Two Chinese pandas have landed in Paris for a new zoo life, in a loan sealed after years of top-level negotiations between China and France.

Danish director Lars von Trier said Wednesday he sympathised "a little bit" with Adolf Hitler at the Cannes film festival.

Down on the Riviera, the Cannes film festival is braced for its bloodiest year in decades.

France this week jolted Europe into establishing common policies on immigration, refugees and asylum, but the move has not been welcomed by all.

Agnes Poirier looks at Laurent Cantet's film Entre les Murs , which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Festival.

The director of Entre les Murs, the French classroom drama that won the main Cannes film prize said on Sunday he had been deeply moved by the applause that met the film when it was shown at the festival. Entre les Murs (The Class) became the first French film in 21 years to claim the coveted Palme d'Or award at the world's biggest film festival.

Back after 19 years, the new Indiana Jones film premiered at Cannes. Charlotte Higgins reports from the festival.

A lack of memorable movies mean the 2008 Cannes film festival is unlikely to live long in the minds of many critics, who argue that after a solid start the main competition faded. With four out of 22 films in the main competition this year yet to screen, critics and journalists struggled to come up with many highlights.

Diego Maradona, the Argentinian soccer genius notorious for the "Hand of God" goal and a post-football descent into drugs, hits the big screen in Cannes on Tuesday in a documentary that also shows him as a staunch critic of the United States. Maradona is revered as a god-like figure in his home country.

Repressed memories, the horrors of war and Israel's dubious role in a notorious Beirut refugee camp massacre are the themes of the Cannes film festival's first ever fully-animated documentary. Ari Folman's anti-war movie is premiered in Cannes as Israel celebrates its 60th year of existence and its neighbour Lebanon hits yet another political crisis pushing it to the brink of civil war.