We really do need to talk about Kevin

Rumours of a British invasion of next month's Cannes Film Festival were dashed when the line-up was announced.

The Festival du Film will unroll its red carpet in four weeks' time (May 11) but just one British film, Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin, the long-in-gestation adaptation of the novel by Lionel Shriver, will compete for the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize.

Other hotly anticipated Britflicks - including Cannes regular Andrea Arnold's recently completed version of Wuthering Heights and Terence Davies's screen adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play, The Deep Blue Sea - are not on the list. Also rumoured but absent is Pawel Pawlikowski's Paris-set The Woman in the Fifth, starring Kristin Scott Thomas.

Of course, any or all of these may still show up in one of the two parallel sections - the Directors' Fortnight and the Critics' Week, which are announced later this month. But neither really has the clout of the main competition.

Still, at least one British stalwart - Michael Radford, part of the British film renaissance of the 1980s - has a new film in the selection, albeit in the Out of Competition category. He has worked almost entirely outside the UK for the past 25 years and his new film, Michel Petrucciani, is no exception: it is a French-produced documentary about the French jazz pianist of the same name.

Dominating the main competition line-up, along with Lynne Ramsay, and submitting themselves to the judgment of Robert De Niro's festival jury, are half a dozen films from the ageing auteurs in whom Cannes never seems to lose faith. Top of that list is Pedro Almódovar, who contrary to earlier rumours clearly hadn't turned down the invitation for his new film, The Skin I Live In, in a huff because his last few pictures have failed to pick up suitable awards.

Also making a return trip to the Côte d'Azur are the Dardennes brothers, Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Nanni Moretti and Lars von Trier. And then there is Woody Allen, whose latest, Midnight in Paris, opens the festival (although not in competition - Allen has always refused to do any Palme-chasing).

Most of the Croisette limelight, however, is likely to be focused on Johnny Depp in his Cap'n Jack Sparrow duds: Cannes has secured the world premiere of this summer's guaranteed blockbuster, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Shores. For the Brits, meanwhile, the shores of the Mediterranean remain as strange as ever: so near and yet so far.