CANNES: The principle “less is more” does not apply to Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes competition contender Winter Sleep. Weighing in at nearly three and a half hours it is hard to find any fat on these bones that could be cut despite the rather lengthy dialogues that make up most of the “action” of this film.

CANNES: It has been a year when a lot of Cannes critics suffered from sore asses as film after film weighed in at well over two hours and most of the front runners from a critical point of view running to 135 or 140 minutes.

CANNES: Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev arrives in competition in Cannes with The Leviathan which might just be his most ambitious and most successful film to date. Zvyagintsev burst onto the international scene with his first film The Return which won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2003.

CANNES: Tommy Lee Jones made his directorial debut in the Cannes competition with his highly respected The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and now the director returns to the Cannes competition with another Western that should prove more accessible to audiences although the The Homesman cannot really be said to be a work of popular entertainment.

CANNES:Director Bennett Miller seems to draw on real life for his best work. He arrives in competition in Cannes with a stunning film based on the real life story of a murder committed in 1996 by John du Pont, a member of one of the US’s richest families.