It’s pronounced “can,” not “con” or “cons” or cans,” and it started today on the French Riviera.

I splurged and attended that glamorous film festival in 2005, so I can guess what’s happening there now. Along the seaside walk called the Croisette, the hotels are emblazoned with advertisements for summer blockbusters, starlets are posing for the paparazzi and journalists are thumbing through the program guides for clues about the Next Big Thing.

This year’s festival leans heavily toward Latin America. The opening night film is “Blindness,” a sci-fi drama by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. Also in competition are “Guerilla” and “The Argentine,” tandem films by Steven Soderbergh that comprise a biography of communist revolutionary Che Guevara, starring Benicio Del Toro.

The American film with the biggest buzz may be the offbeat “Synecdoche, New York,” the directorial debut of acclaimed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a playwright building a life-sized replica of New York City.

But there is plenty of mainstream Hollywood presence as well. “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is premiering at Cannes, albeit outside of the official competition, and so is “Kung-Fu Panda,” an animated film that I previewed today at Ronnie’s. Both of those American films are going to do boffo business overseas, and jump-starting such border crossers is part of what Cannes is for.

My favorite feature of the festival is the series of outdoor screenings on the beach, the one chance for the general public to partake of the bounty. It turns out that the most popular beach screenings are Hollywood popcorn movies. (I watched “Night of the Living Dead” there on a Friday the 13th, under a full moon, with the British royal family’s yacht bobbing in the water behind the screen.)

Contrary to popular belief, the French don’t hate America–they just don’t appreciate it when we insist that our culture is le grande fromage.