The formidable Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev will be there with his Leviathan and from Mauritania, Abderrahmane Sissako will represents new African cinema with Timbuktu. However, some will be disappointed not to see the new movies from Terrence Malick, Emir Kusturica, Fatih Akin and Roy Andersson. (It is possible that Andersson's film, gloriously entitled A Pigeon Sat on the Branch Reflecting on Existence, will be put into selection later this month.)
So the veteran titans of British progressive cinema, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, are once again facing off for the Palme D'Or, something to cause some patriotic pride in the ranks of the British industry, though perhaps some twinges of secret exasperation about quite so much emphasis being put on these names. It is Thierry Frémaux's seventh year completely in charge of the festival as "general delegate", and he has reinforced the mighty predominance of Cannes, not least with his shrewd development of its Un Certain Regard sidebar as a repository of movies that would well be headliners at rival festivals – thus pretty much doubling its selection prerogative.
This newspaper takes an even keener interest in Cannes than usual, having recently awarded it our best festival prize in the inaugural Guardian Film Awards. Festival president Gilles Jacob elegantly and whimsically offered us his thoughts on the choice of Cannes: "The spirit blows where it pleases, as my master Robert Bresson said, and everyone does as he pleases."
It is certainly a big year for the big British players. Ken Loach (a Palme winner in 2006 for The Wind That Shakes The Barley), is the Cannes equivalent of a "made guy", much loved and admired by both Frémaux and Jacob. In fact, Frémaux offered some pointed remarks at the press conference about British directors being unappreciated in their native lands. Loach's film this year, Jimmy's Hall, is another collaboration with screenwriter Paul Laverty, and is understood to be his final fiction feature: a drama centred on Ireland's red scare of the 1930s, and the communist challenge to the Catholic church's censorship.
Timothy Spall in Mike Leigh's Mr Turner Photograph: Film4
Mike Leigh is a director who does not have quite the freehold on Cannes enjoyed by Loach. Notoriously, the festival rejected Vera Drake in 2004, although the film went on to win the Golden Lion at Venice. This year, however, Leigh has been accepted for Mr Turner, a look at the life of the painter JMW Turner, with Timothy Spall in the leading role.
The third British film-maker in the official selection is Andrew Hulme, the former editor on movies such as Control and The American, who is making a directorial debut in the Un Certain Regard lineup with Snow in Paradise, a tough character study about violence and religion.
And speaking of titans, no discussion of this year's festival could be complete without mentioning that never-sleeping giant of French cinema history, Jean-Luc Godard, returning to Cannes at the age of 83 with his new film, dauntingly entitled Farewell to Language. Godard is the great, implacably cantankerous and difficult warrior from the new wave generation, one that still makes its mark at Cannes. (One screening theatre, the Bazin, is named after the great new wave-era critic André Bazin, and the "next-day" catchup screenings are called les séances de lendemain, playfully referring to Truffaut's famous phrase "the cinema of tomorrow").
Godard is always being written off as a spent force. And yet his last Cannes movie, Film Socialisme, featuring loftily cerebral critiques of capitalist society, happened to be filmed partly on board the cruise ship Costa Concordia. This was later to become a spectacular wreck, fatally lacking in manoeuvrability, because it had been built on a huge scale to maximise profit. So perhaps Godard is still a film-maker with serendipity on his side, not yet out of touch with the zeitgeist.
This year was trailed as a festival that has paid greater attention to women film-makers, an issue for which it has been fiercely criticised in the past. In competition is Japanese director Naomi Kawase's Still the Water, an emotional drama about a teen boy and a girl on the southern Japanese island of Amami. Alice Rohrwacher's The Miracles, also in competition, is an Italian movie with Monica Bellucci: a 14-year-old's life is turned upside down when a young German criminal shows up on a rehab programme. Elsewhere, Austrian director Jessica Hausner is in the UCR list with her movie Amour Fou, a period drama inspired by Heinrich von Kleist.
Still from the Dardennes brothers Two Days, One Night
Two Days, One Night, by the double Palme-winning Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, features a very starry lead actor: Marion Cotillard as Sandra, a woman who has the weekend to convince her colleagues to give up their bonuses so she can keep her job. It sounds like a more mainstream film than is usual for these directors, and set in a higher social stratum than usual. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep, coming it at a mighty three-and-a-quarter hours, will be keenly anticipated, again set in Anatolia.
Ryan Gosling has been the most glamorous of figures at Cannes in recent years, acting in movies by Nicolas Winding Refn. Now he arrives with his own film as director, in the Un Certain Regard section: Lost River, about a family living in a small town of the same name, involving a single mother and a troubled teenage boy, and starring Christina Hendricks and Saoirse Ronan. Sure to be a hot ticket.
Maps to The Stars by David Cronenberg is a competition movie avowedly about that most superficially attractive but difficult and elusive subject: celebrity and our current infatuation with it. It is written by Bruce Wagner (author of the excoriating I'm Losing You) and all about a dynastic Hollywood family, deeply embedded and dysfunctionally addicted to the culture of celebrity in Los Angeles. It will of course be interesting to see if the movie can analyse celebrity without being in some way hampered or compromised by the whole business.
Steve Carell and Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher
Bennett Miller, director of Capote and Moneyball, comes to the Cannes competition with Foxcatcher, an intriguing-sounding movie about the wrestling champions Mark and Dave Schultz (played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo) and the family tragedy they endured. Steve Carell is boldly cast in a very serious role. Miller showed himself to be a brilliant chronicler of US sport in Moneyball and Cannes delegates will be very keen to see how this new film plays out.
The other alpha-male of US cinema, as far as Cannes 2014 is concerned, is Tommy Lee Jones who is on the Croisette with The Homesman, a frontier tale about a tense journey from Nebraska to Iowa. Jones, whose The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was respectfully received in Cannes in 2005, is a Hollywood star whose professional personality as an auteur has very much been nurtured in Cannes.
As far as mainstream French cinema goes, the big contender is Olivier Assayas, a critic turned director in the high French tradition. Sils Maria is a fascinating-sounding tale, with something of All About Eve, about a veteran actor (played by Juliette Binoche), who finds herself coming into contact with a young pretender (Chloë Grace Moretz), who plays the role she once made famous in a remake.
Is there a more remarkable wunderkind at Cannes 2014 than the 25-year-old Québécois Xavier Dolan, making his competition debut with Mommy, his fifth feature film as director. I have been sceptical about Dolan in the past, but his last feature Tom At The Farm was terrifically good and this is another must-see.
Michel Hazanavicus is a French director whose fortunes were co-created by Cannes and the great American mogul Harvey Weinstein. In 2011, Weinstein (a true Cannes habitué) came to see Hazanavicius's silent-movie pastiche The Artist, fell in love with it, and the rest is Oscar history. Now Hazanavicius comes to Cannes with a tough, serious film, The Search, again starring his wife Bérénice Bejo as a woman who forms an emotional attachment to a young boy in war-scarred Chechnya.
It is, as ever, a mouthwatering selection.
