CANNES: Director Sofia Coppola has decided to do a remake of director Don Siegel’s Civil War made more than 40 years ago that starred Clint Eastwood. The decision is a strange one and the result is Beguiled a film that succeeds on some fronts but not on others.

CANNES: Documentarist turned fiction director Sergei Loznitsa makes his third venture into fiction film with A Gentle Creature which has scored a competition slot in Cannes.  His two previous feature film outings My Joy and In the Fog both scored major art house and festival successes and A Gentle Creature looks set to continue this trend.

CANNES: Safdie brothers, Benny and Josh, have followed up on their gritty Heaven Knows What that delved into the New York heroin scene with a fast paced street drama Good Time starring Robert Pattinson as a bank robber clearly cut in the mold of Al Pacino and Dog Day Afternoon.

CANNES: Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev follows up on his international art house hit Leviathan which looked at corruption in society with Loveless that looks at the breakdown of family values and love in our contemporary life. While there are no doubt those that will jump to say that this is all about Russia or that “Mr Putin is responsible” as he seems to be accused of just about everything globally these days, Zvyagintsev really is looking at much deeper and more universal values here than just the politics of the moment.

CANNES: Director Todd Haynes scores a slot in the Cannes competition line-up with this seventh feature Wonderstruck based on author Brian Selznick’s critically acclaimed 2011 epic fable for children.  Selznick is also known as a children’s book illustrator and the Haynes film follows in this groove with the main fascination of the film being its striking visuals. Selznick also wrote the screenplay for the film.