Nicole Kidman and Zaf Efron at The Paperboy press conference

Zak Efron is the title character, Jack James, the younger brother of Ward James, played by Matthew McConaughey, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from Miami. Jack is Ward’s opposite; he’s nearly unemployed and listless, except for the route where he delivers his father’s newspapers. But when Ward returns to town to investigate a case of a man who he believes is on death row unjustly, Jack gets intimately involved.

Hillary Van Wetter, played with sulking sneers by John Cusack, is a nasty sort and you can imagine him doing much worth than taking a machete to a lawman, as he’s been convicted of doing. Even so, Charlotte Bliss (Nicole Kidman) is infatuated with the convict after a long, supposedly steamy pen-pal correspondence with Van Wetter (whose name still sounds like a soon-to-be-announced sequel to the Van Wilder series). In the meanwhile Jack becomes infatuated with Charlotte.

With the James brothers in tow Charlotte pays a call on her inmate obsession. As Ward James tries to coax crucial facts about the night of the killing from the panting Van Wetter, Charlotte and the chained man perform a kind of mimed sex act. It leaves Charlotte with torn panty hose, Van Wetter with a wet spot and us with just one of several unbelievable moments in this Tennessee Williams wannabe.

There’s also a visit to Van Wetter’s in-bred swamp clan, presided over by his alligator-gutting uncle. There’s a scene at the beach where Jack (who seems to believe that underwear is appropriate garb just about anywhere) swims into some jellyfish, causing Charlotte to have to urinate on him. There’s a scene where Ward is found in a compromising position in a hotel with some other men. There’s a laundry room sex scene that unites Charlotte and Van Wetter that makes one wonder if Charlotte will ever be able to use the dryer again.

One could suppose that this was all meant to over dramatize for comedic effect. But a sub-plot about race relations between Jack and Anita, the maid who raised him, shows Daniels grasping about for footholds. It’s out of character with the rest of the sex swamp of a film. Imagine if Wild Things had had a serious subtext about rape. And Daniels adds just one more extra to Paperboy. He has Anita, played by Macy Gray, serve as the narrator. Even though Gray tones it down, he might as well have employed Fran Drescher or Sandra Bernhard.

Brad Pitt and director Andrew Dominik of Killing Them Softly

Dominik directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford and he’s once again exploring the nature of violence in a criminal community, though the tone is entirely different. In Killing two simpletons are commissioned to knock off a mob-protected poker game. The guy who runs the game, Markie (Ray Liotta) had actually arranged to have his own game robbed earlier and later admitted it. The guys figure that, if it ever happens again, that Markie will be suspect #1 on the mob’s list while they get away free. The actors who play the dumb crooks are worth mentioning.

One is played by Scoot McNairy. He was excellent in Monsters in 2010 and he brings his talents yet again. His Frankie is a sniveling wretch who only dimly grasps the numerous ways this job could go wrong. McNairy’s vulnerable performance reminded me of John Cazale; it’s that good.

The other thug, a drug-addled, confrontational sort is Russell, played by Ben Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn isn’t given as much to do here as he was in Animal Kingdom but he still provides a believable performance as a lowlife so low the others remark on it.

The heist works well enough, as Frankie and Russell get away clean with the loot. The inevitable consequences, however, are devastating. The guys in charge send in Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) to get to the bottom of the crime, mete out some vengeance and get the games going again. Cogan is friends with Squirrel, the guy who commissioned Russell and Frankie, so he brings in a formerly great hitman, played by James Gandolfini. He, however, has become a paranoid reprobate and so Cogan’s forced to confront whether he can even employe him.

Dominik heavy-handedly overlays the final months of the last U.S. Presidential elections, juxtaposing the promises and bureaucracy of politics, particularly amidst the economic meltdown, with the work-a-day world of these criminals. They all just want to get a system they helped pull down back up and running again, collateral damage included.

The cinematography by Greig Fraser is superb. New Orleans, the real-life shoot for this unnamed city, serves as a sad backdrop with its rotting buildings and open-sore lots to this ramshackle way of doing business.

The violence at times is Chopper extreme though there is one sequence where one of the targets is killed in a stylistic, almost soothing way (Dominik himself referred to it as a lullaby).

Director Walter Salles, the Brazilian who made The Motorcycle Diaries burns up some more gas with On the Road.

Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart for On the Road

It’s taken over 50 years for Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation bible of the same name to make it to the screen, with the last 30 being the most active. Salles’ offering, however, is a mixed bag. As it attempts to portray the youthful exuberance and philosophical naivete of this famed group of writers and artists, that included Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg and Williams S. Burroughs, it fails to make their actions seem contemporary or their reaction to their taboo transgressions believable.

Garrett Hedlund plays the fictional rogue Dean Moriarity, the muse to Sal Paradise (played by Sam Riley), a writer who wants to experience life. He gets a good dose of it when he heads “West” with Dean and Marylou, Dean’s lover. It’s a very good performance by Hedlund and brave one by Kristen Stewart as Marylou. Stewart has a number of nude and/or sexually explicit scenes that, while they aren’t gratuitous, don’t necessarily make you understand her character any better. Along the way they encounter Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge), who was Kerouac’s fictionalized version of Alan Ginsberg and Old Bull Lee (Viggo Mortenson), representing William S. Burroughs.

It’s hard to pinpoint where the story meanders too far. Kerouac’s story took a circuitous route that was part of the point, but, by the time we’ve watched Moriarity get paid to have sex with a traveling salesman (Steve Buscemi, which does provide for an undeniably memorable scene) the story seems to have gotten away from Salles.

Not sure what to tell you about Holy Motors. I was standing in line with some fellow critics, trying to decide whether to attend the film screening or the press conference for On the Road (you frequently have to make such lousy choices at film festivals, often with intuition as your only guide), when I mentioned to one of our group that I saw from Twitter he had loved it. The other two in our group looked at him as if he were admitting to some bizarre sexual peccadillo on his “About” page. The film was one of my Ten to Watch for here because of the director Leos Carax, who made The Lovers on the Bridge. Here’s the trailer.

When it rains in Cannes, which it started to today in earnest, it rains with wild French abandon. Vendors appear on the street corners selling cheaply-made umbrellas that begin to come apart almost immediately. And the red carpet, once the stars have entered the Palais, becomes a ghost town. The Michael Haneke film, Amour, was tonight’s big red carpet debut. The downpour was rather fitting as the film is itself a deluge of grief and loss. Two octogenarians face the inevitable, cruel loss of faculties and hope when one of them has a series of strokes. A devastating sad, and measured film it lingers long after in the memory. That the married couple are played by Jean-Louis Trintignant (the man in A Man and a Woman, The Conformist, etc) and Emmanuelle Riv, the impossibly gorgeous and morose star of Hiroshima Mon Amour, makes the film only more poignant.

Highlights from Cannes of the last two days:

I ran into Oscar-winner, Asghar Farhadi in the street. Mr. Farhadi has acute recollection skills because, though I should know him, there’s very little reason for him to know or remember me. We’d met briefly at the Spirit Awards, introduced by a mutual friend, his publicist on A Separation. “Keith,” he said, extending his hand without looking at my badge. I was and still am shocked. I congratulated on his recent awards and the start of his new film in Paris.

Ran into Matteo Garrone, director of the in-competition title Reality and 2008′s Gamorrah. He told me he was exhausted as yesterday had been his big debut day, which includes getting grilled by the international press and walking the red carpet. He seemed in good spirits though, which he should having made a lyrical comedy/tragedy about our current culture and its obsession with, and deep misunderstanding of, fame. I was feeling as if I was the only one speaking up for the film until I heard from the very smart Sharon Waxman (founder of The Wrap) that she too liked the film quite a bit.

I met Shia La Beouf last night and, I have to say, I now have to alter my opinion of him. First off, he was courteous, as he grabbed a stool I was moving towards and apologized and offered it to me. He had a small glass of champagne and we turned toward the rest of the restaurant where we were at. He told he had just had an excellent night because outside, he’d just met Jackie Chan. Chan was having a dinner with about 50 of his protege/students that he was helping to become actors, honoring some of the ways he’d done so but also in respect to those who had helped him. La Beouf was pretty impressed with that. Those students, as they filed out of the bar, asked him to take photos with them and he gratefully granted each request (perhaps because of his lesson learned from Chan).

I’m very glad I hadn’t seen La Beouf’s film, Lawless, because I saw it today and didn’t much care for it. Last night, luckily, I could claim ignorance. “I liked you very much in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” I said. “That’s the other one I’m proud of,” he said, which made me like him even a little bit more. La Beouf’s first film that he can really remember, by the way, was Beastmaster. We chuckled over the beefcake turn of Marc Singer and the hotness of Tanya Roberts. Then he went out for a smoke. Well, it wasn’t raining.

This good looking chap is Douglas Booth. He’s playng Romeo in an upcoming adaptation of the Shakespeare drama, with Hailee Steinfeld as Juliet. Booth, Ed Westwick, and producer Julian Fellowes held a party celebrating the wrap of the film, which has a February launch date for next year.

It will do better than a good number of Cannes films which often get distribution but not a lot of eyeballs.

One Cannes film that many will see is the most commercial film here, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. The film with the least aspirations of the three so far, M3:EMW, is a colorful, noisy carnival that frankly left me cold and bored. The main stars were in Cannes to promote it, however, including Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Martin Short (he plays a seal) and Jessica Chastain, who plays a love interest for Stiller’s lion, Alex.

One of the most promising filmmakers here, Brandon Cronenberg, brings an inordinately disgusting, off-putting and damn well-made film, Antiviral, to the Camera d’Or competition (essentially the best new filmmaker category). In Antiviral the cult of celebrity has grown to the level that people willingly pay to be infected with the viruses of superstars (no this never really works but, what the heck). Caleb Landry Jones is memorable as Syd March, a purveyor of the celebrity illnesses. When he’s given the opportunity to pick up a blood sample of his favorite celebrity, Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) to get her most recent ailment he injects himself with a small amount on the side. Unbeknownst to either of them she’s the target of an viral assassination attempt and, when she dies, he has to find a cure. Brandon is the son of David Cronenberg and he’s picked up the family business quite nicely. The New Flesh is Dead! Long Live the New Flesh!

This year we’ve moved most of our updates over to our Twitter feed IMDbKeith but I’ll keep some updates in our blog.

You can accuse the Cannes Film Festival of many things but wallowing in nostalgia is not one of them. . Given it’s the 65th Anniversary of the festival they have more than reason to boast but, instead of what could have been two weeks of retrospectives the amazing “general delegate,” essentially the director of the festival, Thierry Fremaux has once again pushed the boundaries of the expected.

The films, as was the case last year, have divided critics. Many cherished Wes Anderson‘s opening night film, Moonrise Kingdom while a strong minority found it precious and twee (two words used in many, many reviews of the film). In talking to Anderson and the filmmakers what surprised me was that the strongest accusation about him, that he’s just being hipster and ironic, is not the case at all and that he’s in earnest and extremely sincere.

Raves (and raspberries) also came from Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone with many citing Marion Cotiard‘s performance as a front-runner for Best Performance – Female.

Reality, by director Matteo Garrone (Gamorrah), is an homage to early Fellini and a biting satire of celebrity culture and greed. Cinematography by Marco Onaroto is sumptuous and Alexandre Desplat score is one of his best. The movie is a bit on the nose but 9 of 10 stars.