Tarantino, Ang Lee, Loach line up for Cannes gold.

A wartime rampage by Quentin Tarantino and a trip to Woodstock with Ang Lee will square off with Ken Loach's latest outing in a heavyweight battle for the top prize at next month's Cannes film festival.

Big names such as Loach and Spain's Pedro AlmodEvar dominate the race for the coveted Palme d'Or at the Riviera festival, opposite hot new Asian talent, from the banned Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye to thriller master Johnnie To.

"All the great names of world cinema are here this year, and the old dogs have some fine new tricks in store," Thierry Fremaux, artistic director of the May 13-24 festival, told reporters Thursday.

In a break with recent years, Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" (sic), a World War II saga starring Brad Pitt, is the sole US contender in a competition with a strong Asian and European tilt.

Asked about the shortage of US fare in the lineup -- picked among 1,670 works from 120 countries -- Fremaux suggested last year's Hollywood writers' strike prevented many US directors from wrapping up in time for Cannes.

But US studios are still set to make a splash at the 62nd edition of the film industry's biggest annual fest, which opens with Pixar's new 3D animation movie "Up."

Heath Ledger's last screen role, in "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" by US director Terry Gilliam, will also get an out-of-competition screening.

Gilliam's hotly-anticipated premiere is expected to bring a raft of A-list stars to Cannes, including Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law. They all stepped in to play parts of Ledger's role after the actor died last year.

Representing the Middle East is Elia Suleiman's "The Time That Remains," the story of a Palestinian family catapulted from the 1940s to the present.

On the Asian front, French rock icon Johnny Hallyday takes the lead role in "Vengeance," the new crime flick by Hong Kong's To, while Malaysia's Tsai Ming-liang ("Goodbye Dragon Inn," "The Hole") draws on an all-star French cast for his entry "Face."

Chinese filmmaker Lou, who was banned from making films in China for five years when he submitted "Summer Palace" to Cannes without Beijing's approval in 2005, returns with an erotic tale of three-way love, titled "Spring Fever."

Korea's Park Chan-wook, whose "Oldboy" wowed Cannes in 2004, is back with a vampire tale called "Thirst." The Philippines' Brillante Mendoza ("Serbis") is running with "Kinatay."

Festival goers will get a taste of the heady 1960s with Lee's latest offering, "Taking Woodstock," set during the epoch-defining US rock festival.

New Zealand's Jane Campion, the first woman to win the Palme d'Or for "The Piano" in 1992, returns with a film about romantic poet John Keats, "Bright Star."

She is joined in the race for Cannes gold by two European women directors: Spain's Isabel Coixet with "Map of the Sounds of Tokyo" and young British director Angela Arnold ("Red Road") with "Fish Tank."

Oscar-winning Spaniard AlmodEvar is running with "Broken Embraces," a multi-strand drama starring PenE[umlaut]lope Cruz, an Oscar-winner herself. Loach's offer is "Looking for Eric," starring former footballer Eric Cantona.

The British director will go head to head with several fellow Palme winners, including Denmark's Lars von Trier who directed Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the horror film "Antichrist."

Austrian Cannes laureate Michael Haneke, winner of Cannes' 2005 best director award for "CachE[umlaut]," is running with "The White Ribbon," a film about fascism in early 20th-century Europe, while "Vincere" by Italy's Marco Bellocchio tells the story of Benito Mussolini's illegitimate son.

Nouvelle Vague veteran Alain Resnais is one of four French directors chosen to run, with "Les Herbes Folles" (Wild Grasses), a year after social drama "The Class" clinched France's first Palme d'Or in two decades.

Other French offerings include "Un Prophete" (A Prophet) by Jacques Audiard, who picked up a best screenplay award here in 1996 for "Un Hero Tres Discret."

And France's Gaspard Noe returns with "Soudain le Vide" (Enter the Void).

His brutal 2002 drama "Irreversible" divided the critics at Cannes.

British novelist Hanif Kureishi and US filmmaker James Gray are on the eight-member jury, chaired by French actress Isabelle Huppert, which will hand out awards after 12 frenzied days of red-carpet screenings, showbiz parties and wheeling-and-dealing.

Fortnight's Coppola premiere

US film giant Francis Ford Coppola is to premiere his new indie movie "Tetro," a tale of sibling rivalry set in Buenos Aires, at the Directors' Fortnight sidebar.

Starring US actor Vincent Gallo in the title role, "Tetro" tells the story of a 17-year-old Italian-American who returns from New York to the Buenos Aires of his youth to search for his writer brother, missing for a decade.

The Oscar-winning director, who also wrote the film, says he drew on his childhood memories to create a "personal" work about family relationships, although he denies it is autobiographical.

Shot last year on a $15-million budget, mostly in the Italian quarter of Buenos Aires, La Boca, the black-and-white film has more in common with European 1960s' cinema than Hollywood mega-productions, according to Coppola.

The Italian-American director of "Apocalypse Now" and "The Godfather" returned to the silver screen in 2007 after a 10-year absence, with the philosophical movie "Youth without Youth."

Launched in 1968 by avant-garde directors including Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, the Directors' Fortnight puts its focus on discovering new and groundbreaking talent.

It can boast having helped launch the careers of high-flyers such as Stephen Frears, Nagisa Oshima, Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders.

While this year's official Cannes lineup is light on US fare, the Fortnight is showing five US works including Coppola's.

"Amreeka" by Cherien Dabis, shows a Palestinian mother and teenage son learning to adapt to life in the US. The film screened at Sundance as did Lynn Shelton's comedy "Humpday" and Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's "I Love You Phillip Morris."

US film grad brothers Benny and Josh Safdie were also invited to premiere their new film "Go Get Some Rosemary," about an Interpol agent probing the murky dealings of an international banking conglomerate.

Olivier Pere, who runs the Fortnight, said this year's crop of films stood out for its lightness of tone.

"It's a good year -- full of surprises. We were struck by the number of comedies, or films with a humorous streak," he said.

"We rarely have the pleasure of inviting so many powerful and original comedies to the Fortnight."

Black humor oozes from Luc Moullet's documentary about a string of murders, "Land of Madness," one of a crop of French films in the lineup along with works by Alain Guiraudie and first-time filmmakers Riaf Sattouf and Axelle Ropert.

Canada also boasts three French-language titles in the lineup: Denis Villeneuve's "Polytechnique," about the December 1989 massacre of 14 female students at a Montreal university; Denis Cote's "Carcasses," about a solitary man who collects old cars; and 19-year-old Xavier Dolan's "I Killed My Mother."

Asia gets a look in with "Like You Know it All" by South Korea's Hong Sang-Soo, while Singapore's Ho Tzu-Nyen showcases "Here," about a middle-aged man struggling to cope with his wife's sudden death.

Japan's Nobuhiro Suwa joined forces with French actor Hippolyte Girardot to co-direct the bi-lingual "Yuki et Nina," a movie about two little girls, one French one Japanese, torn apart by a divorce.

And in "Ne Chamge Rien" (Don't Change a Thing), Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa ("Colossal Youth") follows French actress-turned-chanteuse Jeanne Balibar on tour in Japan.

Critics on Latin America

The Critics' Week, which runs in parallel with the film festival, spotlights first-time directors in a selection with a strong Latin American flavor.

Of the seven films chosen to compete for the Critics' Week award for a best first or second feature, which last year went to "Hunger" by British director Steve McQueen, three are from or about Latin America -- Chile, Uruguay and Peru -- and all but one are by first-time directors.

"We want to underscore what makes us special -- to showcase first and second films, which are by very definition fragile," Jean-Christophe Berjon, the head of the event founded in 1962, told AFP.

"Limiting the number of films allows us to really concentrate on our films and help them break through."

The Chilean movie "Huacho" is a critique of consumer society based around three members of a same family, while Uruguay's "Bad day for Fishing" is cast as a Latin American Western and "Altiplano" is shot partly in Peru in the indigenous Quechua language.

From Iraq comes "Whisper with the Wind", in which first-time director Shahram Alidi follows a character sent to deliver messages across Iraqi Kurdistan.

"It's a film about memory, roots and about a society in mourning, with a huge visual inventiveness, and cultural and symbolic wealth," Berjon said.

In the Franco-Serbian "Ordinary people," Vladimir Perisic tackles the legacy of the Bosnian war with the story of a young man who climbs onto a bus, and is ordered to start killing his fellow passengers.

"It is a very accomplished film, shot with tremendous rigor and distance, which we expect to draw a powerful reaction," Berjon said.

Daily NewsEgypt 2009

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