As Frank Sinatra once said, the days dwindle down to a precious few. (Okay, Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson wrote it, but Sinatra sang it best.)  With two full days left until the Palme d'Or is awarded and the 65th Cannes Film Festival comes to a close, many festivalgoers have headed home, and the ones who are left are singing their own versions of "September Song," adapted to late May.

By most reports, the thinning crowds haven't done much to ease the long lines for press screenings. "Who knew this many people were interested?" tweeted Guy Lodge, upon encountering a surprisingly fearsome queue for Sergei Loznitsa's "In the Fog." (He got in, but didn't much like the movie.)

But audiences,...

Antonio Mendez Esparza's "Aqui y alla" has won the Grand Prize in the Critics Week section, which takes place simultaneously with the Cannes Film Festival. Organized by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics, Critics Week is devoted to the up-and-coming directors' first and second films.

"Aqui y alla" (left) centers on a man who returns to his village after years of working in the United States; according to the film's website, it is "a story about hope, and the memories and loss of what we leave behind."

Three of the other six features included in Critics Week also won awards. "Sofia's Last Ambulance," a documentary from Bulgarian director Ilian...

The talk of the Croisette Thursday involved a scene in Lee Daniels' hot, sweaty, pulpy Southern blast of a thriller, "The Paperboy," in which the trampy bleached blonde at the centerpiece of the film, played by Kidman, urinates on Zac Efron after he is stung by a jellyfish.

Twitter was abuzz with puritanical tweets about how it was a vision you wouldn't ever get out of your mind, even if you tried. But that scene was just one facet of Kidman's no-holds-barred performance, which includes a sex scene with John Cusack during a public prison visit that makes Sharon Stone's briefly uncrossed legs in 1992's "Basic Instinct" look as quaint as something out of "Harriet the Spy."

...

Kristen Stewart showed up, and the fans' screams were deafening. Kim Kardashian came to town with Kanye West, partied on Diddy's yacht  and tweeted, "What an incredible night in Cannes, France!" And Alec Baldwin was overheard badmouthing Harvey Weinstein for declining to participate in a James Toback Cannes documentary that Baldwin is working on.

Sometimes, Cannes doesn't have a whole lot to do with the movies that are supposed to be the focus of the festival.

But as a wet and relatively uneventful Cannes...