The Cannes Film Festival confirmed today (Thursday) that Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights, starring Jude Law, Ed Harris, Norah Jones and Natalie Portman, will open the 60th annual festival on May 16. In something of a surprise, the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez "double bill" Grindhouse, which was expected to compete for the top Palme d'Or prize, will only be represented by the Tarantino half of the feature, Death Proof, which is being expanded to one hour and 50 minutes. Among the other 21 films selected for the competition are the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, starring Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Javier Bardem; David Fincher's Zodiac, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.; James Gray's We Own the Night, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg; and Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, starring mostly first-time actors. Serbian director Emir Kusturica, a two-time winner at Cannes and the chairman of the jury in 2005, will again be represented in the competition with the comedy Promise Me This. Among films screening out of competition will be Michael Moore's documentary Sicko (about the U.S. health system); Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen; Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, starring Angelina Jolie as the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's wife Mariane; and Ken Burns's The War. The latter film will presumably be compiled from Burns's upcoming documentary series about World War II for PBS. It is the only film on the Cannes list whose length is not indicated.

Online movie renters Netflix saw its shares tumble nearly 10 percent to $21.70 Wednesday after saying that it expects to end up with about 7.3 million subscribers by the end of the year, 13 percent fewer than it had forecast in January. Shares in the company have fallen 26 percent over the past year. Netflix apparently was hit hard by a rival service from Blockbuster that allows customers to receive movies in the mail, then exchange them in Blockbuster stores. Reporting on Netflix's woes, today's (Thursday) Los Angeles Times commented that Blockbuster "is finally getting some payback in its battle with rival Netflix."

The Oscar-winning animated film Happy Feet happily danced to the No. 1 spot on the DVD sales charts for the third week in a row, Nielsen VideoScan reported on Wednesday. Charlotte's Web was in second place, followed by The Pursuit of Happyness. On Home Media Retail magazine's rental chart, The Good Shepherd rose to the top of the list for the second consecutive week.

The Bangkok Film Festival, thrown into confusion and then postponed in the wake of last September's military coup, is set to reemerge on July 19 in a drastically pared-down form. Daily Variety said today (Thursday) that the budget of the 10-day festival had been slashed by two thirds, to just $2.4 million, and that the festival will now be organized into three competitions: one for movies from countries comprising the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN); another for films outside the area; and short films. A concurrent film market will also be held.

The landmark National Theater in Westwood, the site of countless Hollywood premieres since it opened in 1970, is shutting down after tonight (Thursday), Daily Variety reported today, citing a theater employee. The National is operated by the Mann Theaters chain, which announced last year that it would not renew its lease due to rising rental costs but later signed a short extension. The company did not confirm the closing. The National, which seats 1,112, represented what Variety described as "a dying breed of single-screen cinemas in an age of megaplexes."

After being the brunt on Tuesday of arguably the most caustic comments yet meted out by judge Simon Cowell to an American Idol contestant, Sanjaya Malakar was finally voted off the talent show Wednesday night. "For once, the notoriously mean judge was vindicated," the Associated Press commented afterwards. Teary-eyed, the 17-year-old, who had managed to remain on the show by dint of a winning personality, eccentric hair stylings, and fashionable clothes -- despite mediocre singing -- said that he had had "an amazing experience." The results show drew a 16.9 rating and a 26 share, drawing an audience in the 9:00 p.m. hour larger than all of the other broadcast networks combined.

NBC News was being commended for its sensitivity Thursday in handling a package of videos, photos and writings sent to it by Cho Seung-Hui, the gunman who killed 32 people and then himself at Virginia Tech University on Monday. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said that NBC faced the issue of "How do you sift out what is newsworthy versus what is exploitative? On one level, you are playing into the hands of a killer who is from the grave trying to manipulate you." NBC anchor Brian Williams reported that during the two-hour period between Cho's first shootings on campus and his deadly assault on a classroom hall he compiled and posted "what can only be described as a multimedia manifesto to NBC headquarters, this very building, here in New York." (Later, Williams said on MSNBC that he was concerned about using as much of the material as he did. "This was a sick business tonight, going on the air with this," he remarked.) Lee Thornton, a former CBS News White House correspondent who now heads the broadcast journalism program at the University of Maryland, also commended NBC for handling the package of material "responsibly" by making copies and turning the originals over to police investigators. NBC News President Steve Capus later told MSNBC's Chris Matthews that the package was flagged by the postal letter carrier when he noticed that it had been sent from Blacksburg, VA, and that it was delivered to security personnel at the network because "ever since the anthrax incident, everything of a larger size gets checked when it comes into the building."

Gail Shister, who lost her TV column in the Philadelphia Inquirer this month after more than 25 years, is contemplating filing a lawsuit against the newspaper, Philadelphia Magazine reported today (Thursday), citing staffers at the newspaper. "I'm considering all options," Shister told the magazine but declined to discuss specifics. In a statement, Inquirer editor appeared to blame forced cutbacks at the newspaper for ending Shister's column. "In trying to tailor the mission of the paper to the staff that we have now, we've had to make some tough decisions," he said. In a message to Philadelphia Magazine, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz said, "I understand the Inquirer must cope with a shrunken newsroom. ... but it would be a shame if Shister can't continue to do at least some of the reporting that reflected quite well on the Inquirer."

Joan Rivers and Melissa Rivers, who had covered Hollywood's red-carpet events for E! Entertainment Channel before jumping ship for TV Guide Channel in 2004, are being replaced by Lisa Rinna, the former soap actress whose career was reignited by a recent appearance on Dancing With the Stars. In a statement, TV Guide Channel said that Rinna "has fashion expertise as both a business person and commentator, so she is a great fit for this role and for our brand." There was no immediate reaction from either mother or daughter Rivers.

Kitty Carlisle Hart, best remembered for her stint as a panelist on the CBS primetime game show To Tell the Truth from 1956-67 (and later in syndication) died Wednesday in New York at the age of 96. She made her film debut in 1934 in Murder at the Vanities and the following year appeared in the Marx Bros.' classic A Night at the Opera. An accomplished operatic singer, she performed with the Metropolitan Opera in 1967 in Die Fledermaus. She married Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Moss Hart in 1946.