Hard to find anything "usual" in this crowd of gems. And these were just the ones that won prizes. Some of the splashiest Hollywood productions made their first big splash at Cannes: A year ago, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith premiered there, and War of the Worlds. This year it's The Da Vinci Code, X-Men: The Last Stand and Over the Hedge.

But somehow the lineup for the festival, which kicks off its 59th edition today, seems wilder than usual. One senses honest-to-goodness anticipation about the selections. It may be because there are many directors on the schedule whose previous movies have made audiences intensely curious about what they'll do for an encore.

Consider, for instance, Richard Kelly, whose Donnie Darko (2001) has become a cultural landmark for at least a generation of filmgoers. Those who have been wondering how Kelly could possibly top such a dark, eccentric tale will finally find out with his much-anticipated Southland Tales, which premieres at Cannes. Southland, as with Darko, mixes mystery, horror and black humor in its portrait of Los Angeles just two years into the future and facing economic and environmental catastrophe. Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson are among the stars.

Then there's Sofia Coppola, whose Lost in Translation (2003) elevated her stature among filmmakers in America and abroad.

Her Cannes entry, Marie-Antoinette, is a historical epic that appears, sight unseen, to be a sharp veer from Translation's deadpan comedy. Kirsten Dunst, who co-starred in Coppola's The Virgin Suicides from 1999, plays the ill- fated French monarch. Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn, Judy Davis and Asia Argento are also in the cast.

It's not just American directors who are arousing such curiosity. Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, whose Amores Perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003) combined to bring him international acclaim, is coming to Cannes with Babel. Guillermo Arriaga, scriptwriter on both Amores and Grams, also wrote this new film, which, as with the other two, compresses different stories with intertwining destinies. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal co-star.

Then there's Richard Linklater, who, but for last year's widely derided remake of The Bad News Bears, would be riding an unrelenting hot streak going back to 2001's Waking Life and continuing with 2003's School of Rock and 2004's Before Sunset.

Linklater's name is attached to not just one, but two highly anticipated films: Fast Food Nation, a freewheeling adaptation of Eric Schlosser's muckraking inquiry into America's junk- eating addictions, and A Scanner Darkly, which turns Philip K Dick's surreal novel about addiction into a provocative blend of live-action and animation.

Speaking of the possibility of stretching hot streaks, Pedro Almodovar's Volver looks to be the kind of resonant, cunning and heart-stirring melodrama that has marked such recent works of the Spanish maestro as 2002's Talk to Her and 1999's All About My Mother. Carmen Maura plays a ghost who returns home to bring solace to the lives of her two daughters (Penelope Cruz, Lola Dueas). Mexican-born director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy) also has a movie set in Spain, Pan's Labyrinth, which evokes a young girl's fantasy life in the years after Franco's ascension to power.

And with Cannes, as with Faulkner, the past is never really past. There will be special presentations of such classics as Sergei Eisenstein's October, John Ford's The Searchers, Oliver Stone's Platoon and Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo. NEWSDAY