Hey everyone,

It’s Heidi here.  The photo above features the 9 jurors of the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. Some of the faces might be familiar and some might not.  But let me tell you, this is a solid jury. Earlier this year, Steven Spielberg was announced as the president of this year’s jury.  

Here’s the rest of the jury: 

Vidya Balan (Indian actress)
Naomi Kawase (Japanese director)
Nicole Kidman (Australian actress/producer)
Lynne Ramsay (British scriptwriter/director/producer)

Daniel Auteuil (French actor/director)
Ang Lee (Taiwanese director/producer/scriptwriter)
Cristian Mungiu (Romanian scriptwriter/director/producer)
Christoph Waltz (Austrian Actor)
 

Earlier this year I read The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve and found myself a bit mesmerized by her chapter about the Cannes Film Festival, of which she was a jury member in 1994.  She and her fellow jury crowned Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction that year as the Palm d’ Or Winner.  

John Powers describes Lee Daniel’s post-Precious film Paperboyas a “Southern white trash thriller that’s basically like a Jim Thompson novel made by John Waters.”

It involves Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, urination, masturbation, Nicole Kidman, a murder plot and John Cusack.

John Powers, Fresh Air’s critic-at-large and the movie critic for Vogue, returns from the 2012 Cannes Film Festival to share his thoughts on the films he liked, the films he didn’t care for and the films that may clean up at the box office this year.

[above: a screenshot from the French film Holy Motors]

John Powers on Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia: “[It’s] about two things. One, a huge planet called the Melancholia that is racing towards the Earth and is probably going to destroy it. Side by side with it, you’re getting the story of a family, one played by Kirsten Dunst, who won Best Actress in the festival, and is just great in Melancholia, as the depressive, melancholic sister whose smile is so radiant you just love her, and then her sadness is so terrible, it annihilates the world. … The film is both a cosmic and psychological portrait of destruction and destructiveness and darkness.”

John Powers tells us about some of his favorite films at Cannes, including The Artist: “It is both a silent film shot in the style of an old silent film, with the timing and rhythm of a silent film but it’s about a silent film star played by Jean Dujardin who’s a great heroic figure but the problem is, he’s a great silent film star just at the moment when [the film industry] is going to sound. So he’s having to deal with that issue. … It works like wonders. A very smart friend of mine went in and said ‘I tried hard to resist it but it’s irresistible.’”