As the Cannes Film Festival passes the half-way point, we ponder the merits of competitors for the Palme d'Or. 

When you’re watching up to five films each day at a festival, your mind can play tricks when you reflect back on what you’ve seen. There’s great risk of plotlines converging if you don’t hastily scrawl notes in the dark.

I wonder if the Cannes jury has the same problem? Let’s hope pen torches are produced at Jury screenings, lest Nanni Moretti, Diane Kruger, Ewan McGregor et al, lose track of which film had the tissue-papered bag of testicles in it… (‘Was that the one that also had the dead dog in the garden?,” a flummoxed Jean-Paul Gaultier might enquire during deliberations. ‘And correct me if I’m wrong, but that nice old lady who died in the Haneke film… Brad Pitt shot her, oui?’)

Okay, perhaps not (none of those moments are easily forgotten). Either way, they have less than a week now to confer about it, now that the Official Competition has just crossed the mid-way point. So here’s a précis of the good, the bad… and the grisly (there has been much, much blood spilt on screen this week), of those in the race for the Palme d’Or.

Filmmakers ponder the reasons why Australian films are out of favour with local audiences.

Kieran Darcy-Smith’s Wish You Were Here is a terrific film, Hopscotch gave it a decent launch and the reviews generally were enthusiastic – yet the Australian thriller has grossed a modest $933,000 in three weeks.

Something is amiss, I suspect, when mainstream audiences aren’t curious to see a superbly-crafted film featuring impressive performances from Joel Edgerton, Felicity Price, Teresa Palmer and Kiwi-born Antony Starr, even when word-of-mouth is positive.

Could it be that cinemagoers have become disillusioned with Australian cinema, with rare exceptions such as Red Dog and Animal Kingdom, after having their expectations lowered from years of movies that failed to entertain, amuse or rouse them?

Alexander Payne hits the road with Bruce Dern, Elijah Wood plays piano for his life, and Tim Roth scores three new roles.

There was a long and unsatisfying seven years between Alexander Payne’s last two movies: 2004’s Sideways and 2011’s The Descendants. The urbane writer/director is looking to better that this time around, and is already casting Nebraska, a road trip comedy (which will be shot in black and white) about a crotchety, ailing father who believes he’s won the lottery and the underachieving adult son who accompanies him to collect the winnings. Payne (pictured)was reportedly keen to lure Gene Hackman out of the retirement he went into in 2004, but the acting great couldn’t be persuaded.

Payne’s current choices, made possible by a low budget, are intriguing. For the father he’s now going with Bruce Dern, the American actor whose credits stretch back to television 50 years ago and who did some of his best work in the 1970s in the likes of The King of Marvin Gardens and Black Sunday. Dern has never stopped working, but he’s generally gone for quantity over quality. As his offspring Payne has opted for comic Will Forte, a former cast member on television’s Saturday Night Live whose main movie experience was starring in 2010’s MacGruber, a very silly MacGyver send-up that was spun out from a television sketch into a feature.

Payne has long had his own ideas about casting, many of them exemplary. It was Payne who gave Reese Witherspoon her defining role as the over-achieving Tracy Flick in 1999’s Election, while for Sideways he had the likes of George Clooney and Johnny Depp lobbying for the roles that the filmmaker eventually gave to the relatively low profile Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden-Church, who both gave outstanding performances. Nebraska – titled for Payne’s home state – is already in pre-production, so it should be with audiences sooner rather than later.

Moonrise Kingdom kicks off the festivities, while the new French President has a close call.

The 65th Cannes Film Festival got underway on May 16th with the world premiere of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.

The day before, freshly elected French president François Hollande was sworn in. The artificial ruckus about how there are – shock! grief! rending of garments – no women directors among the 22 titles in the Official Competition (last year, in a happy coincidence, there were four films in Competition directed by women including Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty) was somewhat offset by the fact that on the 16th, the new cabinet was announced and what do you know? Parity! Equality! Out of a total of 34 government secretaries and ministers, 17 are women. The new Minister of Culture is a 38-year-old woman whose father was a coal miner and who has published two novels to date, including one about the end of coal mining as a profession.

That's funny – festival-goers, watching movies in the bowels of various structures, feel a certain kinship with the miners of yore, except that there's no equivalent of a canary to warn viewers of a poisonously bad film.

Get set for a wave of Aboriginal-themed movies, docos and TV dramas.

It may be too early to proclaim a resurgence in indigenous filmmaking but this year we’re witnessing an unusually high level of films and documentaries from directors such as Ivan Sen, Wayne Blair, Rachel Perkins and Catriona McKenzie.

Toomelah director Sen (pictured) is getting ready to shoot Mystery Road, a murder mystery. McKenzie is putting the finishing touches to family drama Satellite Boy.

The out-of-competition screening of Blair’s soul singer drama/comedy/musical The Sapphires at this month’s Cannes International Film Festival will shine a global spotlight on Australia’s indigenous cinema while Perkins’ doco Mabo will premiere at next month’s Sydney festival ahead of its ABC-TV airing. Mabo features Jimi Bani as Eddie Mabo, the Torres Strait Islander who led the High Court challenge that led to the recognition of native title in Australia.

This week, Idris Elba from The Wire becomes Nelson Mandela, Simon Pegg goes on a pub crawl to end all others, and Jon Hamm heads to India in the name of baseball.

The English actor Idris Elba has had not one but two great television roles to his name. In the epochal American series The Wire he was canny drug dealer Russell “Stringer” Bell, while in his homeland he’s portrayed the obsessive police detective, Chief Inspector John Luther, in the series Luther. As is the way, film roles that didn’t really stretch the imposing actor followed, including Thor and The Losers. Now, however, Elba is in two major science-fiction films, Ridley Scott’s imminent Prometheus, where he joins Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace on the wrong planet, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim, a futuristic tribute to Japanese giant monster movies where soldiers pilot battle robots that fight Godzilla’s contemporaries.

After that Elba gets a real challenge: playing Nelson Mandela in the biopic Long Walk to Freedom. The film, which has secured the former South African President’s life rights, is to be directed by Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl), and will follow Mandela’s life from childhood poverty to a young radical who opposed his country’s repressive apartheid system, to a figurehead who was imprisoned for decades before being released and becoming leader of the nation that had locked him up. Morgan Freeman, in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, Sidney Poitier and Danny Glover, have already played Mandela in his later years, but Elba will have to provide the definitive portrayal of a complex man.

The success of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead and 2007’s Hot Fuzz, a pair of cluey, distinctly British, genre mash-ups written by actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright resulted in to the pair being in such demand that they couldn’t reunite for a third film. Pegg was an unlikely co-star in blockbusters such as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, while Wright went off to make Scott Pilgrim vs .the World. Finally they’re back in sync, along with rotund co-star Nick Frost, and will collaborate on The World’s End, the story of a group of middle-aged men who reunite to attempt a legendary pub crawl. Their pint-laden effort somehow becomes connected to averting the end of the world, which actually sounds plausible where Pegg and Wright are concerned.

Roadshow Films' backflip on releasing indie title Cabin in the Woods is the latest in a line of strange marketing decisions.

Roadshow Films' about-face on its decision to send Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods directly to DVD has been met with begrudgingly open arms by the blogosphere. But inner-city runs in only Sydney (The Chauvel arthouse venue) and Melbourne (the similarly-programmed Nova) will do the film no favours; for the smart suburban teen audience that would’ve driven word of mouth, those cinemas rep a long train ride to-&-fro.

And a dirty taste still lingers about why Australia and New Zealand’s largest, oldest and most-respected independent exhibition and distribution chain is apparently getting cold feet on titles that have such marketable pedigree. A quick glance at the high-profile titles that Roadshow all but discarded (or was going to discard before vocal backlashes prompted a change-of-heart) paints a worrying picture about its faith in its marketing division:

THE HURT LOCKER (2009):
In 2010, Kathryn Bigelow’s bomb-disposal wartime drama took home six Oscars, including Best Picture. Only six months prior, Roadshow notified media that the title would be a home video premiere in this territory. A concerted effort by Australia’s critic groups coincided with the film’s award season momentum, and The Hurt Locker scored a limited release. At that year's Australian International Movie Convention – the annual gathering of both distribution and exhibition sectors, traditionally held on Queensland’s Gold Coast amidst much fanfare and buzz-generating razzle-dazzle – Roadshow proudly boasted of The Hurt Locker’s domestic box-office takings, which had soared to close to US$6million, making Australia one of the best per-capita return’s for the film anywhere in the world.
SBS Film rating: 4.5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes rating – 97%

Two drama school graduates are poised to shine on the world stage.

Elizabeth Debicki and Elizabeth Blackmore: remember the names, because my hunch is we’ll be seeing plenty of both actresses in the coming years.

Both are drama school graduates who had a solid grounding in the theatre. Both have landed high profile roles; Debicki as Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, Blackmore as one of five friends who are possessed by demons in the remake of Sam Raimi’s 1981 classic The Evil Dead.

Both are represented by Shanahan Management in Australia and they seem poised to embark on Hollywood careers, steered by a high-powered US agent and talent manager.

This week, Rooney Mara lands three plumb roles, Fred Schepisi wants to go back to school with Juliette Binoche and Clive Owen, and Darren Aronofsky finds his Noah in Russell Crowe.

Rooney Mara has enjoyed a storybook ascendancy, leaping from TV gigs and small film parts to the iconic role of Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo via little more than a single, telling scene in the same filmmaker’s The Social Network. Mara offered a different take than the original Salander, Noomi Rapace, but her commitment to the role was a highlight of the grimly agreeable thriller. Now Mara is stepping out from Fincher’s tutelage, adding a handful of prominent filmmakers to her CV.

She has already shot one of Terrence Malick’s upcoming movies, Lawless, which reportedly depicts a pair of romantic triangles that take place against the backdrop of the fertile music scene in Austin, Texas. (The reclusive Malick was even photographed at the city annual music festival, South by Southwest.) Mara’s daunting co-stars are Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett, while in Steven Soderbergh’s forthcoming The Bitter Pill she’ll play a wife who becomes addicted to prescription medication alongside Jude Law and Channing Tatum.

Mara’s now also snagged a part in the untitled satire about a conspiracy among world leaders to plan major events in advance that marks the latest collaboration between Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, the team behind Being John Malkovich and Adaptation; Amy Adams and Joaquin Phoenix will also feature. Beyond that there’s still the question of whether the two sequels to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will be remade. Fincher’s take earnt approximately $240 million, which is considered good but not great – Mara and Daniel Craig, who’s currently making the next James Bond adventure, are signed up, but Fincher hasn’t decided whether to return to Sweden yet.

Films on child soldiers, beauty pageants and political asylum are amongst this year's winners.

In a bookended salute to commercial filmmaking, the 11th annual Tribeca Film Festival opened with The Five-Year Engagement and wrapped with a closing night gala screening of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers.

Commercialism aside, the festival lauded a number of first-time directors, non-actors and festival favourites in its slew of awards. The world competition winners for narrative and documentary films were chosen from 12 narrative and 12 documentary features from 18 countries. Best New Director prizes were awarded to first-time directors for both narrative and documentary films, selected from a pool of 24 feature films.

In the juried awards, War Witch, directed by Kim Nguyen (Montreal, Canada), was deemed Best Narrative Feature with its star, non-professional actress Rachel Mwanza, awarded Best Actress in a Narrative Feature Film. The award follows Mwanza’s win at the Berlin International Film Festival for the same role. Developed over 10 years, and inspired by true events in Myanmar and filmed entirely in the Democratic Republic of Congo, War Witch (pictured) is the story of 14-year-old Komona, who is kidnapped from her African village and forced to become a child soldier.