Movies

For 66 years, the Cannes Film Festival's highest prize, the Palme d'Or, has been one of the most prestigious in movies. Winners have ranged from classic American films (Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation") to European classics (Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita").

"Manuscripts Don't Burn" tells the story of an Iranian author secretly writing his memoirs and authorities' attempts to destroy the manuscript - a topic the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, knows quite a bit about.

After two weeks, 20 films and parade after parade down the red carpet, the Cannes Film Festival has not produced a clear-cut frontrunner for the Palme d'Or.

Filmmaker and actor Tyler Perry has surprised middle school students in Ohio by showing up at a musical concert and donating $100,000 to help student athletes in the city's South-Western schools.

For the aging, gruff patriarch of his father-son road trip "Nebraska," Alexander Payne tried to lure Gene Hackman out of retirement and considered the likes of Robert Duvall and Jack Nicholson. Bruce Dern calls them "the obvious guys."

A Canadian man is facing charges that he stalked the brother of Jennifer Lawrence after authorities say he repeatedly insisted that the man put him in touch with the Oscar-winning actress so he could protect her, according to court documents.

If you only know Ricky Jay from his side career - as a character actor looming like a sinister talisman in the films of David Mamet, and in other work requiring an enigmatic and sometimes menacing presence - then you don't know the man at all.

Susanne Bier, the Danish director who emerged from Lars von Trier's militantly minimalist Dogma school, is hardly known for her rom-coms. Damaged war veterans, paralyzed accident victims, dark family secrets ... not exactly a laff riot.

Academy award-winner Marion Cotillard gave her all and even learned another language to play a Polish woman struggling with the realities of 1920s New York in James Gray's terse offering, "The Immigrant."

Writer-director Alexander Payne has been nominated for three screenplay Oscars and has won two. So what did the man responsible for films including "Election," "Sideways" and "The Descendants" feel about working with someone else's script for the first time?