Oscar winner Marion Cotillard and her partner, French actor and director Guillaume Canet, teamed up for the all-star Blood Ties premiering Monday in Cannes but faced audiences' stony silence after high hopes for the picture.

The film features one of the most high-wattage casts of the festival including Clive Owen, James Caan, Billy Crudup, Zoe Saldana and Mila Kunis.

And the hard-boiled screenplay by Canet and New York-based director James Gray, another Cannes favorite who will unveil The Immigrant starring Cotillard in the competition, sparked major buzz in the run-up to the event.

Blood Ties is a remake of a 2008 French film in which Canet also starred, with the action transposed to the mean streets of 1970s pre-gentrification Brooklyn.

Canet, who became the youngest director to capture a Cesar, France's Oscar, for the 2006 thriller Tell No One, said he found inspiration from the movies of Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes.

"I got a lot of offers from Hollywood after Tell No One and it gave me the desire to make a film in English with English-speaking actors," he said.

A press preview of the two-and-a-half-hour-long picture met with crushing indifference, and reviewers blasted its clunky story and uneven performances.

Owen's performance drew more positive reviews than the film, with critics saying the movie simply failed to deliver.

Industry website Indiewire wrote, "While Blood Ties isn't a disaster, it's certainly a mess, a sprawling crime saga that endeavors to evoke the great character-driven movies of the 1970s, but never quite lives up to its epic scope."

Variety agreed, calling it "a sluggish, dramatically undernourished saga."

Blood Ties screened out of competition at the festival, which wraps up Sunday.

AFP