With three films by female directors in the mix this year, speculation was rife that the Palme D'Or might finally go to a woman for the first time since Jane Campion made history 25 years ago with The Piano. Eva Husson's Les Filles Du Soleil took an early bath last week after a disastrous press screening; but Italy's…

After flirting with genre in courtroom drama The Third Murder, which bowed at Venice last year, Japan's Hirokazu Kore-eda—a regular face at Cannes since the early 2000s—made a return to familiar ground, not to mention a quick turnaround, with his new film Shoplifters. Having said that, Shoplifters isn't quite what it…

UPDATE: Jane Campion is still the only woman to have won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. Although Nadine Labaki’s lauded Capernaum was a strong contender and scooped the Jury Prize tonight, it was Japanese veteran Hirokazu Kore-Eda who took the top honor with his family story Shoplifters. The Grand Prize went…

Ruben Östlund is riding high this week, as the newly-crowned winner of the Palme d'Or for his latest film, The Square, which premiered in Cannes a week last Saturday. It's a continuation of themes Östlund explored in his last film, Force Majeure, about the burden of human intelligence and societal propriety inasmuch…

UPDATE, 12:26 PM PT: The Cannes jury said this was the longest deliberation process in the history of the festival as tonight’s awards ceremony began. Following conventional wisdom, there are some head-scratchers in the mix (stay tuned for Pete Hammond’s analysis). The Palme d’Or went to Ken Loach’s well-regarded I, Da…

As we embark on 69th Cannes Film Festival, the eternal question returns: Why is it that the two most prestigious and glamorous events in cinema — the Riviera festival and the Academy Awards — never seem to agree on what a Best Picture should be? Since 1955, when Cannes began handing out the Palme d'Or — a top prize…

During the past week in Cannes people kept asking me, ‘so who is going to win the Palme d’Or?’ I long ago gave up trying to play that guessing game. Juries do their own thing and they’re often unpredictable. But no one was predicting French director Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, about a created family of Sri Lankan …

UPDATE, 12:30 PM PT: Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, a drama about a Sri Lankan Tamil warrior who flees to France and works as a caretaker outside Paris, scooped the Palme d’Or this evening. The win for Audiard, an acclaimed French filmmaker who has previously taken the Grand Prize for 2009’s A Prophet and the Screenplay…

Agnès Varda will be honored for the body of her work at the closing ceremony of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. She’s the first woman selected for this distinction. Only three other directors — Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Bernardo Bertolucci — have been recognized in this way for the global impact of their body…

Adopt Films has acquired all U.S. rights to this year’s Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep. The Turkish drama took the top prize despite its daunting 3-hour, 16-minute run time that even had jury president Jane Campion wondering if she’d need a bathroom break in the middle of the…

It’s all over but the re-runs.  The 67th Cannes Film Festival  unofficially ended Saturday night with the crowning of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s  endless, but admired, Chekovian epic Winter Sleep being crowned with the coveted Palme d’Or. Because French elections fall on Monday the festival decided to end the key…

UPDATE 11:24 AM PT: Before my colleague Pete Hammond weighs in with his analysis of tonight’s winners and comments from the jury, here’s a little bit about what went down at the prize ceremony. There were several emotional moments with Master of Ceremonies Lambert Wilson kicking things off by saying, “The best things…