Among other Cannes highlights: James Gray's romance "Two Lovers," with Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow and Isabella Rossellini; James Toback's "Tyson," a documentary on the rise and fall of heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson; and "Synecdoche, New York," the directing debut of "Being John Malkovich" screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.
Then there's the parties, fashion and stargazing. With a red carpet that swoops up the broad stairs of the Palais, the festival's headquarters along the Mediterranean, Cannes puts celebrities under a glamor microscope like no other.
"It's a carnival, it's a spectacle. It's fun," said David Koepp, who wrote "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and came to Cannes twice previously as a young assistant to a film sales agent. "There's a lot of crazy people. What you get to see at Cannes is all the crazy, rich foreigners who want to get into Hollywood, having parties on their yachts."
The festival presents two major premieres most nights during its 12-day run, with stars preening and posing in front of an endless throng of shouting, gesticulating photographers.
Karen Allen, who reprises her "Raiders of the Lost Ark" role in a reunion with Spielberg, executive producer George Lucas and "Indiana Jones" star Harrison Ford, recalled her first trip to Cannes.
"It was one of the most surreal moments of my life, standing at the bottom of those stairs at the Palais," Allen said. "So many flashbulbs are going off, you're blind."
The new "Indiana Jones" movie has been kept under tight wraps, with Spielberg and his collaborators playing coy on key plot points.
This much is known: The story is set in 1957, 19 years after the action of 1989's "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," and archaeologist-adventurer Indy is battling Cate Blanchett's Soviet operative over ancient crystal skulls that may possess immeasurable power.
However the movie turns out, fans are happy at the return of Allen as Indy's old flame Marion Ravenwood, whose stormy relationship with Jones promises to pick up where it left off more than two decades ago.
"It's just like `Raiders of the Lost Ark,'" Lucas said. "It's like you just said, `We'll wait 20 years, and we'll do the reunion movie.'"
