Cannes Film Festival

Cannes Film Festival - New York Times: "A black comedy about Dystopia, America, "Southland Tales" opens with a line from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Man" ("This is the way the world ends") and a nuclear bomb exploding above a Fourth of July gathering. What follows is a sprawling, periodically dazzling, often funny pop-and-politics mash-up that finds a porn star (Ms. Gellar's character) united with an action star (Mr. Johnson's) to save a country awash in celebrity culture and neo-conservatism.

Pedro Almodóvar's new film, "Volver" — in English it means "To Return". "Volver" stars Penélope Cruz in a performance that may silence those who have doubted her acting ability in the past. It is the latest chapter in Mr. Almodóvar's reinvention of the often-parodied melodramatic tradition, paying homage both to "Mildred Pierce" and to the great Anna Magnani, whom Ms. Cruz resembles more than you might expect. The film is almost literally a woman's picture, taking place in a Spanish village that sometimes seems populated entirely by widows and telling an intricate tale of mothers and daughters, aunts and grandmothers and sisters and girlfriends.

Like the other films of Mr. Almodóvar's major phase — "All About My Mother," "Bad Education" and, supremely, "Talk to Her" — "Volver" fuses powerful and delicate emotion with sly mischief, all of it presented in sensuous, immaculate visual compositions and with Alberto Iglesias's glorious music.

"Climates," a portrait of a man profoundly out of touch with his innermost self, the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has made one of the finest films to play the festival in competition. (His last film at Cannes, "Distant," won the grand prize in 2003.) The exquisitely observed story opens with a man and woman just minutes away from a brutal breakup, only to then shift focus to the man, a professor played by the director himself. Using a minimum of naturalistic dialogue and breathtaking compositions, and featuring a rollicking sex scene that kept the press audience in rapt silence, Mr. Ceylan renders a psychological portrait from the outside in, slowly, slowly, digging his way into a heart of stone."