On the Road won't be the only highly anticipated debut at the festival. Here are five films that are already creating buzz.
Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson's latest, which opens the festival, is a charming fable: two young teenagers in love flee from their small New England town, and a search party (including a boy scout troop) is formed to find them. Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton and Tilda Swinton head a starry cast.
Rust and Bone
Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard plays a killer whale trainer in a French aquatic park; she befriends a penniless single father with a young son. The director Jacques Audiard's brilliant prison drama A Prophet made him a film industry name. All eyes will be on this one.
The Angels' Share
Britain's Ken Loach is a perennial Cannes favourite. His latest work combines comedy and drama. It's about a group of petty criminals sentenced to do community work. When they take a day trip to a distillery in the countryside, they see a chance to transform their lives.
Killing Them Softly
Director Andrew Dominik won plenty of fans (if not awards or huge audiences) for his stylish biopic The Assassination of Jesse James, starring Brad Pitt. Here they reunite in an adaptation of a George V Higgins novel; Pitt plays a mob enforcer investigating a heist in a big card game.
Cosmopolis
David Cronenberg is another Cannes regular, and this one sounds terrific: Twilight's Robert Pattinson plays an arrogant young money-markets mogul being chauffeured round Manhattan in a stretch limo on his way to a haircut, all the while trying to hold his life together.
