Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Jodie Foster are tipped to be among those who will walk the red carpet at Cannes next month when the line-up for the world’s top film festival is revealed on Wednesday, April 13.
While nominations for the main Palme d'Or prize are still under tight wraps, it appears that Spielberg will almost certainly show his adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's classic The BFG (The Big Friendly Giant) out of competition.
It will most likely be joined by Jodie Foster's new thriller Money Monster, about a television financial pundit taken hostage by a man whose family has been left penniless by his dud tips.
Starring Clooney as the Wall Street tipster and Julia Roberts as his TV producer, the film will be released internationally during the festival, which runs in the French Riviera resort from May 11 to 22.
Festival chiefs Thierry Fremaux and Pierre Lescure have already announced that Woody Allen's new Amazon-backed film Cafe Society will open the annual jamboree, also out of competition.
The competitors for the main competition, however, are harder to call, with the final list often not decided till the very last minute.
The presence of festival favourite Pedro Almodovar, who made his name with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, has been thrown into doubt when his was named as running an offshore company in the Panama Papers leak last week.
The Spanish director — a left winger known for his support of environmental causes — cancelled a press conference to promote his new film Julieta about a girl who disappears for a decade, and did not show up at a preview screening in Barcelona.
Insiders, however, are predicting that the American actor-director Sean Penn's new film The Last Face, starring his ex-girlfriend Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem will figure in the line-up.
The romance, set in Africa among humanitarian workers, also stars French actress Adele Exarchopoulos.
US director Jeff Nichols, who made the highly praised Midnight Special last year, is also thought to be a shoo-in for Loving, his story about a mixed-raced couple confronting racism in 1950s Virginia.
The Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, who first came to international attention at Cannes with I Killed My Mother in 2009 when he was only 20, seems a near certainty for his new family drama It's Only the End of the World, with its stellar cast of Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel and Bond star Lea Seydoux.
Indie cinema icon Jim Jarmush's Paterson and La fille inconnue (The Unknown Girl) by Belgium's Dardenne brothers — two-time Palme d'Or winners — also seem assured of being among the 19 contenders for the main competition.
The Bosnian Serb Emir Kusturica — who has also lifted the prize twice — is a clear candidate with On the Milky Road starring Monica Bellucci, as is another past winner, Romania's Cristian Mungiu with Family Photos.
But there were questions over whether I, Daniel Blake, the latest film from Cannes favourite, Briton Ken Loach — about welfare cuts hurting vulnerable families — will make the final cut.
Cannes' traditionally strong Asian presence is likely to be led by Japan's Hirokazu Kore-Eda with After the Storm, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Woman in the Silver Plate and South Korean Park Chan-Wook's The Handmaid.
Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven may mark his comeback with Elle with French actress Isabelle Huppert in the lead, with the Mexican director Amal Escalante's The Untamed and Chilean film Neruda by Pablo Larrain also being talked up.
