Cannes Film Festival

French actress Isabelle Huppert will head the jury of the 62nd edition of the Cannes Film Festival in May. Huppert, 55, who has starred in more than 90 films, has twice won the best actress award at the prestigious film festival on the French Riviera. "I am very glad and very proud," the actress said in a statement after organizers announced her selection Friday. "I've had a long relationship with Cannes, and this next meeting will definitely seal my love for the festival and thus for global cinema."

CANNES, France - Walter Salles carefully raises the fingers of his right hand and gently strokes the back of his left. "These are characters," he says, explaining the gesture, "who experience things not vicariously but on the flesh. Men and women in a quest for something they couldn't define yet, who are trying to amplify their knowledge of the world. " More than half a century after "On the Road" was published, 30-plus years since Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights in 1978, and nearly a decade after Salles began working on the film, Jack Kerouac's peerless anthem to the romance of youthful freedom and experience has finally made it to the screen with its virtues and spirit intact.

The yachts will still cruise in, but there won't be as many. The parties will continue well into the night, yet not with the same excesses. And while most American distributors will still come to the French Riviera, some others won't. Given all that's gone wrong in the economy, it's not surprising that this year's Cannes Film Festival will be more restrained than in recent years.

Upcoming films produced by Megan Ellison "Lawless" A Prohibition-era bootlegging drama based on the novel "The Wettest County in the World. " Director: John Hillcoat ("The Road") Stars: Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBoeuf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Mia Wasikowska Debuts: May 19 (Cannes Film Festival); Aug. 31 (in U.S.) "Killing Them Softly" Gritty drama about a mob enforcer. Based on the novel "Cogan's Trade. " Director: Andrew Dominik ("The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford")

She's a 26-year-old former party girl with social anxiety issues, a motorcycle-riding iconoclast who dropped out of USC and attends meetings in Led Zeppelin T-shirts. Megan Ellison is also the most powerful new producer in Hollywood, running a burgeoning movie company from her $33-million compound in the hills above the Sunset Strip - and giving a critical boost to the kinds of adult dramas the major studios have all but abandoned. Hollywood has long attracted wealthy, star-struck investors who don't appreciate the difficulty (or "complexity")

Nicholas Edmiston, yacht broker to billionaires, ambled down Jetee Albert Edouard in the Old Port here, the premier pier at one of the premier events for the yachting set each spring, the Cannes Film Festival. To the genial, roly-poly Englishman with thinning red hair, the boats stationed near the street — mere putters that go for $3 million to $5 million — are something of a tacky affront. Most are festooned with signs for European film companies and promotional banners ("Mazars: accountants to the media sector")

"I played music in high school, I worked in record stores, music was my No. 1 fix," says Stephen Kijak, adding it all up. "I don't know why I'm making films, I should have been in a band." As a filmmaker, director Kijak has done the next best thing. He's made "Stones in Exile," a gorgeously entertaining documentary premiering at the Cannes Film Festival that provides a fascinating window into the Rolling Stones experience via a detailed look at the making of one of their albums.

Woody Allen's 41st feature, "Midnight in Paris," starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (wife of the French president), will open the Cannes Film Festival on May 11, organizers announced Wednesday. But if you're not in Cannes that night, you still might be able to catch the romantic comedy ? it's to be released in some 400 theaters across France on the same day. "'Midnight in Paris' is a wonderful love letter to Paris," festival director Thierry Frémaux said in a statement.

The Cannes Film Festival is again going with an American brand-name for its jury president. Organizers announced Thursday morning that they'd chosen Robert De Niro to head the jury for this year's edition, the 64th in the gathering's history. He follows Tim Burton, who served as president in 2010. The 2011 installment runs May 11-22 in the southern Riviera town. De Niro is no stranger to film festivals, having founded the Tribeca Film Festival a decade ago; that group spun off another international film convocation, the Doha festival, two years ago. The announcement marks the latest involvement for De Niro with the French festival.

It's Hollywood's version of a home-run swing: a pricey premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which can yield a bases-clearing blast — at the risk of a rally-killing strikeout. With some 3,000 journalists from about 80 countries jamming into the French Riviera for Wednesday's start of the 63rd annual film festival and sales market, Cannes has become an unparalleled press junket for worldwide movie releases. Although the benefits can be tremendous — the early, unstoppable enthusiasm for "Up," Pixar Animation Studios' second-highest grossing film ever, was established in its 2009 Cannes premiere — the downside can be just as dramatic, as the festival's critical thrashing of 2006's "Marie Antoinette" helped send Sofia Coppola's post-modern movie to an early grave.

She's a 26-year-old former party girl with social anxiety issues, a motorcycle-riding iconoclast who dropped out of USC and attends meetings in Led Zeppelin T-shirts. Megan Ellison is also the most powerful new producer in Hollywood, running a burgeoning movie company from her $33-million compound in the hills above the Sunset Strip - and giving a critical boost to the kinds of adult dramas the major studios have all but abandoned. Hollywood has long attracted wealthy, star-struck investors who don't appreciate the difficulty (or "complexity")

Aaron Sorkin once declined an offer from Steve Jobs to write a movie for animation house Pixar, saying he couldn't pen dialogue for inanimate objects. Now, however, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "The Social Network" will aim to help bring the life of the legendary tech icon to the screen in a film for Sony Pictures that will reunite him with his "Social Network" producer Scott Rudin. "Steve Jobs" will be based on the bestselling biography written by former Time magazine Managing Editor Walter Isaacson.

On the list of parents' worst nightmares it has to rate pretty high when your child is diagnosed with a brain tumor. That's the news Valerie Donzelli and Jeremie Elkaim received a few years back -- don't fret, this isn't that kind of story; their son is now considered 100% recovered. But the couple did mine their experiences for an unexpectedly upbeat -- and fictionalized -- exploration of love and romance and the ups and downs of the boy's treatment in the film "Declaration of War," France's submission for the foreign-language film Oscar.

Love him or hate him — or love him and hate him — it is hard to deny the colossus that is Jerry Lewis, International Clown. Even if you only know him from his echoes — Professor Frink on "The Simpsons," Adam Sandler movies, the Beastie Boys — you are living in a world that he has partly made. Among American film comedians, he's one of a small number who rate the term "auteur"; at the same time, he's kids' stuff, a thing we know from childhood and treasure like other childhood things.

At this year's Cannes Film Festival, two movies in the high-profile main competition each dealt with prostitution in their own distinctively confrontational way. "Sleeping Beauty," the first feature by Australian writer-director Julia Leigh, focuses very closely on one contemporary young woman initiated into a secret world of privileged decadence. "House of Pleasures," the fifth feature by French writer-director Bertrand Bonello, takes place within a bustling Parisian bordello as the 19th century gives way to the 20th, traditions falling aside to oncoming modernity.

As Justine, the complicated young bride at the center of Lars von Trier's apocalyptic meditation on depression, "Melancholia," Kirsten Dunst is called upon to convey great depths of anguish with very little dialogue. But Dunst, 29, delivers such a nuanced, polished performance that it's easy to see Justine's grief living behind her eyes as the beautiful woman with the doomed future fumbles her way through her lavish nuptials, leaving a trail of fractured relationships in her wake. Just as the film was set to open in Los Angeles, Dunst, who took home the lead actress prize when "Melancholia" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, sat down to discuss how she invested the character with her own experiences and those of the controversial Danish auteur, who's grappled with depression — "all sensible people have," the filmmaker has said.

"I always have a problem giving films titles," Mike Leigh says, thinking about it. "That comes last, and this film was a real tough one, a bummer. At some stage we thought we should just call it 'Life,' but you can't call it that, it's bloody pretentious." "Another Year" was the appropriate title eventually selected, but the truth is that Leigh's exceptional new film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, really is about the turning wheel of life as dramatized by the hand of a master, about the pleasures and jealousies, disappointments and insecurities, destroyed dreams and rekindled hopes that make up our daily lives.

Cannes is always the film festival that critics have to go to, but this year it's shaping up as a place you actually might want to be. With Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" opening its 64th edition Wednesday night, Cannes is known as an event where art and commerce coexist uneasily, where the 20 presumably rarefied films in the official competition share time and space with the sprawling Marche du Film, a marketplace where 4,079 companies from...

Almost every year, the run-up to the Academy Awards features a film no one has heard of, a film like "Slumdog Millionaire" that seems to have come out of nowhere to become a possible best picture nominee. This year, that film is an especially unlikely one: a black-and-white silent French film called "The Artist" that festival audiences have simply adored. While most years I'm as surprised as anyone at this kind of emergence, "The Artist" is a different story for me. Because of a combination of happenstance and luck, I have been tracking this unusual film from before the beginning, and I've been in a position to observe it win hearts and minds across a wide spectrum.

In the movies, almost as a rule, the world ends with a bang. Fireballs engulf entire cities; asteroids crash into Earth; vast swaths of humanity are swallowed up in the iconic form of a radioactive mushroom cloud. The prospect of extinction — or, as Susan Sontag put it, "the imagination of disaster" — has been a cinematic staple since the days of Cold War science fiction, with its chronic, allegorical fear of alien invasion. Planetary annihilation was the grim punch line of the classics of nuclear cinema ("Kiss Me Deadly," "Dr. Strangelove," "Twilight's Last Gleaming")