Cannes Film Festival 2016: Ten films to look out for

Cannes' 69th film festival is opens today, attracting a host of glamorous stars and a new crop of films, from big studio blockbusters to art house gems and intriguing documentaries.

Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller presides over the jury for the main competition, which will see 55 features screen in the official selection and 30 more in umbrella programmes.

Woody Allen's new film, Cafe Society, has been selected to open the festival. It stars Jesse Eisenberg as the fresh-off-the-bus kid looking to make it in the movie industry in 1930s Hollywood and co-stars Steve Carell, Kristen Stewart and Blake Lively.

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Here are ten more films to look out for:

American Honey

British director Andrea Arnold takes on her first US feature. American Honey, starring Shia LaBeouf, Riley Keough and British newcomer Sasha Lane, focusses on teenager Star (Lane), who runs away to join a traveling sales crew, driving across the Midwest selling magazines, partying hard and bending the law.

Risk

A follow-up to Laura Poitras's Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, Risk sees the director take on another controversial whistleblower, Julian Assange. Poitras uses footage of Assange shot over five years to take a behind-the-scenes look at Wikileaks. Though the director has reportedly fallen out with Assange, the documentary is already tipped as a "hot ticket".

BFG

Steven Spielberg brings Roald Dahl's children's classic to the big screen with Oscar winner [1]Mark Rylance as the Big Friendly Giant[/1], an outcast from the world of giants who kidnaps the orphan Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) to keep him company and help his mission to send dreams to sleeping children.

Money Monster

Directed by Jodie Foster and starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, this morality tale about the financial industry follows financial TV show host Lee Gates and his producer, Patty, as they come under siege from a viewer, who takes over the studio after losing his family's money on a bad tip from Gates.

Neruda

Chilean director Pablo Larrain directs this biopic about the famous poet and politician Pablo Neruda during his years on the run in Chile in the 1940s. Luis Gnecco stars in the title role, with Gael Garcia Bernal as the police officer on his tail. Larrain appeared at Cannes in 2012 with the Oscar nominated No.

The Nice Guys

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe star in this buddy cop movie set in 1970s Los Angeles. Gosling is down-on-his-luck private eye Holland March, who must team up with hired hard man Jackson Healy (Crowe) to find a missing girl linked to a tangled criminal and political conspiracy.

Julieta

Spanish director Pedro Almodovar returns to his favourite subject – women - in his 20th feature film, which is based on three short stories from Alice Munro's book Runaway. Emma Suarez and Adriana Ugarte star as older and younger versions of the film's protagonist, Julieta, a woman who must confront her past and her relationship with her estranged daughter.

Paterson

Adam Driver stars in his first post-Kylo Ren role, directed by art-house darling Jim Jarmusch. The second feature from Amazon Studios sees Driver as Paterson, a New Jersey bus driver, in a story of everyday life, love and poetry. Jarmusch is also debuting his new Iggy Pop documentary, Gimme Shelter, at the festival.

Loving

Jeff Nichols directed this year's surprise hit Midnight Special and has already attracted Oscar buzz for his new film, Loving. It stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as real-life couple Richard and Mildred Loving, who were jailed in 1958 for their inter-racial marriage, sparking a civil rights battle that ended up in the US Supreme Court.

Elle

Paul Verhoeven returns to Cannes for the first time since 1992's Basic Instinct. His new film is a violent French-language psychological thriller starring Isabelle Huppert as a woman who begins stalking the man who invaded her home and attacked her, but soon finds the cat-and-mouse game gets out of control.