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Stars and industry leaders converged to Nikki Beach Sunday evening for a very good cause: the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), in association with Participant Media, awarded the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation (KSCF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending violence against children, a $500,000 grant. Support for entertainment-related charities, scholarship programs, and humanitarian efforts is a core mandate of the HFPA, which has already donated over $30 million over the past years and has been making a point of celebrating great causes in events such as the Cannes Film Festival.

Much has been made, and with some good reason, of the Cannes Film Festival as the last bastion of cinema, a last stand of sorts for the celebration of the pure art form of film in the age of uncertain digital evolution, of streaming video, YouTube videos, and Netflix. The much-publicized querelle with the latter purveyor of on-demand movies has made the Croisette ground zero for a showdown between digital innovators and those who think film should be inextricably tied to its traditions (and its theatrical releases).

What brings silence to the utter frenzy of the famous Palais des Festivals red carpet steps? The sight of 82 actresses and industry women marching up the stairs and then standing in solidarity en masse to bring attention to the disparity to the role of women at the legendary festival since its inception in 1946. Symbolically, 82 women gathered to make a point: this is the number of female directors who have been chosen for the main competition, in contrast to the 1,688 male counterparts in the same time period.

At the Cannes Film Festival, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem walked the red carpet with the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi at the opening night. Their film is Everybody Knows and the real life husband and wife do not play a couple but a couple that once was.

There are four master classes on the Cannes schedule this year, including talks by film icons John Travolta, Christopher Nolan and Gary Oldman. To start, Ryan Coogler kicked things off with an intimate, free-flowing and wide-ranging two-hour conversation with Elvis Mitchell in front of a packed Salle Buñuel.

Two-time nominee and Golden Globe winner Asghar Farhadi is an accomplished cinematic storyteller whose intimate films often revolve around the slow burn of inexorable emotional turmoil. His movies are triumphs of economy whose strength lies precisely in their narrative restraint, and they have garnered worldwide acclaim, not least the jury and screenwriting prizes previously won here in Cannes.

Paris, May 1968, mass protests, street battles and nationwide strikes, a new revolution is on its way, this time, not only a political but social and cultural one.  Intellectuals, students and manual workers took the streets engulfing the country by a social upheaval.

This is Benedict Cumberbatch’s moment: Dr. Strange is on the big screen with Avengers: Infinity War (over $ 1 billion at the box office) and soon he'll be seen in a mind-blowing acting tour de force with Patrick Melrose, a five-episode limited series on Showtime.

HFPA journalist Michele Manelis met Antonio Banderas at Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s offices in West Hollywood.   In this in-depth interview, Banderas looks back to the beginning of his career as a theatre actor and tells why he feels that theatre was like a woman he abandoned.

HFPA Grantee In 1997 a group of Latino activists and cinema lovers living in Los Angeles realized that there was a lack of exposure of Latin American film and film culture within the community. In response, they began screening vintage Mexican films in L.