Silent movie up for top film at Cannes
Robert De Niro, an actor of few words, and a film of hardly any words could prove a perfect match as the Cannes Film Festival prepares to hand out its awards.
Among titles competing for the top prize today at the world's most-prestigious film festival is French director Michel Hazanavicius' silent movie "The Artist," which charmed Cannes audiences with a story about early Hollywood likely to appeal to an actor and filmmaker such as De Niro, who heads the awards jury that also includes Uma Thurman and Jude Law, The Associated Press reports.
Other possible winners of the festival's Palme d'Or include Spaniard Pedro Almodovar's horror thriller "The Skin I Live In," starring Antonio Banderas; American filmmaker Terrence Malick's expansive drama "The Tree of Life," with Brad Pitt; British director Lynne Ramsay's school-violence saga "We Need to Talk About Kevin," featuring Tilda Swinton; and Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's heartwarming immigrant tale "Le Havre."
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Hazanavicius, competing at Cannes for the first time, said he has tried to ignore the awards talk swirling about his comic melodrama of a silent-era star whose career crumbles in the sound era.
Almodovar, the Academy Award-winning director of "Talk to Her" and "All About My Mother," has won the directing and screenplay prizes at Cannes but never the top award.
Malick is another past directing winner at Cannes, for "Days of Heaven" in 1979. "The Tree of Life" is only the third film he has made since and marks his first trip back to Cannes, this time with a film setting the travails of a family against a backdrop stretching from the creation of the universe through the age of dinosaurs to modern times.
Notoriously press-shy, Malick stayed out of sight at Cannes, where his film starring Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain had been eagerly awaited for more than a year.
