Wes Anderson and Todd Haynes to compete at Cannes

Movies by Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes and Ken Loach will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced during a news conference on Thursday.

Also in the running for the festival’s top prize will be films by the returning winners Wim Wenders, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Nanni Moretti, reports nytimes.

But Martin Scorsese will not compete at the festival, which opens May 16 and runs through May 27. Instead, his eagerly anticipated movie “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is about the murder of Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma, will appear out of competition. The Wes Anderson picture in competition is “Asteroid City,” about a space cadet convention that is interrupted by aliens; Todd Haynes will show “May December,” starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, which follows an actress researching the woman she is set to play.

Ken Loach, whose movies focused on working-class life in Britain have twice won the Palme d’Or, will present “The Old Oak”.

A jury led by the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund will choose the winner. Ostlund won last year’s Palme d’Or for “Triangle of Sadness,” a satire of the international superrich; he also took the 2017 award for “The Square,” a sendup of the art world.

Of the 19 titles in competition, five are directed by women, including the Cannes veterans Jessica Hausner and Alice Rohrwacher, and Ramata-Toulaye Sy, a French-Senegalese newcomer.

The festival will open with “Jeanne du Barry,” a period drama about a poor woman. It stars Johnny Depp in his first major role since he won a defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard.

Other high-profile movies scheduled to premiere at Cannes’s 76th edition include “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” directed by James Mangold. Starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, that movie is a short western about a reunion between two hit men.