​The Festival de Cannes is noted for many things--the size of the press corps, the prestige of the prizes, the magnitude of the hype--but rarely the quality of its opening night film. To open the world's premier film festival, a movie must be big enough to catch the eye (and keep itself out of competition) yet bland enough to offer something for everyone. This year's opener, Ridley Scott's Robin Hood--a/k/a Robin des Bois--was no exception, featuring a couple of Oscar-certified stars (grim and rumbling Russell Crowe, tempestuous yet dignified Cate Blanchett), a whole lotta action, a bit of roistering, a tad of historical revisionism, some nifty digital pageantry, a soupcon of romance, and not quite enough drama to sustain my interest for 140 minutes.

No woodsy-shmoodsy green tights man, this Robin is fighting against the French invaders and for the Magna Carta. Thus, the movie introduces two themes that promise to figure in the festival in the days to come. One is the spectacle of French soldiers acting like Nazis--as will be seen in the 1945 Algerian massacre sequence in the festival's designated political scandal, Rachid Bouchareb's Outside the Law--and the other is economic injustice. In addition to many (many) movies about the marginalized and powerless, we can expect to see greedocracy addressed in Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a Swiss-French documentary co-production Cleveland Contra Wall Street, an American documentary Inside Job, the Italian doc on the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila Draquila: Italy Trembles, and perhaps in Jean-Luc Godard's first feature in six years, bluntly titled Film Socialisme.

The new Godard is Cannes' big auteurist premiere--others include works from Woody Allen, Olivier Assayas, the ageless Manoel De Oliveira, Jia Zhangke, Abbas Kiarostami (directing festival poster girl Juliette Binoche), Takeshi Kitano (back in yakuza mode), Mike Leigh, Thai mystery man Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and, here with his first feature since The Death of Mr. Lazarescu rocked the Croisette in 2005, Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu. Only a few of these films are actually in competition. This year even more than most it seems that the most promising films are in the Un Certain Regard or the Directors' Fortnight sections, the latter of which includes a pair of innovative South American horror flicks, or the International Critics Week. Notable there is David Robert Mitchell's The Myth of the American Sleepover--an exceptionally sweet high school naturalization of American Graffiti--that may turn out to be Cannes' great American sleeper.