Marion Cotillard and Jacques Audiard were the luminaries on Thursday at Cannes, with the almost universally well-received "Rust and Bone" staking a claim to be in the awards picture (though some naysayers disagree). Cotillard in particular is drawing some very, very early awards heat, as well as proving irresistible to just about every photographer on the Croisette.

The film, director Audiard said at a press conference, was a direct reaction to his last movie, the prison-set Oscar nominee "A Prophet." According to the AP's Jill Lawless, Audiard described that film as "very male," while "Rust and Bone" was designed to be "full of light and space."

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There is always the one movie in Cannes that you wish you could unsee. Last year it was "Michael," the day-to-day meditation of a pedophile with a boy in his basement.  This year, it has to be "Paradies: Liebe," Ulrich Seidl's film about middle-aged white women who go to Kenya to exploit poverty stricken males by paying them for sex.  While the topic is vital and worth exposing, it's mighty hard to sit through a solid two hours of this torture.

Most women of a certain age who have "let themselves go" have long since given up on passionate sex. To be adored and hungered for isn't on the menu. In its place, either sexless companionship or chicken-fried steak and the jackrabbit vibrator. But the truth of it, which is what "Paradies" sets out to illustrate, is that it isn't really sex so much as love that many of...

Criticism over the absence of women in the main competition at Cannes continues to be an issue at the festival, with a scathing open letter decrying the situation and a couple of notable filmmakers discussing the issue as well.

Before the festival began, an open letter ran in the French newspaper Le Monde. "Men are fond of depth in women," read one line of the letter, "but only in their cleavage."

The letter, which was signed by the feminist action group La Barbe ("The Beard"), including directors Fanny Cottencon and Virginie Despentes, was originally published in French and then translated into English by the Telegraph.

(Left: Cannes...

From the mind, body, heart and soul of Jacques Audiard comes “Rust and Bone” ("De rouille et d'os"), a beautifully rendered, deeply felt film about how traumatic events can sometimes point us in the right direction. 

Audiard, like most modern French filmmakers, does not want to force his story into an inorganic formula with three acts, a catalytic incident, a climax and a resolution.  If those elements are there, no one has carved off the fat. And the same way fat makes meat taste so much better, "Rust and Bone" is made better because of the organic way he lets his characters breathe and allows the intricacies of their motivations to play out.

Co-written by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain, “Rust and Bone” begins with a wayward Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts) caring for his son the only way he knows how: he finds...