CANNES, France -- Gloomy skies may be hanging over the south of France, but psychedelic philosophizing is lighting up the screens indoors. Ari Folman’s The Congress opened up the Director’s Fortnight section of Cannes last night with a loopy dose of future shock featuring Robin Wright as a washed-up variation of herself who sells her scanned body, plus a gallery of emotional expressions and all performance rights, to Tinseltown composite Miramount Studios. No need to suffer the scandal-prone peccadillos, erratic temperaments or drug-fueled habits of stars; after turning them into digital avatars, the studio can dictate movie roles, shape career decisions and exploit promotional duties without any pushback. The forever-young and totally automated celebrity will do its duty impeccably and in perpetuity. (TMZ should fear for its life.)

Director Ari Folman, second from left, poses with the cast of The Congress. (Getty Images)

The digital Faustian bargain (pitched by Ms. Wright’s aging agent, touchingly played by Harvey Keitel) becomes midnight-movie manna when, 20 years later, Ms. Wright goes to a studio-run resort where people snort a gas that turns everything they perceive into a drug-fueled, candy-coated Looney Tunes cartoon populated by famous figures from pop history. In the future, humans are simply hallucinating shape-shifters who idolize past icons and morph seamlessly from Michael Jackson to Frank Sinatra to Grace Jones. But the next logical step is even more morbid: the studio, which has now merged with a Big Pharma company, wants Ms. Wright to sell her chemical essence so that they can let the public literally digest her.

The stoner-quality pontificating, which gets more baroquely animated and increasingly paranoid as it goes along, offers up dystopic visions that deliver kaleidoscopic science fiction at its most extreme—imagine Betty Boop crossed with The Matrix. The film is loosely adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s communist-era satire The Futurological Congress and its vision of a world dictated by illusions that pacify the public, and its update to 21^st century anxiety about virtual reality is admirable. But there’s a thematic sprawl to the film that finally ends in emotional overreach and narrative obfuscation. You might need to be tripping balls to really feel like the ending has any sort of a satisfying climax.

Celebrated Chinese auteur Jia Zhengke is only slightly more down-to-earth in his ripped-from-the-headlines tabloid omnibus A Touch of Sin, a quartet of lurid stories taken from recent news events in China. A darkly poetic slant on everything from a recent high-speed train crash to the suicides at a Foxconn factory, with a few disgruntled employees that go postal thrown in for good measure, Mr. Jia’s latest takes the usually austere director into unfamiliar pulp territory that includes a shotgun rampage and a defiant pedicurist who gets deadly with a fruit knife after being bitch-slapped with a fistful of renminbi. The overt themes of economic oppression come through loud and clear, although the audience will probably feel pummeled rather than persuaded.

Asghar Farhadi, right, director of The Past. (Getty Images)

Sober-minded literalists who prefer their plots unsullied by sensationalistic extremes will look favorably on divorce drama The Past, from poet of martial discord Asghar Farhadi (whose Oscar-winning film A Separation was a devastating look at an Iranian couple at the end their marriage).  As with his previous film, this delicately calibrated story of husbands, wives and children all shell-shocked by emotional upheaval makes for a compelling study that slowly (if tauntingly) parcels out its plot revelations like grenades that cause irreparable collateral damage. The setting is now France, and the cast includes Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), but the concerns and emotional conflicts are clearly universal. It’s good to know filmmakers here can show devastated lives without always causing literal devastation.

Mandy Patinkin in 'The Princess Bride'

The cast of eighties cult fantasy film The Princess Bride is set to reunite at the New York Film Festival this year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced via press release today. Cary Elwes, Billy Crystal, Carol Kane, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, and Robin Wright--along with director Rob Reiner--are all 25 years older and wiser than they were when Bride was released (Ms. Wright's gained and lost a "Penn" on her name!), and will attend a screening of a new print of the film on October 2, along with a discussion afterwards. Perhaps the most memorable cast member--Wallace Shawn, who played the lisping Sicilian criminal Vizzini, told The Observer last year that he doesn't like being stopped on the street with fans' impersonations of his comic role.  “I must admit, they’re rarely that flattering. Even short or bald people such as myself have–we don’t have grotesque self-images.”

Maybe he'll change his mind and attend!

Pitt.

Sure, it’s the familiar formula about a losing team (the Oakland Athletics) catapulted to glory by a tough, idealistic general manager (controversial Billy Beane, immortalized in a compelling performance by Brad Pitt, at the top of his game). But thanks to the awesome collaboration of two brilliant Oscar-winning screenwriters, Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List) and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and one polished director, Bennett Miller (Capote), expect a vacation from clichés and a home run in the final inning with the bases loaded.  Based on the best-seller by writer Michael Lewis, Moneyball details the unconventional strategy devised by Beane shortly after the A’s lost the American League Division Series to the New York Yankees in 2001. In a sink-or-swim decision, he compared the other teams funded by huge budgets with his own team owners and outdated scouts who couldn’t afford to recruit champions, and weighed his options: “We’re the last dog bowl in the room—and you know what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies.” During a strategy meeting to beg favors from the Cleveland Indians, he notices a fat nerdy young economics graduate from Yale named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who specializes in team management based on player analysis. To everyone’s amazement and derision, he becomes fascinated by such an oddball and actually hires him as his dorky new assistant. Brand hits the computer and comes up with 25 names they can afford. They rebuilt the team with tapped losers, traded for damaged players and bargained for defective rejects, then switched their positions on the field. Even Art Howe, the pessimistic new team coach (startlingly bald Philip Seymour Hoffman) was hired with a one-year contract because it’s all their budget would allow. Shy, almost socially autistic, and definitely inept in business, Peter nevertheless juggled figures in his head and came up with a scheme that revolutionized major league baseball. “Adapt or die” was the new motto. It was a colossal gamble, but suddenly the game was blackjack and Billy, 44, and his new assistant, 25, became the players who changed the casino rules. Treating baseball as science instead of reverence, they called their eyebrow-raising experiment “moneyball” and the press massacred them for it. But when the Oakland A’s won 19 games in a row—the longest winning streak in baseball—the team soared to American League stardom. The rest is history.

It’s a story that holds up beautifully in the re-telling, but the best thing about Moneyball is the human element. Billy Beane is not soft-pedaled into a deity, and Brad Pitt takes impeccable precautions not to underplay his abrasive personality. Except for caring about his daughter’s respect and a grudging fondness for his remarried ex-wife (Robin Wright, in a one-scene cameo), there’s nothing about his personal life. He shows no hidden compassion for his players as human beings, trading and cutting them at will with no advance warning, and flies into rants and smashes up the furniture at will. You may not admire him, but you can’t help but like Brad Pitt, even when he overdoes his trademark mannerism of saying almost every line with his mouth full of food and drink. (At last week’s Toronto International Film Festival, he admitted he doesn’t even like baseball.) Chubby Jonah Hill is perfect casting as Peter Brand, the computer doofus obsessed with statistics, but his own private life is a blank page, too. Hoffman is largely wasted in the dugout, looking grouchy. Still, in the crack pacing, smart dialogue and exhilarating camerawork by Wally Pfister, any quibbles of mine are minor. This is a subtle, elegant and altogether triumphant film about a subject I thought I was tired of, told with an artistry and freshness that is positively thrilling.

rreed@observer.com

MONEYBALL

Running Time 133 minutes

Written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin

Directed by Bennett Miller

Starring Brad Pitt, Robin Wright and Jonah Hill

3.5/4