Moving Pictures Final Issue

The Moving Pictures' team packs up today and leaves you with this final edition. This evening they will celebrate the 51st Cannes Festival in the La Napoule Chateau eight kilometers from Cannes with their annual charity party. Three thousand invitations were distibuted and the proceeds will go to such organizations as AIDS Crisis Trust and Medecine Sans Frontieres.

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Red Hot Tips from the Moving Pictures Bunker

*Now that Superman Lives is on the back burner at Warner, actor Nicolas Cage looks likely to team up with jury president Martin Scorsese on the paramedic picture Bringing out the Dead.

*Moving Pictures predicts Beavis and Butt-head will make a triumphant return to Cannes next year to promote their second big screen feature.

* Look for Georges Lucas' Star Wars: Episode One to open or close next year's festival.

*David Cronenberg's eXistenZ looks an early front runner for a competition slot next year.

*And the question on everyone's lips as Cannes enters the final furlong. Will Stanley Kubrick have Eyes Wide Shut ready in time for next year's festival?

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Cannes Great Expectations

On paper, this year's competition line-up looked the strongest in years. Has it lived up to expectations? Not entirely, if the Moving Pictures Critics Poll is taken as the barometer. Predictably, Lars von Trier's Idiots split opinions, but then again, the Dannish maverick also scored a ten on the critics poll.

Ken Loach's My Name is Joe was universally well-liked while Alexei Gherman's Stalin-era fable, Khrustalyov, machinu! exasperated and baffled most of the critics. Some were talking up the Palme d'Or chances of John Boorman's gritty, Irish-based black and white thriller, The General, saying it was sure to be right up Scorsese's (mean) street.

Others noticed the jurors weeping through Benigni's La Vita e Bella. La Vie Revee des Anges is considered by many to be in the frame for one prize or another (perhaps Camera d'Or or Best Actress). Thomas Vinterberg's Festen has its admirers while, in most eyes, Lodge Kerrigan's Claire Dolan deosn't seem to have lived up to its pre-Cannes hype. Either Angelopoulos (whose last film starred Scorsese's old mate Harvey Keitel) or Velvet Goldmine could spring a final surprise. Such speculation is all very well, but everyone knows that it is impossible to second-guess juries. Geoffrey Macnab

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Terrific Cannes for Loach

My Name is Joe is shaping up as the most popular Ken Loach pic in years. The film (which arrived at the Croisette without a British distrib) has been snapped up for every major territory except Australia and the US. Recent sales include Taiwan and South Africa.