The Cannes market has landed its first sale before anyone has even arrived in the south of France as Ryan Gosling’s “How to Catch a Monster,” which is currently filming, has been acquired by Warner Bros. for domestic release.

The film stars Christina Hendricks as a single mother swept into a dark underworld while her teenage son discovers a road that leads him to a secret underwater town. It’s been described as a noirish modern day fairytale set in a dying city. I like how Gosling, in his first at-bat as director, is taking on high concept.

According to the Deadline report, Warner Bros. is paying a $3 million minimum guarantee for the film, which was financed and produced by Bold Films.

Gosling will also be in Cannes supporting Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest film, “Only God Forgives,” in which the “Drive” actor stars. And speaking of “Drive,” I guess Gosling clearly liked working with Hendricks enough to give her the lead in his directorial debut.

I imagine we’ll hear more about release dates on “How to Catch a Monster” in due time. In all likelihood, look for it in 2014.

KIND OF RELATED: I guess this is as good an opportunity as any to bring HitFix’s new comedy channel, RIOT, to your attention. And yes, we covered “Ryan Gosling won’t eat his cereal,” too. Check out the channel (headed up by editor Liana Maeby) here and the absurd new Gosling meme here.

Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited spin on F. Scott Fitzgerald makes its way to theaters today in advance of Cannes opening night festivities next week. I was charmed and quite liked it. Drew McWeeny had a lot of beef with it. And the critics in general reflect that split so far. (Here is our new 3-on-3 feature offering up some industry analysis of the film.) Now, though, it’s time for you to get a look, and I’ll of course be curious to see how you find it. So when and if you get around to seeing it this weekend, head on back here with your take. And as always, feel free to vote in our poll below.

I saw “August: Osage County” on Broadway back in 2008, I think it was, and like most who saw Tracy Letts’ dissection of an Oklahoma family, I was moved and caught under the spell of a playwright at the top of his craft. A film adaptation was inevitable, and a stellar cast was, too. That’s what we’re getting later this year in the form of John Wells’ take on the material, a film that will no doubt be a fixture in the awards season with the Oscar-savvy Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood golden boy George Clooney leading the charge.

Of that cast, most eyes are aimed toward Meryl Streep, who indeed has the meatiest role in the form of matriarch Violet Weston. Julia Roberts will be in that Best Actress discussion, too, should they pitch both performances in the category). Though I also think, given the play, we might want to keep an eye on Margo Martindale, too, a character actress who has come into her own and could really sink her teeth into this role. However, I also like how the film is part of a narrative for two actors who are having a stellar year: Benedict Cumberbatch and Sam Shepard.

Cumberbatch is absolutely outstanding as the villain in “Star Trek Into Darkness” with upcoming work in Steve McQueen’s “Twelve Years a Slave” and Bill Condon’s “The Fifth Estate” (as embattled) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange) besides. Meanwhile, Shepard offered up one of his most significant performances in a while in Jeff Nichols’ “Mud” and has another one on the way in Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace.” I have no doubt they’ll be a big part of what makes “August” tick.

To whet the appetite in advance of the awards season (which is still mercifully four or five months away, depending on how you gauge its start), a trailer for “August: Osage County” has been released. Check it out below and tell us what you think in the comments section.

(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, Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color.”)

The director: Abdellatif Kechiche (French-Tunisian, 52 years old). Kechiche was born in the Tunisian capital of Tunis, before emigrating with his family to Nice at the age of five; much of his work is informed by his experiences as a Franco-Tunisian immigrant. As an auteur, he was a relatively late bloomer: beginning his career as a stage actor in his teens, he appeared (as Abdel Kechiche) in a handful of films, most notably André Téchiné’s “The Innocents,” in the 1980s and 1990s. (He resurfaced as an actor in a rather unlikely way in 2005, starring opposite Robin Wright in the Spirit-nominated US indie “Sorry, Haters.”) Kechiche was pushing forty by the time he moved behind the camera, making his debut feature, “Political Refugee,” in 2000. It was selected by the Venice Film Festival and won a sidebar award there; two of his four subsequent features, 2007’s much-laurelled “Secret of the Grain” and 2010’s oddly buried “Black Venus,” have since played on the Lido, while “Blue is the Warmest Color” marks his Cannes debut. 

The talent: Though he has some drawing power in France, Kechiche has thus far steered clear of major star collaborations, frequently opting for amateur or inexperienced actors. His latest, however, sees him working with one of France’s biggest and brightest ingenues (and the current face of Prada), Léa Seydoux. Non-arthouse audiences might remember her brief ass-kicking turn in “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” though it was a pair of French-language films last year — “Farewell, My Queen” (for which she was César-nominated) and the Oscar-shortlisted “Sister” — that really showed us what the 27-year-old is made of. Not that Seydoux has the spotlight to herself. Her co-lead (and the title character, in the film’s French translation) is lesser-known young actress Adèle Exarchopoulos — a more typical Kechiche pick. The most notable name in the supporting cast is long-serving French character actor Aurélien Recoing, best known for his stunning lead turn in Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out.”

Kechiche’s wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Ghalia Lacroix, who also co-scripted “Black Venus” and “Games of Love and Chance.” Lacroix is also his regular editor. Cinematographer Sofian El Fani worked as a camera operator on Kechiche’s last three features, and shot his 2008 short “Sweat,” but this is the first time he’s been promoted to DP on a Kechiche feature.        

The pitch: At 179 minutes, “Blue is the Warmest Color” is the longest film in Competition by some margin, though if you’re expecting some gargantuan epic, chances are you’re not familiar with Kechiche’s intimate but fastidious style — in which long, seemingly impartial takes allow character networks and tensions to develop at their own pace. Based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, the contemporary-set film tells the story of Adèle (Exarchopoulos), a 15-year-old girl getting to grips with her sexual identity. Just as her dreams appear to have come true when a handsome male stranger begins wooing her, Adèle is surprised to find herself erotically fixated on a mysterious blue-haired girl (Seydoux) she encounters on the street. A return to the youthful romantic terrain he explored in his 2003 breakout film, the teen ensemble piece “Games of Love and Chance,” Kechiche’s latest also appears to find him in more playful form after 2010’s punishing “Black Venus.” (The less evocative French title is “La vie d’Adèle – Chapitre 1 & 2,” which suggests the film could be split into two parts for distribution purposes.)   

The pedigree: It’s somewhat surprising that this is Kechiche’s first turn on the Croisette — and not just because, having grown up in Nice, he’s practically a native son of the festival. His films have been better received in France than anywhere else, after all: “Games of Love and Chance” won him a trio of César Awards (the French Oscars) for Best Film, Director and Screenplay — a feat he repeated three years later with “The Secret of the Grain,” which also won the country’s prestigious Louis Delluc Prize. His record at the Venice Film Festival — where he won the Jury Prize for “Grain” in 2007 — has been impressive, though his imposing, abrasive historical drama “Black Venus,” initially earmarked as a potential arthouse heavyweight, stalled out of the festival after strong early reviews, failing to find US or UK distribution. With even this setback a prestigious one, however, Kechiche is the Competition’s most seasoned first-timer.    

The buzz: Insider word on the film is encouraging, suggesting that Kechiche has regained his popular touch to some extent — despite the new film’s intimidating length. Being youth-focused, female-focused and LGBT-focused certainly helps the film stand out in the lineup, and its cool factor is further enhanced by the presence of Seydoux.

The odds: Cannes betting expert Neil Young places the film midfield with odds of 16-1; I’d be tempted to shorten those a bit, though it doesn’t seem an obvious match, aesthetically or thematically, for Steven Spielberg’s sensibilities. (It’s easier to imagine Ang Lee or any member of the jury’s strong female contingent going to bat for it, however.) A lesser award would still be a fitting acknowledgement of Kechiche’s belated arrival at his near-hometown festival — while a joint Best Actress prize for its two young leads would be a typical jury move. (That is, if they’re not aware of, or bothered by, the fact that the jury made that very move last year.)

The premiere date: Thursday, May 23.   

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up the first of two Japanese entries in this year’s Competition lineup: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Like Father, Like Son.”

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”

Like many of you, I’m eagerly anticipating Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming space drama “Gravity.” Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, it promises to be an eye-popping piece of 3D grandeur from an auteur who has already given us some of the most indelible cinematic imagery of his generation.

Everyone’s waiting for the first trailer for the film, which should hit sometime soon. But while we wait, let me pass this bit of info along. A source who’s seen “Gravity” (and is over the moon about it) tells me that Ed Harris is featured in the role of a mission control voice. It might seem like just a cool bit of casting with a recognizable voice, but it’s also a nice ode to one of the actor’s Oscar-nominated performances.

In 1995, Harris landed his first Academy Award nomination for Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13.” In the film, he starred as NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz, who played a key role in bringing the doomed Apollo 13 crew back home safely. He won the Screen Actors Guild Award for his work in the film, but Kevin Spacey bested him at the Oscars with his career-making turn in Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects.”

Harris is one of only five actors credited on the studio’s official credit listing for the film, and indeed, will be but a small part of the movie. The film is largely dominated by Sandra Bullock, who my source says is fantastic (watch for a serious Best Actress push in the fall). The story is episodic, I’m told, with Bullock’s character overcoming a new obstacle (after being stranded in space following a space shuttle disaster) and then moving on to the next one. But while it plays on thrilling elements, it ultimately becomes a fairly moving piece.

The real star of the film, the source confides, is the filmmaking itself. The opening 16-minute single take has been written about, but there are apparently a number of these throughout the film, recalling some of the more riveting moments from Cuarón’s 2006 film “Children of Men.” Some of these takes even become POV shots and it’s all very smoothly handled. I’m also told Steven Price’s score is very good (Cliff Martinez’s work was noted by way of comparison) and the various elements — visual effects, sound, 3D photography — amount to an incredible experience.

But the news here is that Harris has joined the cast in a role that will have fans of the actor smiling when a familiar voice flashes on the soundtrack.

Listen for it when “Gravity” hits theaters on October 4.

UPDATE: And here’s the trailer…

Cannes may be just around the corner, but the Venice Film Festival is sooner than you think it is — the two European majors effectively bookend the summer movie season, meaning the first glimpse of fall prestige fare on the Lido is just over three months away. Last week, the festival named William Friedkin the winner of this year’s lifetime achievement Golden Lion, and today they further interrupted the pre-Cannes conversation with the announcement of this year’s Competition jury president: Oscar-winning Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci.

After Berlin selected Wong Kar-Wai as their jury president this year, and Cannes followed up with Steven Spielberg, the bar was set pretty high for Venice to clear, but they haven’t let themselves down: the 73-year-old Bertolucci is the most senior member of this A-list director trifecta. (Your day will come, Adam Shankman.)

It’s not the first time Bertolucci has held the position: he also presided over the 1983 jury, handing the Golden Lion to Jean-Luc Godard for “First Name: Carmen.” It’s unusual to repeat presidents, of course, but given that this will be the 70th edition of the festival, Venice brass presumably felt that a native luminary was needed. Interestingly, he’s the festival’s first Italian jury president since 2005, when celebrated production designer Dante Ferretti was a novel choice for the position.    

Winner of the 1987 Best Director Oscar for “The Last Emperor” — one of nine statuettes taken by the lavish historical epic — Bertolucci was nominated twice in 1970s (once for writing, once for directing) for what arguably remain his two signature films, “The Conformist” and “Last Tango in Paris.” Other notable credits include “1900,” “The Spider’s Strategem” and “The Dreamers”; his most recent film, “Me and You,” premiered at Cannes last year. 

Somewhat surprisingly, Bertolucci has never actually been in competition at his home festival, though he did receive the career Golden Lion in 2007. At Cannes, meanwhile, he has twice competed for the Palme d’Or (on neither occasion for one of his most acclaimed films) and headed the jury in 1990. (That year, he presented the Palme d’Or to David Lynch for “Wild at Heart,” so it seems his tastes run pretty adventurous.)

While Cannes has opted for the odd veteran actor in recent years, this is the seventh straight year that the Venice jury president has been a major (and male) filmmaker: Michael Mann, Darren Aronofsky, Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee, Wim Wenders and Zhang Yimou precede him.

In further Venice news, festival organizers have also adjusted the rules dictating the division of prizes between films, and publicly clarified them for good measure. This is in response to the confusion (and ensuing controversy) at last year’s festival, when Michael Mann’s jury, clearly high on Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” initially awarded it the Golden Lion, Best Director and a joint Best Actor award for Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman — only to be overruled by festival brass, whose rules forbade one film from taking the top prize and an acting award.

It’s the same technicality that prevented Mickey Rourke from winning Best Actor for 2008 Golden Lion winner “The Wrestler,” though it’s a relatively recent innovation: “Vera Drake,” for example, took the Golden Lion and Best Actress in 2004. Mann’s jury, reluctant to take the award away from Hoffman and Phoenix, compromised by letting “The Master” keep Best Actor and Best Director, handing the Golden Lion to their second favorite: Kim Ki-duk’s “Pieta.”

Much grumbling ensued, but the festival has addressed the situation to some extent by introducing a Grand Jury Prize to their lineup of awards. (Sadly, it replaces the often-interesting Technical Achievement Award.) Like the similarly named prize at Cannes, it will be regarded as the official runner-up honor to the Golden Lion, and is presumably what “The Master” would have ended up taking had it been around last year.

The introduction of a new award, however, hasn’t really changed their policy regarding the allocation of awards: they remain adamant that the Golden Lion winner may not take any other prizes. Indeed, the festival advises a one-award-per-film rule throughout — though either Grand Jury Prize, Jury Prize, Best Director or Best Screenplay winner may also take an acting award “in exceptional circumstances and after consultation with the festival director.” Meanwhile, no ties will be allowed for any award, save the acting ones. You still with me?

It’s not a unique policy: Cannes has similarly clamped down on juries in recent years, preventing the Palme d’Or from taking additional awards. (Rumor has it that last year’s Palme winner, “Amour,” would otherwise have taken Best Actor and Best Actress; jury president Nanni Moretti hinted as much at the award presentations.) I understand the desire to spread the wealth, though I think such cast-iron restrictions are overly obstructive: sometimes the best film does also contain the best performance, after all. 

After a five-month delay, Baz Luhrmann’s long awaited adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is finally coming to theaters. So far, reviews have been mixed. “Gatsby” has a 56 on Metacritic and just a 46% on Rotten Tomatoes. And “Gatsby” still has a global stampede of critics ready to pounce after it opens the Cannes Film Festival next week. With that in mind, we’re using the film’s opening to kick-off a new feature here on HitFix, 3 on 3. What’s 3 on 3? Simply, three questions answered by three HitFix insiders on a compelling topic from the world’s of movies, music and television.

Let’s get to it…

1. Was Warner Bros. right in moving ‘The Great Gatsby’ to May?

Kristopher Tapley: In a word, yes. The studio had a heavy slate to deal with last year on the way to a Best Picture Oscar for “Argo” and “Gatsby” would have suffered while putting a strain on the rest. It also has a better shot at making some money as a summer film (which it is, by the way, more so than a fall prestige one).

Gregory Ellwood: Absolutely. “Gatsby” would have been pummeled by the holiday competition. At first thought opening in the summer sounds like a bad idea, but Warner Bros. has actually done a smart job of counter programming against “Iron Man 3’s” second weekend.  “Gatsby” is currently polling to debut over $35 million. That number have been tough at Christmas (let alone for the holiday week).

Drew McWeeny: Sure. It’s a popcorn movie at heart. Baz is playing to the cheap seats, and anyone fooled into thinking he cares about awards hasn’t really been playing attention so far. He’s doing what he does, and at this point, I think he knows that it divides people, and he’s okay with that. As long as he can convince a studio to let him make one of his big splashy spectacles, why shouldn’t they try to make money on them? “Moulin Rouge!” was a pretty canny counter programming play in the summer when it opened.

2. Will ‘Gatsby’ return Baz Luhrmann to the A-list?

Kristopher Tapley: I’m not sure he was ever truly there. After all, the poor guy couldn’t even get a Best Director Oscar nomination for “Moulin Rouge!” In all likelihood he’ll attract a few more stars who would like to sample his breed of cinema and put off a few others who know it’s not the direction they want to go. Same as it ever was, really.

Gregory Ellwood: No. In fact, he may be close to landing in movie jail after this. Or, at the least, finding it considerably harder to land a big budget for his endeavors. Considering its $100 million + budget and marketing costs, “Gatsby” is gonna have to be an international smash to get into the black. And Luhrmann is coming off “Australia” which was a major bomb for 20th Century Fox. “Gatsby” might sell a ton of soundtracks though, but Jay-Z is gonna take all the credit for that, not Baz.

Drew McWeeny: There’s a healthy market for musicals in the Australia/New Zealand market, and if Baz ever really gets stuck in Big Hollywood Jail, he should take a cue from “The Sapphires” or “Bran Nue Dae” and go local. His voice is his voice on a big budget or small, and I think he’ll keep making audience-pleasing films in the future. Not every single one, but enough of them.

3. How will audiences react to the movie?

Kristopher Tapley: I’m guessing more favorable than critics, but I can only think with my heart here. “Gatsby” is a film that wears its own heart on its sleeve and Luhrmann pulls no punches where his passion is concerned. It’s not a gaudy mess or anything so I imagine a fair amount will be charmed as I was. I hope so, anyway.

Gregory Ellwood: Probably mixed. Warner Bros. has done a great job trying to lower the demo age for the film by hyping up the Jay-Z and Fergie tracks in the trailer and TV spots, but the movie is still “Gatsby” and it’s still slow. Expect a B- or C cinemascore. That being said, Luhrmann has something of a fanbase that will like it no matter what (I mean, it’s better than “Australia”).

Drew McWeeny: I have no idea. I heard a wide range of reactions outside my screening, and reading reactions from other people, I think there’s a lot of very different takes on what people saw. Warner Bros. is doing everything they can to open it, and I think there’s some genuine curiosity. Does that mean people go when there’s so much other stuff in theaters at the same time? And that they’ll tell others to go? That’s the question, isn’t it?

What do you think? Share your thoughts and answer the 3 on 3 questions below.

In our recent list of 10 under-the-radar films to watch out for this summer, I listed the small Danish thriller “A Hijacking” as a title especially worthy of your attention. A sparse, nerve-shredding account of a Danish cargo ship held hostage by ruthless Somali pirates, it’s a must-see on its own terms — but also worth checking out as a primer (and yardstick) for this fall’s pumped-up Hollywood take on a notably similar story: Paul Greengrass’s “Captain Phillips.” Now the first trailer has arrived, and it’s a good one.

Unlike the Danish film, Greengrass’s film is based on true events: specifically, the headline-making “Maersk Alabama” hijacking of 2009, whereby an unarmed US cargo ship, 240 miles off the coast of Somalia, was seized by four Somali pirates for four days — the first time an American ship had been captured in this manner in over 200 years. Tom Hanks plays the ship’s captain, Richard Phillips, who courageously led his crew through the ordeal; the screenplay, by “Hunger Games” co-writer Billy Ray, is based on Phillips’s book “A Captain’s Duty.”

This material is an obvious fit for British director Paul Greengrass, who excels in high-stakes tension; the crisp trailer evokes the matter-of-fact procedural approach to a true-life crisis that earned him a Best Director Oscar nomination for 2006’s similarly claustrophobic “United 93.” Greengrass has since been occupied with the fictional action exploits of “The Bourne Ultimatum” and the indifferently received (though rather good) “Green Zone,” but will be looking to return to the awards conversation with this one; with super-producer Scott Rudin on board, “Captain Phillips” will surely be pursuing an Oscar campaign, pending a warm critical reception on the fall festival circuit.

If all goes to plan, that could return Tom Hanks to the Oscar race for the first time in 13 years. The two-time Best Actor winner hasn’t had much luck on the big screen of late (sorry, “Cloud Atlas” fans), but the role of Phillips is his meatiest dramatic opportunity in several years, and the trailer promises strong if necessarily understated work from the veteran. With his turn as Walt Disney in “Saving Mr. Banks” also coming up this year, and a shot at his first Tony Award for Nora Ephron’s “Lucky Guy” to boot, 2013 could usher in a bit of a Hanks career surge.

Check out the full trailer below, and tell us what you think. “Captain Phillips” opens in the US (as well as numerous European regions) on October 11.

http://cdnapi.kaltura.com/p/1151292/sp/115129200/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/13668182/partner_id/1151292?autoembed=true&entry_id=0_seuq82e2&playerId=kaltura_player_1368141397&cache_st=1368141397&width=640&height=533

(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, Jia Zhang Ke’s “A Touch of Sin.”)

The director: Jia Zhangke (Chinese, 42 years old). Born in Fenyang, Jia studied at the Beijing Film Academy — alumni of which include Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige — before making his first three features (beginning with his 1997 debut “The Pickpocket”) outside the country’s State Administration. Where the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers (including Zhang and Chen) opened up post-Cultural Revolution Chinese cinema to global audiences, Jia is a pioneering figure of the more underground-inclined Sixth Generation, embracing documentary technique, minimalist narrative and digital video to offer a harder, sparer view of everyday life in contemporary China. Unsurprisingly, his films haven’t enjoyed as much international crossover success as his Fifth Generation predecessors, though he’s a favorite of A-list festival programmers — and has furthermore been working with state approval since 2004’s “The World.” His most widely distributed film to date, “Still Life,” won the top prize at Venice in 2006, yet 10 features (seven narrative, three documentary) into his career, he’s still largely unknown outside cineaste circles — wherein the word “important” is routinely affixed to his name. (Detractors may opt for “dour.”) 

The talent:  Jia has often favored non-professional ensembles in the past, but not this time: the cast includes Jiang Wu (“Let the Bullets Fly”), Wang Baoqiang (winner of several festival awards as a teenager for 2003’s “Blind Shaft”) and Jia’s own wife Zhao Tao, who has been his muse over five previous features. (Only more recently has she branched out into working for other filmmakers, and with some success: 2011’s “Li and the Poet” won her the Italian Oscar, the David di Donatello Award, for Best Actress.) Below the line, too, it would appear that Jia has turned his back on the scrappiness of past efforts, employing the services of Polish cinematographer Pawel Edelman, an Oscar nominee for 2002 Palme d’Or winner “The Pianist.” (Still Roman Polanski’s DP of choice, Edelman also shows up in Competition with “Venus in Fur,”making him one of the more wide-ranging double-dippers in this year’s lineup.)  

The pitch: “A Touch of Sin” is the first Chinese entry in Competition since 2010 — which, coincidentally enough, is also when Jia’s last film, the Shanghai-focused documentary “I Wish I Knew,” premiered in Un Certain Regard. His latest represents a rather dramatic shift in aesthetic and sensibility: effectively Jia’s first studio film (a collaboration between the director’s own Xstream Productions and the heavyweight Shanghai Film Group), it’s a sprawling multi-narrative drama taking place across a range of social and geographical environments, rural and urban, within contemporary China. Plot details are vague for what Jia has described as a “major production” and a “road movie with action scenes”; lest you think the socially conscious auteur has gone wholly wu xia on us, we’re also told its four interwoven stories reflect on China as “an economic giant being slowly eroded by violence.” Shot over five months with the director’s largest crew to date, the film weighs in at 135 minutes — one of the Competition’s bulkier entries.

The pedigree: Jia is arguably more a Venice pet than a Cannes one: he’s been in competition three times on the Lido and has won several awards there, culminating, of course, in the profile-elevating Golden Lion for 2006’s broadly acclaimed “Still Life.” Following 2002’s “Unknown Pleasures” and 2008’s “24 City,” “A Touch of Sin” is Jia’s third Competition entry at Cannes, levelling the score to some extent — though the director has yet to win a single award on the Croisette. Meanwhile, the festival cut him down to size in 2010, when he was demoted to Un Certain Regard with “I Wish I Knew” — not an unusual or especially embarrassing fate for a documentary, though the festival then salted this mild wound by belatedly promoting a different Chinese UCR entry from a less celebrated director, Wang Xiaoshuai’s poorly received “Chongqing Blues,” to Competition status. Jia’s devoted critical cheerleaders will applaud this return to the Competition fold as a victory in itself, however the film is received.  

The buzz: Modest, if only because the film is a mostly unknown quantity (or, if you will, an unknown pleasure) at this point. As mentioned above, Jia has devoted advocates in the critical community — though the new film’s concessions to mainstream Chinese cinema run the risk of alienating at least some of them, while perhaps recruiting others. The scarcity of Chinese entries in recent Competition lineups lends this one something of a profile boost — particularly with two other Chinese-language entries in other strands of this year’s Official Selection to underline the point.  

The odds: Cannes betting expert Neil Young gives “A Touch of Sin” healthy but conservative odds of 12-1 for the Palme, which sounds right to me — his auteur status has risen to the point that his Cannes awards duck seems unlikely to continue for too much longer. But while his critical following has grown, I’d say only “Still Life” among his previous films had the unifying emotional heft that can win over an entire jury. Juror Ang Lee could conceivably lead support for a rare Chinese-language contender, but if Jia’s stylistic shift pays off, a Jury Prize or Best Director might be a likelier reward.  

The premiere date: Friday, May 17.

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up a new film from one of the few Cannes novices in this year’s Competition lineup: Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color.”

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”

After initially being something of a question mark on the schedule (remember when IMDb rather unconvincingly asserted that it was being released in February?), the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” now seems to be falling into the prestige groove we expect for the directors’ work these days. A high-profile premiere in Competition at Cannes is just around the corner, while last week, an awards-friendly release date of December 6 was announced for the period folk-music drama. CBS Films may not be terribly experienced in this game, but they sure are aware that three of the brothers’ last four films nabbed Best Picture nominations.

To whet our appetite for the film, and handful of new stills from it have hit the web, and very handsome they are too. A couple of them we’ve seen before in monochrome, but they really pop with the addition of color. In a different but comparable way to their last 1960s-set piece, “A Serious Man,” the Coens appear to be using a rich but selective palette to evoke the fashions and aesthetics of the era: here, the autumnal hues and natural textures popular in Greenwich Village bohemia (and glimpsed in a certain phase of “Mad Men”) are the order of the day. Orange-and-teal has never looked so retro-chic.

The creator of these images, it’s worth noting, is not Roger Deakins: the Coens’ favorite cinematographer (he’s shot 11 of their films, earning Oscar nods for five of them) wasn’t available this time round. Instead, it’s Frenchman Bruno Delbonnel doing the honors, and he’s hardly a secondary replacement. (When Deakins isn’t around, nothing but the best will do for the brothers: “Burn After Reading” was shot by an understretched Emmanuel Lubezki.) Oscar-nominated for “Amelie,” “A Very Long Engagement” and — in something of a surprise — “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” he’s well known for his stylized use of color, often to romantic or nostalgic effect; everything we’ve seen of the film is clearly his work.   

Check out the new images below. 

After Ben Affleck won the Best Picture Oscar for “Argo” — and, apparently, the admiration and sympathy of the industry at large — at February’s Academy Awards ceremony, he could probably have persuaded Hollywood to greenlight just about anything he felt like making. Those on the lookout for a grand, overreaching folly in the actor’s fourth outing behind the camera, however, may be disappointed to hear he’ll be on familiar turf: like his 2007 debut “Gone Baby Gone,” “Live By Night” will be an adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel.

The news was confirmed today by Warner Bros’, which also backed “Argo” and “The Town” (another Boston-based thriller) with Affleck, though it was hardly out of the blue: rights to Lehane’s period crime saga were snapped up by the studio a year ago, before the book even hit shelves. And who better to bring it to life than their Beantown-based golden boy? “Live By Night” enters pre-production today, and could start rolling as early as August.

Affleck will produce with his Warner-based company Pearl Street, and will take a screenplay credit after skipping out on writing duties in “Argo.” At this stage, moreover, he’s the only actor confirmed to appear in the film: only in “Gone Baby Gone” has he managed to stay off-camera. He’ll presumably take the lead role of Joe Coughlin, the rebellious son of a police chief who enters a life of organized crime in Prohibition-era Boston.

Lehane’s book won the Edgar Award — the highest accolade in mystery writing — last week for Novel of the Year; among those it beat was publishing phenomenon “Gone Girl.” “Live By Night” is the second in a planned trilogy about Boston Irish lawmen, and shares characters with its 2008 predecessor “The Given Day.”

Interestingly, a film of “The Given Day” hasn’t yet come to pass: Warner Bros’ also bought the rights to that one, and it was optioned by Sam Raimi, but the project fell through. Still, Lehane’s work has otherwise been generously served by Hollywood recently. In addition to “Gone Baby Gone,” Lehane saw his novel “Mystic River” brought to life (to Oscar-winning effect) by Clint Eastwood. “Shutter Island,” meanwhile, was filmed somewhat divisively by Martin Scorsese; you don’t have to be an Oscar-winning A-lister to direct a Lehane adaptation, but clearly it helps.    

What do you think? Is this the right move for Affleck following his Oscar triumph? Or does he need to stay out of Boston?

Her recent run-ins with the law may be mildly tarnishing her name at the moment, but the question of what’s up with Reese Witherspoon has been on my mind for several years now — and it has nothing to do with any offscreen activities. Rather, the decline of Witherspoon as a vital screen actress — all while she’s held onto her stardom with impressive ease — has been far more troubling to witness than any standard-issue TMZ fodder.

As is all too often the case, Witherspoon’s career took a sharp turn for the uninteresting almost immediately after winning her Oscar: a deserved one, in her case, for a bright and canny turn as June Carter Cash in James Mangold’s country-music biopic “Walk the Line.” Far too long a time passed while we waited for her to follow up this career boost with a committed but off-key dramatic turn in “Rendition,” and an indifferent comic one in “Four Christmases.”

“How Do You Know” had its high-end fans — most of them not all that vocal about Witherspoon’s lead turn — but by the time last year’s noxiously misogynistic “This Means War,” a supposed romcom that didn’t burden Witherspoon with a single smart one-liner,  rolled around, the frisky, risky, sour-sweet young star of “Freeway,” “Election” or even “Legally Blonde” seemed another person entirely.

But Witherspoon seems to be trying to turn things around. “Mud” may not give her an awful lot to work with — Jeff Nichols’ indie drama is, in its own way, as plagued with gender issues as “This Means War” — but it’s at least indicative of the scale and class of project she should be pursuing alongside her Hollywood potboilers. Ditto Atom Egoyan’s upcoming “Devil’s Knot” and human-interest drama “The Good Lie” from “Monsieur Lazhar” director Philippe Falardeau. The firecracker comedy roles haven’t returned just yet, but it’s a start.

Witherspoon’s latest project, meanwhile, finds her extending this well-meaning dramatic streak, as well as reteaming with the director who got her that Oscar: James Mangold’s “Three Little Words,” based on the bestselling memoir by Ashley Rhodes-Courter, will start rolling in September, and will be on the market at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.

The film will star Witherspoon as a volunteer social worker who takes on the cause of an adolescent girl who has been buried within the welfare system for nine years; the volunteer must persuade the girl’s biological mother to sever her parental rights to the child. The book was a hit upon its publication in 2008, though producer Cathy Konrad, seeing cinematic potential in the story, had actually optioned it four years previously. Amanda Seyfried is in talks to co-star; Lewis Colick (a WGA nominee for “October Sky”) and Michael Petroni (“The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys”) penned the adaptation. Red Crown Productions, the outfit most recently behind “What Maisie Knew,” is driving the project.

The film will take Mangold back to the kind of female-centered, character-oriented territory he hasn’t occupied since 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted” — another youth-in-crisis memoir that won an Oscar for Angelina Jolie. His touch will have to be delicate to escape the material’s movie-of-the-week pitfalls, but this still represents a healthy about-face for the director after his recent big-budget exploits with “The Wolverine” and 2010’s “Knight and Day.” Perhaps he and Witherspoon will bring out the best in each other. What do you say?

(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, Jim Jarmusch’s late entry, “Only Lovers Left Alive.”)

The director: Jim Jarmusch (American, 60 years old). Jarmusch may still be seen by many as the distinctively-coiffed crown prince of true US independent cinema — though he’s now the most senior American director in Competition. After graduating from Columbia with a degree in English literature, Jarmusch enrolled at NYU’s prestigious film school in the 1970s: he never graduated, but he did gain the close-to-death Nicholas Ray as a mentor. His thesis project, “Permanent Vacation,” became his debut feature in 1980; four years later, “Stranger Than Paradise” (an expansion of a short made the previous year) marked his auteur breakthrough, winning the Camera d’Or (even though it wasn’t technically his first feature) at Cannes, picking up further gold at Sundance and even taking the National Society of Film Critics’ Best Picture prize. It established the tone of delicate, sometimes romantic absurdism, shot through with nods to classic Americana, that has become his brand over nine subsequent features. 2005’s shaggy-dog romantic comedy “Broken Flowers” represented his nearest brush with the mainstream, though he ended that dalliance pretty emphatically with his last film, 2009’s defiantly opaque “The Limits of Control.”

The talent: Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton — words that, even five years on, still feel pleasingly odd to write — appears to be a new talisman of sorts for Jarmusch, as this is his third straight film to feature her. Joining her at the top of the bill (replacing the originally-cast Michael Fassbender) is rising star Tom Hiddleston, best known to some as Marvel villain Loki and to others as the elegant, stage-schooled star of “The Deep Blue Sea.” Mia Wasikowska, fresh from another auteur-horror hybrid this year in “Stoker,” completes the principal triangle; the supporting cast includes two-time Oscar nominee John Hurt, Anton Yelchin (“Star Trek,” “Like Crazy”) and French-Alegerian actor Slimane Dazi, who made a vivid impression in “A Prophet.”

As per usual, Jarmusch penned the screenplay himself; Oscar-winning British producer Jeremy Thomas is best known for his work with Bernardo Bertolucci (“The Last Emperor”), Nicolas Roeg (“Bad Timing”) and David Cronenberg (“Crash”). The below-the-line team is largely new to Jarmusch’s world. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, who made his name with director Francois Ozon, has form in lighting Tilda Swinton’s angular visage: he also shot “Julia” and, spectacularly, “I Am Love.” Editor Affonso Gonçalves, ACE-nominated for Todd Haynes’s “Mildred Pierce,” has a strong track record in recent US indies: he cut “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Winter’s Bone,” among others. Production designer Marco Bittner Rossner was ADG-nominated as an art director on “Inglourious Basterds” and “V for Vendetta.” 

The pitch: We all know vampire films have been en vogue recently, but who would have guessed that the trend would claim Jarmusch? The hope, of course, is that the claim will be the other way round: it’s hard to imagine Jarmusch capitulating to genre convention, though this sounds darker and sexier than most of his work. Indeed, it’s hard to read the synopsis for “Only Lovers Left Alive” without thinking of Tony Scott’s influential but underrated “The Hunger”: Hiddleston stars as Adam, a vampire and underground rock musician who, weary of human lifestyle, returns to his lover of several centuries, Eve (Swinton), only to find their relationship disrupted when Swinton’s seductive, unruly younger sister Ava (Wasikowska) enters the scene. Any film that casts Swinton and Wasikowska as sisters knows at least partly what it’s doing; ditto any film that forges even a tenuous cinematic link between Swinton and David Bowie. If Jarmusch calls it a “crypto-vampire love story,” chances are it’ll be very “crypto” indeed — though, if this Adam-Eve business is anything to go by, not hugely subtle. Shot in Germany, Morocco and Detroit, this international co-production has been in post-production for some time — so whatever the reason was for its late entry into the Cannes competition (it was announced a week after the others), a scrambled finish wasn’t it. 

The pedigree: Jarmusch is a true son of the Cannes Film Festival, which has fostered him since his not-quite-debut “Stranger Than Paradise” premiered in Directors’ Fortnight, and won the Camera d’Or, in 1984. He made it into Competition two years later with “Down By Law,” and “Only Lovers Left Alive” represents his sixth stab at the Palme d’Or. 1989’s “Mystery Train” won a special award for Best Artist Contribution, while his last Cannes entry, 2005’s “Broken Flowers,” brought him closer than ever before to the big one, taking the silver-medal Grand Jury Prize. Still, he can, usually among his peers, boast a Palme d’Or in the short film section — won by “Coffee and Cigarettes (Somewhere in California)” in 1993. “Down by Law,” “Dead Man” and “Ghost Dog” all left the festival empty-handed, but with plenty of admirers.  

The buzz: Late entries into the Competition lineup can either turn out to be genuine trump cards (“The Artist”) or damp squibs (remember the groans three years ago when, after much hype, the party-crasher turned out to be Ken Loach’s “Route Irish”?). Interest in Jarmusch’s film is certainly high enough — thanks to the stars, the genre and its unlikely fit for the director — to ensure it won’t be met with a why-did-they-bother shrug, but one does wonder why it wasn’t in the initial announcement. Are some of the powers that be not wholly confident in it, or was there uncertainty over where it would play best? However it turns out, it’ll be one of the most keenly monitored films in the lineup.

The odds: Cannes would no doubt love to hand Jarmusch a full-size Palme d’Or one of these days, but sight unseen, this isn’t quite looking like his year. (Some will count its position as the last Competition film on the schedule against it, though that’s not always a disadvantage.) Competition between the heavyweight American auteurs looks to be tight (if, indeed, they don’t cancel each other out), and even if the film is an artistic success, sexy, chilly vampire romance isn’t the first place you’d expect jury president Steven Spielberg’s heart to lie. Cannes betting expert Neil Young gives it duly long odds of 33-1. Swinton, it’s worth mentioning, has never won Best Actress at Cannes, though that looks to be a fiercely contested award this year.

The premiere date: Saturday, May 25.

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up the first of three Asian entries in this year’s Competition lineup: Jia Zhang-Ke’s “A Touch of Sin.”

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”

Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” is hitting theaters this week in advance of opening the 66th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 15. If you’ll recall, the film was all set to open last December amid the awards season glut as part of an already packed Warner Bros. slate. But it was shuffled on to a summer 2013 release to allow more time for post-production and, surely, to have a fighting chance at making some money.

I saw the film a few weeks back and, even as a Luhrmann fan, I was prepared for the worst. Why? A mixture of advance buzz, a trailer indicative of a film that could fall on either side of the line and even that rescheduling scenario, which is the kind of thing that rarely spells much more than trouble. After struggling for about a half hour to get into the film (Luhrmann’s usual largesse really takes some getting used to when married with 1920s New York), it settled in and a simple fact took hold: it takes a lot to ruin a story this great. F. Scott Fitzgerald keeps it on an even enough keel, I think.

Something else became clear, too: Of COURSE Luhrmann would adapt this story. Here is a filmmaker preoccupied throughout his career with passion, obsession and, yes, love. From “Strictly Ballroom” to “Moulin Rouge!” to “Australia,” that is the essence of his oeuvre. And this classic love story makes an interesting companion to 1996’s “Romeo + Juliet,” with that in mind. I walked away appreciative of the ambition, charmed by the themes and, overall, positive on the experience. Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance was a highlight, as was Joel Edgerton’s.

Had the film hit the season mid-gallop last year, I doubt it would have made much of a dent. Releasing in the summer here, it has a chance to breathe before that craziness takes hold in the fall months, but nevertheless, it’s unlikely to pick up much steam on the circuit. I imagine many will have the knives out for it as it is and the Academy demographic will surely be unforgiving.

As always, Luhrmann’s wife, Catherine Martin, does a bang-up job on the costume and production design. The former in particular could still find its way to an Oscar nomination, and the visual effects will be in the conversation but I don’t know how far they’ll go in what promises to be a tight category. Simon Duggan’s photography is electric, though I have to say the 3D choice was an odd one here; the story is an intimate one, and so the added dimension actually served to distance me from it rather than immerse me in it.

Luhrmann’s is a voice I’m glad we have. It’s a voice that never compromises itself, which is refreshing no matter the outcome. And “The Great Gatsby” finds its way. I imagine few will be willing to offer it the same pass already afforded to “Iron Man 3” this summer (a blockbuster with admittedly lower expectations given the genre and a film that doesn’t fail or anything, but surely doesn’t hit the level critics have notched for it — at least in my opinion).

For more, check out Drew McWeeny’s mixed review of the film.

“The Great Gatsby” opens everywhere Friday.

(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, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun with “Grisgris.”)

The director: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Chadian, 51 years old). Born and raised in the central African republic of Chad, Haroun fled during the civil war of the 1980s, and has been based in France for the last 30 years — though he continues to make films in his homeland. Having begun his career as a journalist, he studied filmmaking at Paris’s Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français; after a series of narrative and documentary shorts, he made his first feature, the autobiographical semi-doc “Bye Bye Africa,” in 1999. It was an auspicious debut, premiering at Venice and winning the Best First Film award. He made his first trip to Cannes with his 2002 sophomore feature, “Our Father,” which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight. In 2010, he made his Competition debut with “A Screaming Man” — his most widely distributed film to date — and served on the Competition jury the following year. “Grigris” is his sixth feature.

The talent: As far as I can tell, the film’s 20-something leading man — Soulémane Démé — is a newcomer. The supporting cast includes Marius Yelolo, who had secondary roles in Haroun’s last two features. Producer Florence Stern also steered “A Screaming Man,” while that film’s editor Marie-Helene Dozo — who has also worked with the Dardenne Brothers — also returns. Composer Wasis Diop — a renowned Senegalese folk musician in his own right — is a longtime Haroun collaborator. New to the team is French cinematographer Antoine Héberlé, whose past credits include “Under the Sand” and “Mademoiselle Chambon.”    

The pitch: As with much postcolonial African cinema, Haroun’s work — which, while stately and reflective, has arguably skirted the sentimental in the past — tends to work in an allegorical register, examining Chadian social and political inequalities via intimate domestic tragedies. “Grigris” sounds no different: the title character is a 25-year-old man (Démé) who dreams of being a dancer in spite of a paralyzed leg. When his uncle (Yelolo) falls critically ill, however, Grigris must abandon his dream to pay for his care, and takes a dangerous job in illegal petrol trafficking. And Billy Elliot thought he had it rough. The 101-minute French-Chadian production features French and Arabic dialogue.

The pedigree: African filmmakers are still a relative rarity in the Cannes competition, so with two entries in four years — and a turn on the jury in between — Haroun is obviously Thierry Frémaux’s chosen one of the moment. Tim Burton’s 2010 jury backed up the festival’s faith in the director, handing “A Screaming Man” the bronze-medal Jury Prize — though the film’s critical reception was more respectful than rapturous, the award propelled it to unprecedented levels of global exposure for the director’s work. Haroun’s 2006 film “Daratt” took an equivalent prize in competition at Venice, so he’s climbing the festival status ladder at a healthy rate.  

The buzz: Quiet, but promising. Third World cinema rarely enters festivals with much in the way of advance chatter, but with “A Screaming Man” having  raised awareness of Haroun’s work among the general festival crowd, his latest is expected to build upon that — it could be one of the mass heartstring-tuggers of the lineup. 

The odds: It’s been 38 years since an African film — Algeria’s “Chronicle of the Burning Years” — won the Palme d’Or, so the most neglected continent in world cinema is due a break at some point. And it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see Steven Spielberg go that route. I can’t help suspecting that the biggest brand name in Hollywood cinema will feel inclined to reward something far removed from his own world, and if “Grigris” proves emotionally compelling to a general audience — which the synopsis suggests it might — it could well be rewarded with a major prize. Cannes betting expert Neil Young currently pegs it as the Palme favorite with odds of 9-2; a bold choice, but an eminently plausible one.

The premiere date: Wednesday, May 22.

In the next edition of Cannes Check, we’ll be sizing up a rather less starry entry in this year’s Competition lineup: Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive.”

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”

There’s really only one thing to report out of today’s big AMPAS conclave: the entire membership of the Academy will now be able to participate in the final vote for all 24 categories at the Oscars. And that wasn’t even part of the business at hand, it was something the Board of Governors had decided upon, so they just went ahead and announced it in tandem.

The move was teased last season when screeners of the documentary features and short films were made available so the membership could vote in those categories rather than prove that they saw the nominees at sanctioned screenings. Now they’re just adding the foreign language films and documentary shorts to that list, opening up, for the first time ever, the entire field to the entire Academy.

Academy president Hawk Koch noted a “90% record voter turnout” as reason to push ahead with the rule changes, though, again, we’re just taking the Academy’s word for it that voter turnout was so impressive. And of course, there’s nuance in that figure, because it’s not like 90% of the entire membership voted. “Koch told me 96% of those who signed up to vote electronically did so, while 87% of those who signed up for paper ballots eventually voted that way,” reports Pete Hammond at Deadline. “Those who” voted.

Apparently the decision to hire producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron again was defended, and the ratings boost last year was offered again as support. It’s just staggering to me that one could be so blind as to not understand the ratings are about the movies, not the show. At least one member who Hammond talked to gets it.

There was talking of “going green,” there was museum discussion, there was electronic voting debate and response to the event was mostly positive. But it honestly just sounds, from the various reports, like members were just glad to be involved in the process rather than leave everything to the Board of Governors.

Scott Cooper’s slate of upcoming projects is about as impressive and varied as fellow Cooper Bradley’s as of late. Three years removed from his debut film, “Crazy Heart” (which earned Jeff Bridges an Oscar for Best Actor), the writer/director is set to traverse the nation, from the streets of New York to Depression Era Central California, the Tidewater of Virginia to the blast furnaces of Pittsburgh.

On the latter, Cooper is finishing up “Out of the Furnace” right now. He overhauled Brad Inglesby’s Black List script “The Low Dweller” for producers Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott, loaded it with an impressive cast of actors and set out to tell a blue collar tale against a backdrop of economic decline in Pennsylvania steel country. The film will hit the fall festival circuit later this year en route to awards season, where you can expect to hear plenty about Christian Bale, Casey Affleck and particularly Woody Harrelson.

Beyond that, Cooper’s to-do list is enough to keep anyone’s calendar full. He recently spoke with HitFix about the themes he’s hoping to explore as an artist over this spectrum of projects and the stretching he’s hoping to do as a filmmaker along the way.

First and foremost, Cooper says he would like his adaptation of Michael Armour’s unpublished novel “The Road Home” for Warner Bros. to be his next endeavor, because he finds the world so fascinating and under-explored recently. He’s been researching the film in Santa Barbara County as of late. It will tell the story of a Depression Era rancher entangled in scandal when he’s asked to investigate a local murder.

“I was inspired by Edmund Wilson’s ‘Axel’s Castle,'” Cooper says of the work he’s put into the project behind the scenes. “He traveled around the countryside and wrote a series of articles about the effect of the Great Depression. I also remember seeing a photograph of cotton sharecroppers in Alabama that was taken by Walker Evans in 1936 and it really just moved me. And you can go to Detroit and see that very same family today.”

Cooper is attracted to the period, he says, because of its prescience and its socio-economic parallels to what’s happening in the country today as the middle class is ever squeezed out. He’s expanded the scope of Armour’s story, which already deals with racism and the opium trade, and says that, though a period piece, he wants it to feel very modern. Leonardo DiCaprio is producing through Appian Way after a pleasant experience with “Out of the Furnace.” The film is also currently untitled; Cooper says he likes titles that “reveal themselves over the course of a narrative.”

Indeed, “Out of the Furnace” went through a couple of iterations before settling on its moniker. While writing the script, Cooper thought “Under a Black Sun” might be an apt title, a reference to the sun straining light through the airborne soot of a blast furnace heyday. (The script even once featured Soundgarden’s 1994 track “Black Hole Sun” as an allusion to this.) Director’s chairs on the Braddock, Pennsylvania set sported another title, “Dust to Dust,” though a potential copyright concern nixed that. Eventually “Out of the Furnace” was settled upon, a title actor Sam Shepard (who stars in the film) and legendary director Terrence Malick told Cooper they thought was perfect. “I’d say Terrence Malick and Sam Shepard know a thing or two about titles,” Cooper says with a laugh.

Continuing on, there is also an adaptation of William Styron’s novel “Lie Down in Darkness” on Cooper’s plate, a story that will carry a personal touch as it’s set in his native Virginia. A Southern Gothic tale in the tradition of William Faulkner, the novel tells the story of the dysfunctional Loftis family, and particularly patriarch Milton and wife Helen on the day they set out to bury their daughter Peyton.

“I wrote the script just after ‘Crazy Heart,’ but with that one, it really comes down to casting,” he says. “When you’re casting a family, all the elements have to come together perfectly and delicately. I’m in the process of talking to a number of actors and actresses.”

A premature report last August announced Kristen Stewart as attached to the film in the role of Peyton, but Cooper says there was no truth to it. He’d like to first cast the role of Milton and move on from there.

Then there’s the Big Apple, as Cooper has a pair of projects lined up set in New York City. First there is an adaptation of Claire Messud’s novel “The Emperor’s Children,” written by Noah Baumbach about a group of 20-somethings trying to find their way in Manhattan in the spring of 2001 and the days leading up to, as well as in the fallout in the wake of, 9/11.

“Really I think it’s one of the better novels about life around that time,” says Cooper, who was a big fan of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2011 film “Margaret,” which marinated in the post-9/11 environment of New York. “But, again, casting is really critical with that piece. Noah has written a beautiful script. It’s kind of a present day version of ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ and in many ways, he may be our generation’s Woody Allen.”

Staying with New York, freshly announced is a remake of Olivier Marchal’s 2004 French film “36th Precinct.” Basil Iwanyk”s Thunder Road production company optioned the remake rights. The original film starred Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil in a story of Paris police corruption and it will be transplanted to the NYPD’s anti-terrorism unit.

“I don’t think many films are too ripe for remaking,” Cooper says. “Trying to remake ‘The Wild Bunch’ or ‘Scarface’ is a really bad idea, but this is a film that had certain elements that illuminate the human condition, which is something I look for in everything I do. And I don’t know that many people had seen this film or were aware of it. It easily translates to America and it was different than the other things I had considered; I never want to repeat myself.”

Cooper says his love of cop dramas also played a hand in his decision to take on the project. He cites “The French Connection,” “Once Upon a Time in America” and “Se7en” as a few films he loves and will probably have in mind while working on the film.

Other than that, there is also a unique original concept Cooper has been turning over in his head. This one contrasts strongly with all of the above, yet still has the edge of Americana that is so of a piece with who he wants to be as a filmmaker.

“I’ve always wanted to do a movie about the last day in the life of Elvis Presley,” he says. “Just that day, not the full life story. Whether we’ve seen the full life story as a film or not, I feel like we all know that film. But what must he have been going through that day, affecting people’s lives, going to the dentist at 10:00pm, playing racquetball at three in the morning?”

But with a sigh, he admits the obvious: “I have plenty on my plate to keep me busy for a while. The only issue is trying to find the bandwidth to mount all these projects. But they’re all certainly very worthy.”

“Out of the Furnace” will be the first to hit, and it lands in theaters on October 4.

The Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” was picked up by CBS Films some time back and the course was set for a Cannes debut, which it will receive later this month. Oscar Isaac is on the rise and has the leading role, supported by the likes of Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman and Garrett Hedlund, among others. Bruno Delbonnel has filled in for the Coens’ usual cinematographer, Roger Deakins (who has been nominated five times for Coen endeavors), and the trailer promises lush production value.

So…how will the film figure into the awards scheme later this year? We’ll know in due time, but for the distributor’s part, eyes are clearly on the circuit as it has just been announced the film will receive a December 6 limited release with plans to expand wider on December 20. That puts it right in the thick of it, though it’s also a frame that didn’t pan out so well for Paramount’s period music drama “Not Fade Away” last year, financially speaking.

Seven Coen films have been recognized by the Academy to date. A brief history lesson…

“Barton Fink” (1991) — The first Coen film to land an Oscar nomination. It picked up three, for Best Supporting Actor (Michael Lerner), Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design.

“Fargo” (1996) — The first Coen film to win an Oscar and be nominated for Best Picture, in addition to which it picked up another six nominations, for Best Director, Best Actress (Frances McDormand), Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing. McDormand won, as did the Coens for writing.

“O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) — Two nominations, for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography.

“The Man Who Wasn’t There” (2001) — One nomination, for Best Cinematography.

“No Country for Old Men” (2005) — The first Coen film to win Best Picture. It dominated the Oscars, also winning Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem) and Best Adapted Screenplay, while also picking up nominations (eight total) for Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.

“A Serious Man” (2009) — Two nominations, for Best Picture (the first year 10 were nominated) and Best Original Screenplay.

“True Grit” (2010) — A record nominations haul for the Coens with 10: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Jeff Bridges), Best Supporting Actress (Hailee Steinfeld), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. But it would go home empty-handed.

Which is your favorite? And how do you think “Inside Llewyn Davis” will fit, if at all, amid those efforts at the end of the day? Have your say in the comments section below.