Cannes 2012 preview: Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, and Kristen Stewart bring Hollywood glitz to the French Riviera VIDEO

Image Credit: Focus Features

Since its inception in 1947, the Cannes Film Festival has been the ne plus ultraof international cinema, but rarely has the festival featured quite so manyAmerican filmmakers and Hollywood movie stars. The 2012 Cannes festival gets underway on Wednesday with the opening film, Wes Andersons Moonrise Kingdom, and over the course of the subsequent 11 days, the festival will premiere films starring (deep breath) Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Kristen Stewart, Zac Efron, Shia LaBeouf, Robert Pattinson,Kirsten Dunst,Tom Hardy, Amy Adams, Viggo Mortensen,and MatthewMcConaughey (intwo movies!), with filmmakers like Anderson, Lee Daniels, and John Hillcoat screening their films in competition for the first time. Meanwhile, DreamWorks AnimationsMadagascar 3: Europes Most Wanted and the HBO TV movie Hemingway & Gellhorn are both premiering out of competition.

EWs Owen Gleiberman will be detailing all his thoughts on the great and not so great at Cannes, but heres a quick primer on whats likely to light up the famed Croisette,in chronological order of their big premieres inside the cavernous Grand Thtre Lumire.

IN COMPETITIONNew films from Palme dOr winners Michael Haneke (Love) and Cristian Mungiu (Beyond the Hills), and Cannes mainstays Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone), Abbas Kiarostiami (Like S omeone in Love), Ken Loach (The Angels Share), and Alain Resnais (You Aint Seen Nothin Yet) made the cut this year to compete for the Palme dOr. The Cannes jury is headed by director Nanni Moretti (The Sons Room), and includes filmmaker Alexander Payne, actors Ewan McGregor and Diane Kruger, and fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Moonrise KingdomDirected by Wes Anderson

Amazingly, Wes Andersons seventh feature film is his first to screen in competition at Cannes. It chronicles two 12-year-olds whose decision to run away together mobilizes their small New England town into action. Starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and Jason Schwartzman.

LawlessDirected by John Hillcoat

Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, and Jason Clarke star as the real-life Bondurant brothers, famed Virginia bootleggers during Prohibition. Musician Nick Cave adapted Matt Bondurants based-in-fact novel The Wettest County in the World for director John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road). Costarring Jessica Chastain, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman, and Mia Wasikowska.

Killing Them SoftlyDirected by Andrew Dominik

Brad Pitt re-teams with the director of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford for this contemporary tale of an enforcer (Pitt) charged with hunting down the thieves who robbed a mobbed-up poker game. Costars Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini, and Sam Shepard.

On the RoadDirected by Walter Salles

Jack Kerouacs seminal semi-autobiographical novel which presaged the rise of the Beat Generation finally gets a big screen adaptation some! 60 year s after Kerouac famously typed out his novel on a single 12o-foot roll of paper. Stack onto that cultural significance the fact that costar Kristen Stewart and her Twilight compatriot and Cosmopolis star Robert Pattinson will be in Cannes practically at the same time, and the cognitive dissonance is staggering. Costarring Sam Riley (as the Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise), Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams, Elisabeth Moss, and Viggo Mortensen.

NEXT PAGE: Robert Pattinson, Josh Hutcherson, and Two! Times! TheMcConaughey!