They still love Jerry Lewis in France. Lewis was working the press at Cannes, talking up his latest project, and Manohla Dargis of the New York Times was on hand. “‘Jerry’s here to announce the film he will be starring in next October,’ the French translator said. ‘We’re going to do Mutiny on the Bounty again,’ Mr. Lewis said, as laughter filled the room. ‘I’m playing the Christian part, and we need an Arab so we can beat’ the stuffing ‘out of him.’ Silence fell like a lead curtain. Being an old nightclub performer, he didn’t use the word stuffing. Being an old nightclub guy, he also recovered fast, but he clearly wasn’t going to make himself especially loveable. I wonder if he ever had.”

Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces looks a bit too familiar to some critics. “Pedro Almodovar offers nothing new in his latest feature, Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces), but that’s probably enough for his devout followers,” writes Eric Kohn in Indiewire. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw finds it “a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively infatuated with the business of cinema itself. Yet I wonder if Almodóvar isn't in danger of retreading old ideas.”

“Von Trier and the festival's standout, Police, Adjective, notwithstanding, the energy has so far come mainly from Asia,” J. Hoberman writes in the Village Voice. “Chinese, Filipino, Iranian, Japanese, and South Korean movies have stoked the most anticipation and inspired the most heat. Both the Competition and Un Certain Regard gave prime early slots to movies that, as taboo-breaking as they are, were shot on the QT and are unshowable in their homelands--China and Iran.”