teaser trailer below tells us only to expect a chillier, more sombre Ozon than we’ve seen recently. The “four songs” reference had me wondering whether musical elements of the “8 Women” variety were on the cards, but that doesn’t square with what we see here. It’s the first Competition film to premiere, and at 95 minutes, it’s one of the shortest.     

The pedigree: Perhaps surprisingly for a French filmmaker with more critical and commercial clout than most, Ozon has been in Competition at Cannes only once before, and 10 years ago at that — for the brain-teasing thriller “Swimming Pool,” which left the festival empty-handed. Since then, he’s competed at Venice twice and Berlin three times; whereas Ozon could arguably have been considered an enfant terrible the last time he vied for the Palme d’Or, he’s now one of the bristlier members of the French auteur establishment. He’s also coming off a good run of form, with the popular one-two of “Potiche” and “In the House” (which cracked my own Top 10 of 2012) having raised his stock after the back-to-back misfires of “Angel” and “Ricky” toward the end of the last decade. Ozon has never won a jury award at any of the Big Three festivals; nor, despite 10 career nominations, has he ever won a Cesar. His time is surely approaching.  

The buzz: While the film itself remains mostly a mystery package, the provocative publicity materials and kinky premise have kept its profile high in the run-up to the festival. At least one Competition film satisfies the media every year with a healthy level of controversy, and the story of an underage prostitute is likelier than most to be the one. Perhaps coincidentally, it shares the same Competition-opening slot that Julia Leigh’s faintly similar-looking (and suitably provocative) “Sleeping Beauty” did two years ago. 

The odds: Erotic, brittle, enigmatic, preoccupied with teen female sexuality — on paper, at least, nothing about “Young and Beautiful” seems designed to curry favor with jury president Steven Spielberg. (Though, hey, sometimes the best tactic is to plump for the film that least resembles one the president would make.) Jigsaw Lounge‘s long-ish Palme d’Or odds of 22-1 are probably on the money, then, though if Vacth’s performance ticks the “brave” box that so often impresses festival juries, she could be a viable contender in a stacked Best Actress contest.  

The premiere date: Thursday, May 16.   

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up the third of four American entries in this year’s Competition lineup: Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska.”

PREVIOUS CANNES CHECKS:

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s “A Villa in Italy”

Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis”

Arnaud des Pallières’s “Michael Kohlhaas“

Arnaud Desplechin’s “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian”

Amat Escalante’s “Heli”

Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past”

James Gray’s “The Immigrant”

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Grigris”

Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive”

Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin”

Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color”

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Like Father, Like Son”

Takashi Miike’s “Shield of Straw”

(Welcome to Cannes Check, your annual guide through the 20 films in Competition at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on May 15. Taking on a different selection every day, we’ll be examining what they’re about, who’s involved and what their chances are of snagging an award from Steven Spielberg’s jury. We’re going through the list by director and in alphabetical order — next up, Takashi Miike with “Shield of Straw.”)

The director: Takashi Miike (Japanese, 52 years old). Two Japanese filmmakers have found their way into Competition this year — but if Hirokazu Kore-eda is, as discussed yesterday, something of a classicist, Takashi Miike is defiantly new-school. If, of course, Miike belongs to a school at all. Eccentric, stylistically restless and bewilderingly prolific, the man has directed over 50 feature films (not counting assorted TV and direct-to-video projects) in the last 20 years, hopping from samurai swashbuckler to clinical J-horror to postmodern musical. Though he has amassed a keen cult following in the East and West alike — largely via DVD — while the top-tier festivals have been slower to demonstrate their approval. Born into a working-class Osaka family, Miike graduated from the Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film under the mentorship of two-time Palme d’Or winner Shohei Imamura. After several years of small-screen work, he directed his first theatrical feature, “Shinjuku Triad Society,” in 1995, and crossed over internationally with his influential 1999 horror film “Audition.” Notable films since since then include “Ichi the Killer” and “13 Assassins,” though his reputation — at least among those who can keep up with his work rate — is inevitably on the hit-and-miss side. 

The talent: Leading actor Tatsuya Fujiwara, now 30, is best known for his teenage performance in the 2000 cult item “Battle Royale.” Female co-star Nanako Matsushima was the lead in Hideo Nakata’s original “Ring” film; co-lead Takao Osawa (“All About Lily Cho-Chou”) may less easily identifiable to non-Japanese audiences. Low-profile screenwriter Tamio Hayashi is new to the Miike fold, though below the line, the film is stocked with the director’s regular collaborators, including cinematographer Nobuyasu Kita, editor Kenji Yamashita and composer Koji Endo.       

The pitch: One year after bringing his curious fusion of high-school musical, romantic comedy and gangster kickaround, “For Love’s Sake,” to Cannes, Miike returns with a more straightforward genre piece. Well, “straightforward” is a relative term here: part police thriller, part road movie, the film centers on a convicted child killer who is targeted as the prime suspect when a billionaire businessman’s young granddaughter is murdered. When the mogul publicly places a price on the man’s head, triggering a public manhunt, the accused turns himself in to the police — who then face the challenge of transporting him 750 miles to Tokyo with numerous members of the public out to kill him. As if you hadn’t guessed already, the trailer promises ample action and cheerfully grisly bloodshed in one of the Competition’s less highbrow entries.

The pedigree: Among genre fetishists, Miike was a cultish auteur brand well before the A-list festivals welcomed him into their club. Venice was the first European major to place him in Competition: first in 2007, with “Sukiyaki Western Django” and then in 2010 with samurai actioner “13 Assassins,” which became one of his biggest crossover successes to date. With the groundwork having been laid on the Lido, and perhaps directly prompted by the warm reception given to “Assassins,” Cannes admitted him into Competition the very next year with his follow-up, “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai.” Turned out Cannes drew the short straw with this less popular (and arguably less accomplished) samurai flick, though it does have a notable claim to fame: it was the first 3D film to contend for the Palme d’Or. The festival further fostered its friendship with the director by premiering “For Love’s Sake” out of competition last year. Still, even with his second Competition berth in three years, Miike retains a degree of outsider status. 

The buzz: Miike’s turnover is too high for any of his films to gain much buzz ahead of their unveiling — there’s little way of telling whether “Shield of Straw” is another in his long line of potboilers or something a little more special until we actually see it. That said, critics in Japan, where the film has been on release for two weeks, haven’t been overly complimentary.

The odds: Pretty much a rank outsider, however the film turns out. On the rare occasions that festival juries do plump for out-and-out genre fare, it’s for a film that feels more obviously like a departure — or indeed an arrival — for its director. (Case in point: “Drive.”) All signs on “Shield of Straw” point to Miike simply doing his thing, and even if he’s doing it well, that’s unlikely to dazzle Steven Spielberg and his fellow jurors. (“13 Assassins,” for example, was a surprise critical hit at Venice, but still left the festival empty-handed.) Cannes betting expert Neil Young agrees, offering odds of 100-1 on Miike taking the Palme.    

The premiere date: Monday, May 20.   

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up one of several French entries in this year’s Competition lineup: François Ozon’s “Young and Beautiful.”

PREVIOUS CANNES CHECKS:

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s “A Villa in Italy”

Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis”

Arnaud des Pallières’s “Michael Kohlhaas“

Arnaud Desplechin’s “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian”

Amat Escalante’s “Heli”

Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past”

James Gray’s “The Immigrant”

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Grigris”

Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive”

Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin”

Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color”

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Like Father, Like Son”

http://players.brightcove.net/4838167533001/BkZprOmV_default/index.html?videoId=4912281650001

One of the five films nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar last year was Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s “Kon-Tiki.” It was the first Norwegian film to be nominated for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe and it was actually filmed in both Norwegian and English. The latter version was released on two screens stateside two weeks ago and is platforming out slowly, moving into more markets today.

I actually liked the film, and really, it’s difficult to not be engaged by the story it tells. The tale of Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon-Tiki expedition is legendary, and the documentary his tiny crew shot aboard that modest vessel as they crossed the Pacific rightly won an Academy Award. Rønning and Sandberg’s film had a shot at the foreign language film Oscar last year because it was a favorite among a great many voters in the category.

The Weinstein Company has offered a 20-minute making-of feature on the film, which you can view at the top of this post. It’s a deep dive behind the scenes on the story with people like Matt Lauer featured as talking heads throughout. If you’re at all interested in Heyerdahl’s wild story, you should see “Kon-Tiki,” but you should also give this feature a look.

Take it away, Maria Menounos.

(Welcome to Cannes Check, your annual guide through the 20 films in Competition at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on May 15. Taking on a different selection every day, we’ll be examining what they’re about, who’s involved and what their chances are of snagging an award from Steven Spielberg’s jury. We’re going through the list by director and in alphabetical order — next up, Hirokazu Kore-eda with “Like Father, Like Son.”)

The director: Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japanese, 50 years old). While the modern school of Japanese cinema is dominated by formally abrasive, genre-splicing stylists — of which another of this year’s Competition entrants, Takashi Miike, is a prime example — Kore-eda’s quiet humanism hearkens back to previous generations: more than a few critics have likened him to Ozu. Born in Tokyo in 1962, he initially harbored ambitions of being a novelist, though after graduating, he found his way into film via a stint as an assistant director for an independent TV production company. After directing three documentaries, he made his first narrative feature, “Maborosi,” in 1995; it was an auspicious debut, premiering in competition at Venice and winning him an immediate critical following that has grown with such subsequent films as “After Life,” “Still Walking,” “Nobody Knows” and, most recently, “I Wish.” Family life, mourning and companionship are recurring concerns of his work. “Like Father, Like Son” is his ninth feature.  

The talent: Though leading man Masahuru Fukuyama has done some acting work before — chiefly on the small screen — Japanese audiences know him best as a chart-topping pop star of over 20 years’ standing. Rounding out the principal cast are actresses Machiko Ono (from 2007 Cannes Grand Prix winner “The Mourning Forest”) and Yoko Maki (from the US remake of “The Grudge”), and another musician-turned-actor, Lily Franky. As is his custom, Kore-eda wrote and edited the film himself. His DP, Takimoto Mikiya, worked as a stills photographer on Kore-eda’s 2009 film “Air Doll.”     

The pitch: After his dalliance with fantasy in “Air Doll” met with less universal critical acclaim than usual, Kore-eda returned to his more traditionally favored territory of dense, wistful family drama with “I Wish” in 2011. He’d arguably sweetened the formula a little, but the critics were back on his side, and he appears to have remained in that lane with “Like Father, Like Son.” Fukuyama plays Ryota, a devoted family man thrown into immediate emotional turmoil when he and his wife are informed that their 6-year-old son is not, in fact, their biological offspring: the hospital accidentally switched two families’ newborns at birth. After contacting the less privileged family that has been raising their son for the last six years, Ryota and his wife must effectively choose between nature and nurture. Hardly a new story, it’s the stuff of many a tear-streaked melodrama, though we can expect Kore-eda’s measured, documentary-influenced approach to keep the hysterics at bay.   

The pedigree: Kore-eda has been in Competition at Cannes twice before: in 2001 with “Distance,” and in 2004 with “Nobody Knows.” He won nothing on either occasion, though the latter film, a moving study of a pre-teen boy who takes it upon himself to parent his younger siblings when their mother disappears, won Best Actor for its young lead Yuya Yagira. Strangely, Kore-eda has rather fallen off the festival A-list in recent years, which has nothing to do with the standard of his work. Though they’re among his most acclaimed films, “Still Walking” (2008) and “I Wish” (2011) both had low-profile international premieres in Toronto. “Air Doll” made it to Cannes, but was relegated (some might say deservedly) to the Un Certain Regard strand. His return to the Competition fold this year is more in line with his auteur standing, which critics have kept elevated all along. 

The buzz: Quietly confident. Kore-eda has enjoyed such acclaim in recent years for films that haven’t had the benefit of a major festival spotlight that his return to the Palme league after nine years’ absence feels less like a reprieve for the director than Cannes itself playing catch-up. Meanwhile, the fact that “I Wish” has only been released in most territories in the last year means that Kore-eda is entering the festival still warm with critical affection.

The odds: Cannes betting expert Neil Young currently places “Like Father, Like Sun” among the frontrunners for the Palme, with odds of 7-1, which sounds about right to me. Indeed, I’m tempted to take a flutter on it myself. I can easily imagine jury president Steven Spielberg taking a shine to Kore-eda’s gentle, emotionally direct approach to family portraiture — particularly if it continues his last film’s subtle brush with sentimentality. Even if you’re not among the director’s most devout followers, his best films are hard to take against; unlike the work of more aggressive stylists in the lineup, this could be a solid consensus choice for the jury.   

The premiere date: Saturday, May 18.   

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up the final Asian filmrst of two Japanese entries in this year’s Competition lineup: Takashi Miike’s “Shield of Straw.”

PREVIOUS CANNES CHECKS:

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s “A Villa in Italy”

Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis”

Arnaud des Pallières’s “Michael Kohlhaas“

Arnaud Desplechin’s “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian”

Amat Escalante’s “Heli”

Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past”

James Gray’s “The Immigrant”

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Grigris”

Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive”

Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin”

Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color”