Steven Spielberg heads the jury; 100 years of Indian cinema is being feted; the proceedings open with The Great Gatsby.
With no great global upheaval - political or economical - dominating the film line-up, Cannes is putting the emphasis back on glamour. The first night alone will see Leonardo DiCaprio, Amitabh Bachchan and Nicole Kidman on the world's most famous red carpet.
And yet, despite the yachts and the dress trains, Cannes somehow still manages to be about the films.
This year, the early front-runner to win the coveted Palme d'Or is the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. When Farhadi won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011 with the brilliant A Separation, everyone wondered how it had not been at Cannes. The festival's artistic director Thierry Frémaux was not going to miss out again. The domestic drama The Past, starring Tahar Rahim and Bérénice Bejo, is the first film Farhadi has made outside of Iran. It will be interesting to see if working in French will affect his worldly narratives.
Farhadi's competition for the Palme d'Or is stiff, with three previous winners also nominated. The Coen brothers have Inside Llewyn Davis, about a folk singer in New York in 1961, while Roman Polanski brings Venus in Furs, a two-hander set in a Paris theatre. There's also Steven Soderbergh's biopic of Liberace, Beyond the Candelabra.
Nonetheless, it's rare for a director to win twice; the critical consensus is that the top prize will find a new home. Expectations are high for the Chadian auteur Mahamat Saleh Haroun; his film Grigris is the only African entry. There's also Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director who took home the Best Director award in 2011 with Drive. Excitement is climbing high for his Thai boxing drama Only God Forgives, which sees Refn teaming up with Ryan Gosling.
There was a time when Mads Mikkelsen was Refn's actor of choice. Last year's Best Actor winner will be seen as the title character in Arnaud des Pallières's 16th-century tale Michael Kohlhaas.
The competition is packed with heavyweight directors. The eclectic Jim Jarmusch has his otherworldly romantic drama Only Lovers Left Alive; Alexander Payne leaves the California wine region and heads to Nebraska; the Cannes favourite James Gray travels back to 1920s New York in The Immigrant, starring Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix; Arnaud Desplechin has Benicio Del Toro in Jimmy P (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian) and Paolo Sorrentino comes with The Great Beauty. The only woman in the competition is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi but it would be a major surprise if A Castle in Italy causes Tedeschi to join Jane Campion on the shortlist of female Palme d'Or winners.
Away from the main competition, the quality of films is no less brilliant. In the Un Certain Regard section, rubbing shoulders with Sofia Coppola (whose celebrity robbery drama The Bling Ring opens the section) and James Franco (with a William Faulkner adaptation, As I Lay Dying) is the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad. His new film Omar is a love story set in the occupied Palestine Territories in which the eponymous lead is a baker turned freedom fighter. It promises to be a return to form for a director who has thus far failed to capitalise on the critical success of Paradise Now.
Hiner Saleem's My Sweet Pepper Land is set after the fall of Saddam Hussein, on the border between Iran and Turkey, and stars Golshifteh Farahani as a teacher.
The number of Iranian-influenced films is particularly strong this year, although mystery surrounds Mohammad Rasoulof's Anonymous. The director was banned from making films in his homeland in 2010 and although it was originally announced that Anonymous would play at the festival, the title has been shelved. Iranians on the run are the focus of Kaveh Bakhtiari's L'Escale, a documentary following a group of illegal immigrants seeking a better life in -Athens.
It's a lineup that's in keeping with Indian cinema's centenary, a glamorous extravaganza that doesn't forget those less fortunate.
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