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You know you're mere hours away from the launch of the Cannes Film Festival when the breeze on the Croisette is redolent of musty old critical gripes. Take the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, still fuming over Lars Von Trier's 2000 Palme d'Or winner Dancer in the Dark: "I think it is still one of the most exasperatingly awful films I have seen in Cannes, up there, or rather down there with Vincent Gallo's legendary The Brown Bunny and Pupi Avati's syrupy Il Cuore Altrove from the same annus horribilis of 2003." Damn. Pupi and syrupy? Where do I sign up? [Guardian]...

Righting the wrongs of festivals past, I would never have awarded the Palme d'Or to the awful Dancer in the Dark. But the jury got it spot on with Nanni Moretti's deeply-moving The Son's Room

The Cannes film festival is about to start, and today is the day for savouring the eve-of-battle atmosphere … as ever, a luxurious time of leisure before critics and journalists are all plunged into a frantic rush.

For me, the proceedings will be that little bit more hectic, as I am a member of this year's Un Certain Regard jury, chaired by double-Palme d'Or winner Emir Kusturica. My gibbering excitement about this has, so far, been unremittingly uncool. Last year, at this time, I blogged about an imaginary "No Cannes Do" festival, taking place in my imagination, consisting of 10 well-received or at any rate much talked-about Cannes films which for some reason never made it to the UK.

ROME -- Pupi Avati, the Italian director whose A Heart Elsewhere recently unspooled at the Festival de Cannes, is set to shoot a new picture revolving around Italy's present-day jazz scene. Cameras will start rolling in mid-July on the film, Quando Arrivano Le Ragazze? (When Are the Girls Coming?), Avati said Wednesday. Italian pubcaster RAI's film unit, RAI Cinema, is co-producing with Avati's Rome-based DueA shingle. Avati -- a jazz buff whose many feature films include Bix, a biopic of the 1920s U.S. cornet giant Bix Beiderbecke -- said his upcoming work will be about a fictional Italian jazz sextet.

The festival's official poster may be in Italian this year, but it is France that gets pride of place in the official lineup for the 56th Festival de Cannes, with French films capturing one-quarter of the Competition titles that were unveiled here Wednesday. With the U.S. studios not proffering many movies for selection, Hollywood is represented In Competition by three pictures: Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, a Warner Bros. Pictures/Village Roadshow drama starring Sean Penn, Laurence Fishburne, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon; Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, starring Gallo and Chloe Sevigny; and Gus Van Sant's Elephant, shot with an amateur cast for HBO Films. Festival president Gilles Jacob refuted any suggestion that U.S. filmmakers had boycotted Cannes as a reprisal for France's antiwar stance on Iraq. "Absolutely not," he said. "It's been a difficult year," Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux admitted. As a result, the lineup contains little to set the pulse racing, featuring as it does many directors who have appeared In Competition before. These include Eastwood; Brazil's Hector Babenco, back with his tale of the notorious prison Carandiru, produced by Sony Pictures Classics; Italy's Pupi Avati, who's returning with Il Cuore Altrove (The Heart Is Elsewhere); and Canadian Denys Arcand, with The Barbarian Invasions.

PARIS -- Despite a poster in Italian, it is France that gets pride of place in the official line-up for the 56th Festival de Cannes, with one quarter of the Competition titles unveiled here Wednesday. With the U.S. studios not proffering many movies for selection, Hollywood is represented in Competition by three pictures: Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, starring Sean Penn, Laurence Fishburne, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon; Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, starring Gallo and Chloe Sevigny; and Gus Van Sant's Elephant, shot with an amateur cast. Festival president Gilles Jacob refuted any suggestion that U.S. filmmakers had boycotted Cannes as a reprisal for France's anti-war stance on Iraq. "Absolutely not," he said. "It's been a difficult year," admitted Cannes's artistic director Thierry Fremaux. As a result, the line-up contains little to set the pulse racing, featuring as it does many directors who have appeared in Competition before. These include Eastwood, Brazil's Hector Babenco, back with his tale of the notorious prison Carandiru, Italy's Pupi Avati who's returning with Il Cuore Altrove (The Heart Is Elsewhere), and Canadian Denys Arcand with The Barbarian Invasions.

ROME -- Turkish-born Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek's tale of repressed romance La Finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) took five nods Wednesday at Italy's 48th David di Donatello Awards. The country's top film prizes did not see a big winner scoop the lion's share of statuettes at this year's ceremonies, which featured a rare public appearance by Roman Polanski, whose The Pianist won for best foreign film. Ozpetek's bittersweet drama, which weaves the mutual attraction of a married working-class woman and a bank manager who live in facing apartments with a secret haunting an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor, won Davids for best picture, actor, actress, score and educational film. French sales company Celluloid Dreams recently acquired world rights. The prize for best director went to Pupi Avati for Il Cuore Altrove (The Heart Is Everywhere), a drama set in the 1920s centering on the sentimental education of a shy man.