Jude Law and Norah Jones are big draw on first day of Cannes Film Festival

Welcome the first day of Cannes, which opened with the film 'My Blueberry Nights', starring Norah Jones and Jude Law, the English-language debut of cult Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai.

It will be interesting to see if Jones, who is more famous as a singer and the daughter of sitar player Ravi Shankar, impresses in her first acting role.

She plays the lead as a part-time waitress who goes on a trans-American road trip after having her heart broken.

According to Wong Kar-Wai, Jones has an "acting aura".

Alas, British films are rather absent from the list of competing films this year. But as a consolation, The Queen director Stephen Frears is the festival jury President - the second Brit ever to have the honour. The festival runs until 25 May.

The main competition involves 22 films from countries including Israel, South Korea and Mexico, as well as movies from four directors who have already been crowned with Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or: Tarantino's gory "Death Proof," the Coen brothers' Rio Grande thriller "No Country for Old Men," Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" and Sarajevo-born Emir Kusturica's "Promise Me This."

Michael Moore, whose "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the top prize at Cannes in 2004, is not competing for awards this year.

But "Sicko," his look at the U.S. health care system, has already won more attention than any film in the festival.

The U.S. Treasury Department opened an investigation into a trip Moore took to Cuba - accompanied by a group of ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers - during the film's shooting.

Leonardo DiCaprio brings his environmental documentary "The 11th Hour," and celebrity super couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are expected to appear to promote "Ocean's Thirteen," and Jolie's "A Mighty Heart," in which she plays the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Cannes was founded in 1939 as an alternative to the Venice Film Festival in Mussolini's Italy - but almost as soon as it opened, the festival was canceled because World War II broke out. The festival did not get going in earnest until the 1950s.

Past winners of the festival's top prize include "Rome, Open City," "The Third Man," "Blowup," "M A S H," "Taxi Driver" and "Apocalypse Now."

The Director's Fortnight sidebar features a British film, Control, about the life of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the band Joy Division who killed himself in 1980 at the age of 23.

The festival has rekindled its love affair with Hollywood after cooling to mainstream film in the early 1970s.

Last year, the biggest Hollywood title, The Da Vinci Code, was slated by critics. The negative publicity did not stop the movie taking a massive 758 million (£382 million) worldwide.

But film experts have commented that last year's critical maulings may have led to fewer blockbusters in Cannes this year.

Actress and party girl Lindsay Lohan, Kelly Brook, and some of the cast of new British film St Trinian's are also expected to be making appearances this year.