Cannes

The movie market in Cannes, France, this week is such a dramatic sideshow that this year it's getting its own film. Director James Toback and actor Alec Baldwin are running along Boulevard de la Croisette, filming a documentary on the feverish deal-making that surrounds the film festival. The industry hatches deals in hotel rooms, over drinks at evening parties, and aboard yachts just off the beach. Toback, director of Fingers and Tyson, will document the process of selling a film at Cannes while also trying to land financing for a fictional film.

Surely there are other places where the air feels like a silk shirt, smells like lavender, and tastes like wild strawberries, but Cannes is the best-known spot for this sort of sensory seduction. Festival in Cannes is indie director Henry Jaglom's starstruck valentine to the onetime fishing village that has become international filmmaking's favored spot to fish for financing. It isn't a good movie, but it is diverting, a showcase for Anouk Aimee, Greta Scacchi and Ron Silver, and a peephole on behind-the-scenes moves.

Bonjour mes amis! Are you tired of hearing news about glamerati cinephiles now convening in Cannes, the Ventnor of the French Riviera? Us, neither. Though we long to frolic with Uma Thurman and Achilles tendency Brad Pitt, word reaches us that all is not merveilleaux at this year's film festival. Long known as a burglar's playground (see Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief), the private- jet-set playground is besieged by a crime spree. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott's wallet and laptop were stolen from his hotel room while he was sleeping.

The 42d Cannes Film Festival opens tonight with the foreign debut of New York Stories, the Manhattan triptych by director superstars Woody Allen, Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Maverick American filmmakers will also be enjoying considerable exposure here, where for the next 12 days features by Paul Bartel, Kathryn Bigelow, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and Wayne Wang will be given their world premieres. In all, 22 movies from 11 nations - principally the United States, France and Italy - will compete for the Golden Palm, the festival's highest accolade.

Riding into Cannes, and even throughout the old city itself, you see multiplex movie theaters just as ugly as those anywhere in the United States, playing the same combinations of action thrillers, teen movies and sex comedies. The most prominent movie right now is "The Delta Force. " And "Young Sherlock Holmes" has finally arrived here (I'm surprised it didn't make the competition) under its international title, "The Secret of the Pyramid. " Speaking of "The Delta Force," its producers, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, are probably the most courageous men in Cannes.

Jean-Claude Duvalier's lease on a plush French Riviera villa in this hilltop town expires tomorrow, and real estate agents said yesterday that the former Haitian ruler would move to nearby Cannes. In Haiti, the justice minister said that millions of dollars in Duvalier's assets had been frozen or seized. Duvalier, his wife, Michele, and their children and aides have been living in a 10-room villa with a swimming pool and tennis courts since March 7. Duvalier fled Haiti Feb. 7 on a U.S. Air Force transport.

"Nice is a singular city, a combination of stimulant to the senses such as I have seen nowhere in the world. " - Paul Valery The first time I went to Nice, almost 50 years ago, I traveled on Le Train Bleu. Alas, the famed Blue Train has succumbed to the airplane, but I still remember the blinding sunshine and the astonishing colors I saw riding along the water's edge for the first time: The blue, blue sea, the terra-cotta coastline, and the white froth of breaking waves - much like the colors of the French flag.

PARIS - Silent film "The Artist" has won six awards including best picture, best actress and best director at France's answer to the Academy Awards. Just two days before the Oscars, co-star Berenice Bejo and director Michel Hazanavicius took top honors at the Cesar awards on Friday. Best actor honors went to Omar Sy, star of the blockbuster feel-good movie "Intouchables" (Untouchable). He notably beat "The Artist" star Jean Dujardin who won the category at Cannes, the Golden Globes and Britain's BAFTAs - and is among the best-actor nominees at the Oscars.

The mere mention of Richard Gere's name sparks a libidinous flame in the hearts of female festival-goers. So it was no surprise that when the American heartthrob came to Cannes for the world premiere of his new film, Miles From Home, Wednesday night, his presence ignited a four-alarm fire of fan passion. Though the prematurely silver-haired Gere escorted model Gabrielle Lazoure up the red-carpeted stairs of the Grand Palais, his intimate interaction with the crowd made each woman in the mostly female throng feel as though he only had eyes for her. Reaction to Gere's latest effort, an Iowa-farm foreclosure saga that marks the feature debut of theater director Gary Sinise, was polite but unenthusiastic.

In early 1981, when the appointment of Sandra Day O'Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice, was still a gleam in President Reagan's eye, Jill Clayburgh was on a soundstage playing Ruth Loomis, the first female Supreme in Ronald Neame's First Monday in October . Brainy, mouthy, near-beautiful, Ms. Clayburgh was the go-to actress to boldly go where no woman had gone before. Ms. Clayburgh, who died Friday at her Connecticut home at 66 after living two decades with leukemia, was the Hollywood face of what was quaintly known as Women's Lib. For five years, between 1977 and 1982, the Oscar-nominated star of An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over personified a new breed of American female, defined by professional rather than marital status.

Chillin' Wit' is a regular feature of the Daily News spotlighting a name in the news away from the job. IT'S JUST AFTER 6:30 a.m. Sunday and Ed McCann, with a 5 o'clock shadow, stands in the middle of 20th Street, his Raleigh hybrid bike propped against a van. He adjusts his black helmet, fastens the clasp, and takes one last swig of water, bracing himself for the 65-mile ride ahead. McCann, the city's first assistant district attorney and a prosecutor for 23 years, is one of about 1,700 bikers set to cycle in the 25th annual Tour de Shore from the Irish Pub at 20th and Walnut to the Irish Pub in Atlantic City.

CANNES — At the 65th running of the annual Cannes Film Festival, offerings ranged from avant-garde to avant-garbage. The annual fest ended Sunday night, in a shower of Palmes D'Or (the top prize) by a jury presided over by Italian filmmaker and raging artistic bull Nanni Moretti. Among the better (if more conventional) films:   The Palme D'Or (top prize) went to Michael Haneke's Amour, in which an elderly Parisian couple, played by acting titans Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, tries to die on its own terms without interference from a pest of a daughter (Isabelle Huppert)

CANNES, France — After the success of Bridesmaids, the actor Chris O'Dowd was mostly getting scripts for mediocre romantic comedies — "bad versions of Bridesmaids," he says. "I figured I should go and do something very different, otherwise I'll kind of get stuck," O'Dowd said in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival this week. "So an Aboriginal musical made sense. " And that could well be the first time such a sentence has been uttered. In the genre of Aboriginal musicals there is but one entry: The Sapphires, which premiered in Cannes to a lengthy standing ovation and eager debate over whether it was this year's out-of-left-field success story at the festival.

The movie market in Cannes, France, this week is such a dramatic sideshow that this year it's getting its own film. Director James Toback and actor Alec Baldwin are running along Boulevard de la Croisette, filming a documentary on the feverish deal-making that surrounds the film festival. The industry hatches deals in hotel rooms, over drinks at evening parties, and aboard yachts just off the beach. Toback, director of Fingers and Tyson, will document the process of selling a film at Cannes while also trying to land financing for a fictional film.

Even in the world of entertainment, somebody's always mad about something. At the Cannes Film festival, five women from French feminist group La Barbe took to protesting on the red carpet due to the lack of female directors at this year's fest. Of the 22 films vying for this year's Palme D'Or, none were directed by women. La Barbe (which means The Beard) previously had a letter complaining about the male-dominated line-up published in Le Monde and The Guardian newspapers.

PARIS - Silent film "The Artist" has won six awards including best picture, best actress and best director at France's answer to the Academy Awards. Just two days before the Oscars, co-star Berenice Bejo and director Michel Hazanavicius took top honors at the Cesar awards on Friday. Best actor honors went to Omar Sy, star of the blockbuster feel-good movie "Intouchables" (Untouchable). He notably beat "The Artist" star Jean Dujardin who won the category at Cannes, the Golden Globes and Britain's BAFTAs - and is among the best-actor nominees at the Oscars.

Hello there Heather and Steve met in junior English at West Chester East High School in 2002 and got to know each other in an after-school Christian youth group called Young Life. That's also where Heather noticed Steve's wonderful sense of humor and contagious smile. "I had my eye on him," Heather confesses. "She didn't make this apparent to me," said Steve. There was a reason Heather kept her crush a secret: Steve had a girlfriend all through high school. After graduation, Heather earned her elementary education degree at Shippensburg University and is now a kindergarten teacher at KinderCare in Downingtown.

Way back in another millennium - 1992, to be exact - a cineaste by the name of Linda Blackaby, with support from International House, launched the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. There were growing pains over the years - new organizers and artistic directors (exit Blackaby), and then a name change, but the good news is that Philadelphians have been blessed with an ambitious, adventurous film festival for 20 years now. Philadelphia Film Festival 20 - a seriously inspired two-week affair that started Thursday night with Like Crazy , the roller-coaster love story with a star-making turn from Felicity Jones - celebrates the festival's traditions, and looks to its future, too. Andrew Greenblatt, PFF's executive director, invited Blackaby back to coprogram and lead discussions on a documentary slate.

Like Crazy, a "captivating" romance between an American and his English girlfriend who runs afoul of immigration authorities, will open the 20th annual Philadelphia Film Festival on Oct. 20, J. Andrew Greenblatt, PFF executive director, announced Saturday. The 15-day, 120-movie cinextravaganza closes with The Descendants, Alexander Payne's sharp dramedy starring George Clooney as a father who reconnects with his estranged children. (Although the festival officially ends Nov. 3, its closing night gala is Oct. 29.)

Dream House (Sept. 30) Real-life newlyweds Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz as a Manhattan couple who discover their New England retreat is haunted by ghosts. Might victims of a nightmare crime inhabit this dream house?     - C.R. Anonymous (Oct. 28) Elizabethan political thriller starring Rhys Ifans as the Earl of Oxford, believed by some to have ghostwritten Shakespeare's most famous works. With Joely Richardson as Queen Elizabeth.     - C.R. Like Crazy (Nov.