As millions of ordinary homeowners and investors all over the developed world have discovered over the last two years or so, the moral hazard associated with capitalism’s boom-and-bust cycles can produce extraordinarily painful results. Stone’s long-delayed “Wall Street” sequel will surely make news as the first major motion picture to dramatize the worldwide financial crisis, and to point the finger squarely at those who induced it, exacerbated it and lied about it.

But I also think Stone’s new film expresses a more personal, intimate sense of moral hazard, which more broadly indicates the possibility that one or more parties to a contract may lie, cheat, steal or otherwise behave badly. Stone may now feel that his 1987 “Wall Street” made its piles of money under false pretenses, or at least that it failed to deliver the lesson he thought it would. Instead of a parable about the evils of greed and speculation, “Wall Street” was seen by many as an antiheroic saga with a charismatic dark angel at its center. (John Milton had much the same problem with “Paradise Lost,” not that I’m equating the two.) For the would-be financial whizzes of the “American Psycho” generation, Gordon Gekko was a role model and a father figure, not a cautionary example.

“Oliver and I were both pretty stunned by the way people perceived Gekko,” Michael Douglas told a packed press conference after the film’s Friday morning preview screening. “He was a very well-written villain, and people are always attracted to villains. But we never imagined that all these MBAs, all these kids coming out of business school, would say he was the person they wanted to be.

“This time around, we saw an opportunity to start him over again from the bottom. And it’s really ambivalent. The biggest question I get about Gordon in this movie is: Has he changed? Is he a changed man? Well, you don’t find out until the end.”

In that spirit, I’ll discuss “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” only in general terms. Most of you won’t get to see it until its worldwide release in September, and a full review should wait until then. It’s an ambitious, uneven, surprisingly talky melodrama, which mixes a quasi-documentary approach to the crash of 2008 with the story, as Michael Douglas puts it, “about how money shapes families and how money can destroy families.”

Along with Douglas, Shia LaBeouf and Carey Mulligan in leading roles, Stone’s terrific supporting cast includes Josh Brolin, Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, Vanessa Ferlito and 94-year-old Eli Wallach, sensational as a sinister Wall Street patriarch. Although the title has a nicely evocative ring, it’s actually bowdlerized: “Money,” Gekko tells would-be son-in-law Jacob Moore (LaBeouf) on a New York subway car, “is the bitch who never sleeps.” In other words, one night she’ll get away from you.

While the movie has moments of beauty (thanks to cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto) and considerable thoughtfulness, I only wish it had more of the mordant masculine menace suggested by that scene. Stone and his writers, Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, do indeed seek to tear Gekko down and then rebuild him, perhaps hoping to lay bare the essential nature of the man, and of the culture of endless accumulation and manipulation that he represents.

In the film’s opening sequence, Gekko is released from federal prison in 2001, after eight years behind bars. He reclaims his personal belongings, which include a gold Rolex and a mobile phone that weighs more than the Manhattan phone book. No one shows up to meet him outside the gates. As we learn in short order, his daughter Winnie (Mulligan) won’t speak to him, although she’s his only living blood relative and also holds the keys to his financial future.

Flash forward to 2008, when Gekko has reinvented himself as a best-selling author and professional Cassandra, telling adoring throngs how much worse today’s masters of the universe have fucked them than he ever did. That’s when he meets Jacob, who is both engaged to his estranged daughter and is also an ambitious young energy trader at an investment bank that’s about to drown under a tide of worthless paper. (The collapse of Jacob’s firm is clearly modeled on the historic implosion of Lehman Brothers.)

Stone clearly longs to invest these characters with emotional and moral ambiguity, and to craft a tale whose heroes and villains are never entirely clear. (As Stone put it, “Each of the characters plays each other’s roles at different times in the movie.”) I’m just not sure that’s where his strengths lie. It may not be accidental that Josh Brolin gives the movie’s best performance as the thoroughly abominable Bretton James, an ultra-slick investment titan who helps bring Gekko and Jacob together (because they both hate his guts).

Brolin’s character, however, is ancillary to the movie’s central triangle, in which each member ostensibly wants the same thing — to heal the rift between Winnie and her father — but none of them is being entirely straightforward. Jake is a classic capitalist idealist, who believes he can make a killing on Wall Street while funding a major societal breakthrough (a voodoo-flavored fusion-energy scheme). Winnie wants to put her left-wing investigative website on the map with a major scoop. (No, as far as I can tell it’s not supposed to be Salon.) And Gordon wants … well, what the hell do you suppose Gordon wants?

If you think it’s a bit rich to sit around at a resort town in the south of France with a bunch of people from Hollywood talking about the evils of capitalism, well, you’d be right. Nonetheless, that’s exactly what we did at the press conference, which offered one of the most felicitous and absurd combinations I’ve experienced in several years of coming here.

Things happen at Cannes that don’t happen anywhere else. One question came from an Iranian journalist, who inquired about Stone’s dormant plan to make a documentary about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s controversial president. (It remains dormant.) The next reporter who took the mike was from Israel, and we all held our breath. But no, he didn’t challenge his colleague from Tehran to talk about nuclear reactors or the Holocaust. He asked Michael Douglas about being an older actor in Hollywood. (There are fewer studio roles, but you can still find parts in interesting independent films.)

Beefy, mustachioed and sunburned, Oliver Stone looked ready to step outside, don a tan blazer and work alongside the alternately menacing and cheerful security guards who man the doors of the Palais des Festivals. When Douglas and producer Edward Pressman approached him about reviving Gekko and “Wall Street,” he said, it was 2006 and the boom was near its apex. “I didn’t want to celebrate that culture of wealth. It just seemed wrong, it had no appeal for me. But after the crash — I mean, that was a major heart attack. Then I knew it was time for Gordon Gekko to come back.”

Asked by an Arab journalist whether the film was “anti-capitalist,” Stone paused for a long moment and chose his words carefully. Stone is not entirely unlike Gekko, in that he plays a double game and is always in danger of succumbing to moral hazard. He hangs out with Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro (with whom he recently filmed a third and presumably final interview), but also wants to keep on making Hollywood movies and flying first-class to Cannes on somebody else’s nickel.

“I’m confused, as are many people right now, about whether capitalism in its present form will work,” he finally said. “It seems not. It goes beyond America, of course, to England and Greece and many other places. It looks like we need serious reform and regulation.

“You know, when I look back at the ’80s, it’s like we all got drunk. In 1987, I thought was going to correct itself. But it didn’t. It got worse. The real income of the American worker flattened out in 1973, but American productivity went way up. So there’s a real imbalance between what ordinary people make and what the bosses and managers, the people at the top, make. It’s an enormous problem.”

The next question came from an Egyptian fellow who asked Michael Douglas, “What is it like to be Michael Douglas?” The answer was about children and nuclear weapons.

It’s got a screenplay from Hollywood hackmeister Brian Helgeland that suffers from a near-terminal case of prequel-itis and is loaded with on-the-nose emotional beats and blasts of present-tense American ideology. Turns out Robin Hood wasn’t just some dude in Sherwood Forest who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He also brokered the deal between England’s King John and the landed aristocracy that produced the Magna Carta, the foundational document for civil liberty in the English-speaking world! He was also George Washington’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, and sent the Gettysburg Address to Lincoln via a time-travel mind-meld!

OK, that last part isn’t really in the movie. But it sure felt that way. Helgeland probably put quotes from Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry into Robin’s climactic monologue before concluding, with great reluctance, that they just wouldn’t fly. Then there’s the question of the man uttering that monologue, sex-god bruiser Russell Crowe, who plays Robin with his customary blend of brooding, manly rectitude and ferocious hangover.

Crowe has never possessed much dramatic range, but he can be — and sometimes is here — a tremendously charismatic screen presence who imparts an air of naturalness even to stupid roles in stupid movies. There’s something off about this performance, though. It’s got a calculated movie-star-ness about it, as if Scott had assured him that every character issue and every plot point could be resolved by striking a gloomy non-expression at the perfect angle and holding it for five seconds. Hey, don’t worry about any of that acting-school bullshit, Rusty. They loved you in “Gladiator”! (Which is, at the risk of being obvious, the career-topping, Oscar-sweeping formula Scott and Crowe long to recapture here.)

What I’m working my way around to saying (talk about damning with faint praise!) is that despite its abundant flaws and historical howlers and generally dimwitted tone, “Robin Hood” is a surprisingly enjoyable work of popcorn cinema, if you’re willing to take it on its own terms. As ever, Scott hires the best production-design teams in the business, and his muddy vision of late medieval Britain — where even London is little more than a collection of wood-and-wattle huts built around the royal castle — is richly detailed and totally convincing. Much more important, this is a knockout love story built around two adult characters who’ve learned some of life’s toughest lessons and faced real responsibilities.

I don’t know how much money Cate Blanchett got paid to play Marian Loxley, the aristocratic widow who will become — in the story’s future tense — Robin’s Maid Marian. It was probably more than you and I combined will make in 10 years, but in terms of redeeming this film as a viewing experience, it might not have been enough. For my money, Blanchett’s beauty only grows more luminiscent as she gets older (she celebrates her 41st birthday this week, if you haven’t sent a gift), and in this role as a rural woman forced to run her absent husband’s estate she commands the screen with supernal grace and a fiery sense of purpose.

Moreover, when paired with Blanchett, Crowe’s gloomy demeanor and noncommittal expression — he looks like a man unsure whether what he just ate was chocolate or cat shit — seems directed at a worthy object. In this before-the-man-became-a-legend prequel, Crowe’s Robin Longstride is an archer who skips out on the army of King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) as it pillages its way homeward from the Crusades, perhaps because he’s developed a conscience about all that wanton killing of Muslims. (Ascribing a 21st-century sense of morality and cultural sophistication — not to mention literacy — to the uneducated son of a 13th-century stonemason is nice and all. But, you know, not that plausible.)

After Robin and his band of fellow deserters fight their way through a series of narrow escapes and schmooze their way across the English Channel wearing knightly get-ups they stole off dead guys, he fulfills a battlefield promise to return one dead knight’s sword to his family. The sword has some weird stuff written on the hilt, which makes Robin have these acid-flashback childhood memories. (I believe it’s the Middle English equivalent of “Luke, I am your father!”) The family turns out to be the Loxleys of Nottingham, and Robin finds Marian and her aged father-in-law (Max von Sydow, in another enjoyable crusty old guy role) barely clinging to their estate against bandits, rapacious tax collectors, and the buffoonish Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen, and they’re really going to have to make him more imposing if they want to make a credible sequel).

If you think that sounds complicated, we haven’t even gotten into all the political back-stabbing, some of it ripped from the pages of history and some of it total bullshit: Vain and cruel pretty boy King John (Oscar Isaac) accedes to the throne after Richard’s death, only to become the object of universal hatred and sinister French plots. This story’s central bad guy is bald-headed, black-clad Godfrey (Mark Strong), an Anglo-French double agent with the scar, sneer and rapacious appetites to match — along with an ability to be in all places at all times that suggests a DC Comics supervillain. (One could point out along the way that this movie presumes a conception of nations and nationality that simply didn’t exist at the time, and that Richard the Lionheart was himself French. But why be pedantic?)

When Robin agrees to pose as Marian’s missing husband in order to restore stability to Nottingham — well, we know what’s coming. At first she makes him park his manly hunk of flesh on the hearth to sleep with the dogs. Arf, arf! Owoo! But let’s just say that this lady’s been on her own for a while, if you catch my drift, and just to get the grime of 10 years of Crusadin’ off Robin, she’s got to help him wrestle all that chain mail off his impressive torso.

Seriously, though, the sexual chemistry between Crowe and Blanchett is fully convincing, and acts as an electrical field that energizes the mediocre movie around it. New romance after age 35 always carries an element of relief and reprieve, and this hard-luck couple find each other in the Middle Ages, when to be not yet dead of dysentery or gangrenous infection at that age required a minor miracle. When they look at each other with evident hunger, you can feel their shared wonder: Can it really be true that, in the middle of this miserable existence, God has granted me this? Solely because of its triumphant central coupling, this labored prequel — which doesn’t get Robin Hood and his Merrie Men into the forest until the very end — may form the basis for a viable franchise.

According to a press release issued Wednesday by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, a leading French cultural institution, Polanski is showing “signs of grave depression,” which might not be surprising. This ailment, the academy’s release went on, had an obvious remedy: the filmmaker’s “rapid liberation” from house arrest at his villa in Gstaad, Switzerland. “Since the sentence initially expected [for Polanski's 1977 offense] has in every possible sense been served for more than 30 years, we cannot see why the demand for his extradition continues.”

Also on Wednesday, the magazine La Règle du Jeu (Rules of the Game) published the pro-Polanski petition signed by Godard, Varda, Bertrand Tavernier, Olivier Assayas, actor-director Mathieu Amalric and six other prominent filmmakers who are here at Cannes this week. (Two of the 11 are female: Varda and young French director Katell Quillévéré.) Like the Beaux-Arts press release, this petition focuses on legal issues surrounding Polanski’s extradition case and possible sentencing, and not at all on his original offense. This essential mistrust of the American judicial system — and perhaps the entire American social climate — is the central issue that divides European and American opinion on the Polanski matter.

“The undersigned have learned with astonishment of new information brought to our attention by Roman Polanski,” the petition begins. Citing Polanski’s own public statement published by La Règle du Jeu on May 2, the petition goes on to discuss former Los Angeles District Attorney Roger Gunson’s February testimony to the effect that “Roman Polanski had served, 33 years ago in the penitentiary at Chino, the entirety of the sentence decided by the judge at the time.” This “essential piece,” the petitioners write, “has been strangely cared for on the scales of American justice.”

Here comes the big finish: “Conscious of how much this festival … owes to the great auteur of ‘The Pianist,’ conscious, also, of some basic rights such as the impossibility of judging and condemning a man twice for the same offense, conscious, in the end, that the demand for extradition expressed by the United States is based on a lie, we appeal to the Swiss authorities and urge them not to believe the word of Governor Schwarzenegger and his prosecutors.”

It’s a bravura performance: No jurisdiction that would actually elect Arnold Schwarzenegger can presume to judge an artist of Roman Polanski’s greatness! Now, the facts about exactly what deals were made and broken at the time Polanski fled to France in 1978 are by no means clear. Depending on how you interpret them, he may indeed have a viable legal case for receiving a minimal or symbolic sentence. But this week’s publicity offensive in the European media, which has included absolutely no discussion of Polanski’s original crime, is about something larger than that. It’s about the enduring sense on this side of the Atlantic that America, even in the Obama era, remains a land of philistine, puritanical barbarity.

Much of the pro-Polanski passion has been stirred up by journalist and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who publishes La Règle du Jeu and has campaigned vigorously for the director’s release. It’s logical to conclude that Lévy played a leading role in crafting the filmmakers’ petition, and may indeed be its real author. Lévy is a prominent public intellectual with no precise American parallel, so famous here he is often simply called “BHL.” (If you took Bill O’Reilly and gave him Harold Bloom’s education, you might get Lévy.) He’s no left-winger and no knee-jerk anti-American; his controversial positions in recent years have included supporting the Iraq war and favoring laws to limit the public role of Islam in European life. But Lévy embraces the traditional, nationalist conception of France as the home of reason and human rights. He has evidently concluded that sending Polanski back to L.A. is the moral equivalent of shipping Chinese or Iranian political dissidents back home to face the firing squad.

Still, there’s something different about this year. When I read the other day that Cannes was adding “Route Irish,” the new film from 2006 Palme d’Or winner Ken Loach, as a last-minute competition entry, I was momentarily confused: But they’ve already got a Ken Loach film.

In fact, no, they didn’t. What Cannes programmer Thierry Frémaux already had was a Mike Leigh film, and while they may both be aging, left-wing Brits with social-realist tendencies and monosyllabic names, they are not the same person. (Spare those e-mailin’ fingers: Accents aside, their movies aren’t all that similar either.)

My confusion, however, does point to a problem with the 2010 Festival de Cannes lineup: A whole lot of Loach and Leigh and other films and filmmakers at about that respectable but unglamorous level. I’ve spent a lot of time parsing the Cannes roster, and have concluded that, film-buff-wise, it offers the possibility of being absolutely great, in an earnest, artistic, quietly ambitious kind of way. But the Palais des Festivals, that splorgulous concrete ’80s monstrosity on the Mediterranean beachfront, was not built on earnest aesthetic ambition.

It was built on the discordant, schizophrenic marriage between art and commerce — between European pretension and Hollywood shamelessness — that has made Cannes a headline-grabbing event around the world, for ordinary moviegoers as much as for cinephiles. And this year’s edition, arriving precisely as the worst economic crisis in the brief history of the European Union hits bottom, suggests that model is itself in crisis.

I’ll be in Cannes Wednesday night for the world premiere of Ridley Scott’s splashy, ultraviolent men-without-tights update of “Robin Hood,” starring Russell Crowe as the heroic bandit of Sherwood Forest and Cate Blanchett as his Maid Marian. Friday offers the premiere of Oliver Stone’s long-awaited “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” with Michael Douglas reprising his generation-defining role as greed guru Gordon Gekko, and supported by Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin and Carey Mulligan.

But after we see those two films — and maybe Doug Liman’s “Fair Game,” with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts (about which more below) — many of the paparazzi and gossip columnists will depart the Cote d’Azur for sunnier, or at least more celebrity-kissed, climes. It may be an enriching week after that, and I’m exactly the sort of person who’s supposed to welcome that. Mais je dis non! Bring on the salon-bronzed legs, the camera-hogs in form-fitting tuxedos, the supposedly famous Ibiza club DJs. Is it too late for Frémaux to get “Sex and the City 2″?

That was never in serious consideration (sadly) but lots of other movies were. Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” starring Penn and Brad Pitt, isn’t finished, and the selectors simply passed on such varied big-name delights as Sylvester Stallone’s action-dude roundup “The Expendables” and Julian Schnabel’s Middle Eastern-themed “Mirai.” That leaves us with an interesting but relatively low-wattage lineup full of world-cinema veterans and relative unknowns, with a special focus on Asia. The age range alone is extraordinary: Canada’s Xavier Dolan is barely into his 20s, while Portuguese-French legend Manoel de Oliveira is now 101. Compared to him, 74-year-old Woody Allen and 79-year-old Jean-Luc Godard are in early-mid career. (I don’t really talk about Godard’s new film below. It’s called “Socialism,” which is all you need to know to estimate its potential audience. I’ll save other commentary for when I’ve actually seen it.)

Here’s my traditional (and largely arbitrary) breakdown of Cannes films, starting with the biggest events and moving toward the obscurities.

The Sound and the Fury

After the red-carpet gala for “Robin Hood,” which will proceed with Crowe and Blanchett but without director Ridley Scott (who is laid up at home with an injury), the profound Cannes hunger for paparazzi-worthy glamour spectacles will devolve almost entirely onto “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” without question this festival’s biggest event. (As I write this I haven’t seen “Robin Hood” yet, but the opening-night film at Cannes is mocked by the cognoscenti no matter what it is.) “Wall Street” won’t open Stateside until fall, and possibly isn’t in final form, so this should be exciting. 

You can also bet that “Fair Game,” Doug Liman’s drama about the Bush administration scandal surrounding CIA couple Valerie Plame (played by Naomi Watts) and Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn), will attract considerable attention. Penn may be a bigger star in France than he is at home, but the specifics of the story will be largely inscrutable to Europeans (except for the fact that GWB plays the bad guy). “Fair Game” splits the difference between this starfucking category and the next, more ahh-tistic one, as does Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” another of the Woodman’s late-career globetrotting divertissements. Brolin and Watts — is this their year or what? — which is a great start. I know nothing else about it, except that Allen would clearly love to replicate the 2008 Cannes success of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” which became a worldwide hit.

The Devil’s Candy

I use this term to describe the often unattainable marriage of art and commerce, found in films that win awards, cause critical swooning and, somewhere along the way, attract a paying audience too. These are precisely the movies Cannes was built to enable; think “Inglourious Basterds” and “No Country for Old Men,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

Once you get past the above-mentioned Doug Liman and Woody Allen movies, contenders for Satan’s sweetmeats are thin on the ground in Cannes this year, which is precisely what makes this festival feel buzz-deficient. Arguably, one of 2010′s most anticipated premieres is for a documentary, “Inside Job,” in which policy insider turned filmmaker Charles Ferguson tries to attack the global financial crisis with the same muckraking zeal he applied to the Iraq war in his devastating “No End in Sight.”

We’ve already discussed Mike Leigh, who returns to the Croisette with “Another Year,” another of his semi-improvised social-realist comedies — but despite glowing reviews for his last film, “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Leigh no longer has a high international profile. You could say the same about French director Bertrand Tavernier, a respected veteran of global cinema going the costume-drama route with “The Princess of Montpensier.” (I don’t think Tavernier has had a film released in the United States since 1999, and he’s best known for “Round Midnight” in 1986.) Three years after “Babel,” his overstuffed, star-studded ensemble drama, Mexico’s Alejandro González Iñárritu gets back to basics with “Biutiful,” a Spanish-language thriller starring Javier Bardem. There’s one I’m definitely curious about.

“Diving Bell” star Mathieu Amalric makes his feature directing debut with “On Tour,” in which he also stars as a Parisian professional burnout who starts over as an American burlesque entrepreneur. Advance word is strong, and at some point Amalric’s got English-language stardom in his future. But is the retro-burlesque craze a big enough trend to support a movie?

In an extremely light year for American films, there’s one indie at Cannes with the potential for some degree of breakout success — but it’s a tough sell, at least in theory. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play a working-class couple whose marriage hits the rocks in “Blue Valentine,” a spectacular narrative-feature debut from director Derek Cianfrance that explores a level of American life hardly ever seen in the movies. Lusciously photographed, with riveting star performances, it’s the only dramatic film to premiere at Sundance this year and move on to Cannes. If and when you finally get to see it, you’ll understand why.

High Art With Low Expectations

This category captures that large subset of festival films made by directors with impeccable artistic credentials, films that are likely to set a tiny coterie of journalists, bloggers, festival programmers and cinephiles abuzz while receiving virtually no attention from the rest of the world. Should those of us who are excited about seeing the new Pablo Trapero and Hong Sang-soo movies even care about the rest of the world? That’s a much bigger question than I can handle in my jetlagged condition. Let’s just say it does no good to climb atop a soapbox and preach at people about movies they A) almost certainly can’t find, and B) very likely would not enjoy.

Having thus admonished myself, I’ll keep the sermon short. Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami is at Cannes with his first “global” film (i.e.., since leaving the land of the mullahs), “Certified Copy,” with French superstar Juliette Binoche. Arab-French director Rachid Bouchareb’s “Outside the Law,” a drama set against the Algerian war for independence, is a very big deal in France. Argentina’s Trapero, who’s been here before with a wry family comedy (“Rolling Family”) and a wrenching prison drama (“Lion’s Den”), seems to have become a regular. Beloved French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Summer Hours,” “Irma Vep”) offers an only-in-Cannes experience, perhaps literally: A five-and-a-half-hour film about ’70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal. I do want to see it, kind of. (OK, it’s actually a TV series crammed into a single afternoon.)

A pair of critic’s-darling directors, Romania’s Cristi Puiu (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”) and China’s Jia Zhangke (“Still Life,” “The World”) return with eagerly awaited new dramas. I personally found Quebecois wunderkind Xavier Dolan’s “I Killed My Mother” (made when he was not yet 20) insufferable, but his admirers will no doubt queue up enthusiastically for “Heartbeats.”

Cannes programmers have been slow to recognize the new wave of art-house cinema from Asia, but this year it sounds as if they’ve finally listened to the annual chorus of complaints. In fact this is a tremendous year for Asian films on the Croisette, almost certainly the best ever. Along with new work from Jia and aforementioned Korean slacker-cinema titan Hong Sang-soo, there’s “Outrage,” a violent new yakuza drama from Japanese actor-artist-director and all-around Renaissance man Takeshi Kitano. Korea’s Lee Chang-dong, who had a smash here three years ago with the female-centric drama “Secret Sunshine,” is back with “Poetry,” and I hear strong advance word on a film called “Chongqing Blues,” from Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai.

All that is trumped, for devotees of drifty, dreamy Asian weirdness, by the new film from Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“Syndromes and a Century”). As if his name weren’t enough — Weerasethakul has occasionally invited Western journalists to address him as “Joe,” in recognition of our total tongue-tied defeat — it’s called “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” I really don’t expect anybody to care, but I can’t wait.

Into the Unknown

Not obscure enough for you? We’re not done! Here’s where I embarrass myself by pimping out a few movies based on nothing, or almost nothing: some rumors, a half-translated review, reports from a friend of a friend of a friend. But this is what film festivals are all about, really — getting a totally unexpected look into a world you know nothing about. Two years ago, I wandered into a screening of the Chilean film “Tony Manero” mostly because Jim Jarmusch was receiving an award before it started. I hadn’t heard of the movie or its young director, Pablo Larraín. Yet that utterly demented disco-era serial-killer psychodrama remains one of the most intense moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had.

There’s bound to be something like that lurking amid the catfish at the bottom of this year’s Cannes pond as well — maybe the pseudo-documentary “My Joy” by Russian collage-artist Sergei Loznitsa, or ultra-indie New York filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan’s new “Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs).” Moving in totally different directions, here are two films I’ve promised myself to see: “Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project,” by Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó, who people keep telling me is indescribably weird and original, and the latest in a recent wave of German-language neo-noir thrillers, Christoph Hochhäusler’s “The City Below.” Mind you, if I break that promise to myself, it’s not like anybody’s really going to notice.

Ahead of the premiere of “Robin Hood,” fans were staking out a spot near the festival headquarters in hope of catching a glimpse of Crowe and co-star Cate Blanchett as they walk the newly laid red carpet later Wednesday.

The media blitz around Ridley Scott’s adaptation comes at a convenient time for the action-packed film, which will go head-to-head with the reigning blockbuster “Iron Man 2″ when it opens in parts of Europe and the U.S. this week.

Like “Robin Hood,” many of the other big-name movies in this, the 63rd edition of the prestigious festival are to be shown out of competition.

A-list movies not in contention for awards include Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” — the followup to their 1987 hit “Wall Street” — and Woody Allen’s ensemble romance, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” starring Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderas, Anthony Hopkins and Freida Pinto.

Only one U.S. film will be in the running for Cannes’ top prize: director Doug Liman’s “Fair Game,” starring Watts as CIA covert operative Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked by officials in the Bush administration. In years past, there were as many as five American films in competition at Cannes.

U.S. director Tim Burton heads the jury, which also includes British actress Kate Beckinsale, Puerto Rico’s Benicio del Toro and Indian director Shekhar Kapur, who made “Elizabeth.”

Early contenders for the Palme d’Or include “Biutiful,” by Mexican critical darling Gonzalez Inarritu. Set in Barcelona, “Biutiful” stars Spanish hunk Javier Bardem as a father struggling to protect his children.

With “Certified Copy,” top Iranian director Kiarostami leaves his native country, serving up an Italian-set romance starring Juliette Binoche.

British directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, both Cannes laureates, are in the running for a second Palme d’Or — Leigh with his relationship drama “Another Year,” and Loach with “Route Irish,” which is set in Iraq.

This year’s selection also includes a strong Asian contingent, with two films from both South Korean and China, as well as one entry each from Japan and Thailand.

The Cannes film festival runs through May 23.

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On the Net:

http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en.html