If January is the beginning of the U.S. domestic film festival circuit with the Sundance Film Festival, international film festival season begins with the Cannes Film Festival. Celebrating its 60th year, they just announced their line-up, and there are some heavy hitters among the competition films. I’ve always wanted to go to Cannes, but the reason has usually been because of the majesty, the location and the history of the festival, but this year it’s because the line-up looks great.

The festival will open with Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights, his first English language movie, where singer Norah Jones stars with Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Tim Roth, Ed Harris and others. We’ll see if Wong is able to deliver a print on time. He tends to like to shoot from the hip and edits as long as he can. Last time he got a film in to Cannes, the sci-fi picture 2046, he delivered the print late. Lucky for him he’s supremely talented, though they probably have a rough cut waiting just in case he pulls that stunt again.

The high-profile American films in the festival include the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, in which a hunter stumbles upon dead bodies, millions of dollars and a bunch of heroin; Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, his latest tribute to youth filmed in Portland, OR, shot by Wong Kar-wai’s former cinematographer Christopher Doyle; Tarantino’s Death Proof, an expanded version of his half of the Grindhouse double feature (while Rodriguez’s half is notably absent); and James Gray’s return to the Russian mafia with We Own the Night, from the overrated director of The Yards and his more accomplished debut, Little Odessa.

The American movies that are not in competition include Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean's Thirteen; a compilation Ken Burns made from his new PBS miniseries, The War; and Michael Moore’s latest anti-Bush critique of American bureaucracy and class inequality, Sicko. Even more exciting is Harmony Korine’s new movie, Mister Lonely, which not only stars Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator who discovers a commune where everybody is (presumably) famous, but whose cast also includes not only French director Leos Carax’s actor Denis Lavant (as Charlie Chaplin), but also Carax himself. Also exciting is Abel Ferrara’s new movie about Catholic guilt and underground New York, Go Go Tales, set in a strip club of course.

Which brings me to some of the notable “foreign” films playing in the festival. These will be coming within the next year to a festival, or an art-house theater, or a DVD near you. Just pop these titles into your NetFlix queue and hope for the chance to see them earlier (if at all) in the theaters.

Art-film stalwart and maven of the slow-moving, long take cinema, Bela Tarr returns with what may very well be a thriller, The Man from London; Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov is also fond of slow-moving cinema, and he will be presenting Alexandra; Turkish director Fatih Akin follows his acclaimed movie Head-On with the German co-production Auf der anderen Seite des Lebens; Catherine Breillat directs Asia Argento in an 18th-century love triangle, Une Vieille Maitresse; Carlos Reygadas (Japón) presents his international co-production Silent Light; and the mad Serbian Emir Kusterica returns to Cannes with Promise Me This, about an old man who prays for his son to marry.

These are just some of the “known qualities” who have movies at Cannes. Some of the notable omissions (whether the movies are not done or they’re not good) include Todd Haynes' impressionistic Dylan bio-pic I’m Not There; Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s remake of The Red Balloon; Swedish director Roy Andersson’s follow-up to his acclaimed movie Songs From the Second Floor; and new movies from Paul Thomas Anderson, David Cronenberg and Takeshi Kitano.

Of course the movies that did make it into Cannes give us plenty of food for thought for our next cinematic year, and films to look forward to.

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Andy Spletzer often confuses the Croisette with a croissant.

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