Ken Loach and Mike Leigh will go head-to-head at the Cannes Film Festival.

THE Tree of Life, an epic and ambitious coming-of-age film that took years for enigmatic US director Terrence Malick to bring to the screen, won top honours last night at the Cannes festival.

THE 53rd Corona Cork Film Festival opened yesterday with the screening of Burn After Reading, the latest Coen brothers film starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

A film about the Bobby Sands hunger strike which scooped an honour at Cannes will “have a resonance across the world”, its co-producer said.

AS the credits roll on another Cannes Film Festival, it may go down as a year in which the on-screen line-up outshone that on the famed red carpet.