Cannes set for 70th anniversary

PARIS — A Civil War film by Sofia Coppola, a Ukrainian road movie and a drama about AIDS activism are among the 18 films competing for top prizes this year at the Cannes Film Festival , an international cinema extravaganza that organizers hope can help counter rising nationalist sentiment around the world.

Contenders for the top Palme d’Or prize at the 70th Cannes festival, opening Wednesday, include Coppola’s spooky Civil War drama The Beguiled, starring Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst; American director Noah Baumbach’s family saga The Meyerowitz Stories, starring Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler; and fellow American Todd Haynes’s 1920s-set drama Wonderstruck.

Also aiming to impress a competition jury headed by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar are Okja, a fantasy thriller with an animal-rights theme by South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho starring Tilda Swinton; French director Michel Hazanavicius’s tribute to the French New Wave, Le Redoutable; sex-trafficking drama You Were Never Really Here from Britain’s Lynne Ramsay and starring Juoquin Phoenix; and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a thriller from Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos starring Kidman and Colin Farrell.

Kidman also appears at Cannes in John Cameron Mitchell’s outof-competition entry How to Talk to Girls at Parties and in Jane Campion’s TV crime drama Top of the Lake. Austrian director Michael Haneke, a two-time Palme d’Or winner, returns with Happy End, whose title bears little relation to its content.

French filmmaker Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute looks at the rise of AIDS activism, while festival director Thierry Fremaux called Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature a road movie “about the situation of Russia.”

In all, 49 films will be shown during the May 17-28 festival, including out-of-competition entries and the sidebar competition Un Certain Regard. Twelve of the films are by women — up from nine last year.

Director Alejandro G. Inarritu will be in Cannes with the virtual reality short film Carne y Arena (Meat and Sand), reported to be about migrants crossing the U.S.Mexico border.

In a reflection of changing industry economics, several entries at Cannes this year were funded by Netflix or Amazon. But the festival has decided that in the future, films in competition must be distributed in French movie theatres.