Cannes is underway, and it's a quieter place without Lars Von Trier there. Despite guesses from some, the Danish auteur isn't on the Croisette with his latest, "Nymphomaniac," but it's not because of the outrage he caused in 2010 with his comments about Hitler, but instead because the sex-laced two-part epic simply isn't ready. Still, there is a presence of some kind, as the films' backers have used the festival to unveil an image that shows the film's starry cast in various suggestive positions. The tableaux includes Von Trier himself (tape over his mouth, camera in hand) looking over much of his cast, including Charlotte Gainsbourg in the title role, Stacey Martin as her younger self, Stellan Skarsgard, Jamie Bell, Christian Slater, Willem Dafoe, Uma Thurman, Connie Nielsen and Udo Kier (nowhere to be seen: Shia LaBeouf). There's a certain amount of fun to be had in finding the not-exactly-hidden phallic images, and if there was every any doubt that this was going to be....

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American cinema seems preoccupied with the emptiness of excess, at least in the first half of 2013. Baz Luhrmann luxuriates in the meaningless wealth of "The Great Gatsby," while Harmony Korine put his own twisted spin on the dark soul of the American dream in "Spring Breakers. And now comes Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring," another look at the at-any-cost pursuit of celebrity and the worship of brand names, but it doesn't bring anything new to a conversation that seems to have run out of things to say. While the film makes pains to remind the viewer that it's "Based on true events," Coppola is less concerned with accurately capturing the ins and outs of the real-life gang than in simply recreating their criminal behavior. But unfortunately, the criminals themselves are little more than one-dimensional sketches. Katie Chang and Israel Broussard form the heart of the film as Rebecca and Mark, a duo of besties who bond at Indian Hills, a school known for taking on last chance kids....

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Hindered by legal precautions, a recently published tell-all memoir and its lead actress dropping out because of that fact, director Abel Ferrara's “Welcome To New York,” his thinly-veiled account of disgraced IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, seemed like a lost cause. t it seems Ferrara, alongside his star Gerard Depardieu, are too formidable a team to be kept down, because our first glimpse of the film has landed online - and it is appropriately bombastic. Apparently filming over the last six weeks in New York -- the vacated role of Depardieu's wife now occupied by Jacqueline Bisset - our first look at the film (via The Film Stage) roars right into the midnight activities of Depardieu's rampaging, sex-addicted politician, “Mr. Deveraux. The trailer appears primed for Cannes as a sales trailer, and in that respect, everything you'd expect from both Ferrara and Depardieu is on full display: the lurid, low-lit depiction of seedy rooms and activities and the hulking, silent men that....

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The upside to directing such a genre-shifting, subversive film as “Cabin in the Woods,” as Drew Goddard did, is that it provides ample experience for whatever world he'd like to tackle next. d indeed, after a string of high-profile writing gigs, the writer/director has chosen an ambitious setting and narrative for his follow-up -- one that features a new type of horror previously unexplored by him. In a move that at first recalls the Great “Deep Impact”/”Armageddon” Faceoff of '98, Goddard has been announced to write and direct another space-bound drama, just a week after the trailer to Alfonso Cuaron's “Gravity” was revealed. he e-book written by Andy Weir, “The Martian,” which is set up at Fox, tells a similarly-hopeless tale of solitude: an astronaut stranded on Mars, who tries to survive long enough to chart a path back to Earth. ccording to The Wrap, insiders claim the project is in fact quite different from Cuaron's film and more of a mix of “Apollo 13” and “Cast....

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Incoming casting news, fresh from the French Riviera: first off, Philip Seymour Hoffman has signed on for a new film, so we can all get our regular dose of rumpled magnificence. God's Pocket” will be directed by John Slattery, who you know as “Mad Men”'s silver fox Roger Sterling but who is making the move to directing (having helmed several excellent episodes of the series in which he stars), adapting a Pete Dexter novel about Mickey (Hoffman), whose attempts to move on after the suspicious, and not unwelcome, death of his unstable stepson are frustrated by a local reporter with a hunch. chard Jenkins, Christina Hendricks and John Turturro are all also involved, which is a pretty damn promising quartet (but then, so is “Philip Seymour Hoffman and three extras, or dead people, or inanimate objects”). d's Pocket, if you’re wondering, is the name of the South Philly neighborhood where it all goes down. Meanwhile the great Cate Blanchett has been cast as the lead in....

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Damn it. Just when we thought we were going to be able to ignore Zach Braff's controversially crowd-sourced sophomore feature, he goes and casts Anna Kendrick. According to The Wrap, the "Pitch Perfect" star, so often the best thing in whatever she's in, has joined the cast of Braff's currently-prepping "Wish I Was Here. The actress will play the love interest of Braff's character's brother (Josh Gad), a young cosplayer named Janine. Manic Pixie Dream Girl alert! Mandy Patinkin is also in the cast (Mandy Patinkin Dream Girl alert! and Kendrick will next be seen in the questionable-looking "Rapturepalooza," which opens on June 7th. Someone else we're a big fan of is British director Eran Creevy, who made an ace debut a few years back with "Shifty," and followed it up earlier this year with homegrown actioner "Welcome To The Punch. We've been tipping the filmmaker, who was one of our Directors On The Rise this year, for a Hollywood breakout for a while and it seems to have arrived....

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Ari Folman's "The Congress" aka "Robin Wright at The Congress" aka "Reviewer's Nightmare" (last title mine) opens the director's fortnight at Cannes this evening and screened for a group of alternately beguiled and baffled press this morning. Evoking Miyazaki and perhaps on-form Gilliam in its best moments, and lurching oddly into "Southland Tales" territory in its worst, it is a film we'd be happy to call a fascinating muddle, were it not a little overstretched to really support even that summation. At the very least, however, should your copy of "Pink Floyd's The Wall" have worn out through overuse, we can see "The Congress" having a similar kind of life as a late-night stoner mindfuck. This is Folman's first return to Cannes (and to feature filmmaking; he's been keeping busy writing for TV otherwise) since 2008's Oscar-nominated and universally lauded "Waltz with Bashir. The five-year gap is attributed to many things, most often to his desire to work in a more....

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The apocalypse is terrifying at the best of times, but when the concept of oblivion hits you through young adult literature -- as the teens of today are finding out through "The Hunger Games," "Divergent," "The Knife Of Never Letting Go" et al -- it's almost guaranteed to lead to some sleepless nights. For a certain generation, that fear of radiation poisoning came from "Z For Zachariah," the 1974 novel by Robert C. O'Brien (who died before the book was completed). A stark and affecting two hander about Ann, a young woman who thinks she's the lone survivor of a nuclear war, only to discover a scientist, Loomis, alive, it's been a high-school favorite for nearly forty years, but other than a low-budget BBC adaptation, has never made it to the big screen. However, for some time now Tobey Maguire has been planning an adaptation through his Material Pictures banner, setting "Compliance" helmer Craig Zobel to direct it a while back, and while Maguire was once set to star, he seems to....

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Has Aussie actor Joel Edgerton become Hollywood's new it-man? He turned heads with a jerk in 2010's crime thriller, "Animal Kingdom" (we immediately took notice) and gained further acclaim for his toe to toe role with Tom Hardy in the underloved MMA drama "Warrior. nbsp;Directors of note also took notice. nbsp;Kathryn Bigelow cast him for a small but important role in "Zero Dark Thirty," and he arguably stole the show from Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and the rest of the cast in Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby. So what's next for an encore? Two plum roles in two major projects everyone's keeping a close eye on. First up, he joins Johnny Depp in a movie about notorious Boston gangster Whitey Bulger called "Black Mass. nbsp;It's a project that will reunite him with "Donnie Brasco" producer Barry Levinson, who will take the director's chair here, and it's one of three projects in the works about Bulger, including one that's being developed by Matt Damon....

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