The X-Men are going to make their Last Stand at Cannes.

The third and supposedly final entry in the comic book series, directed by Brett Ratner, is one of several popcorn flicks set to play at the venerable film festival, which unveiled its full slate on Thursday, joining the previously announced Cannes opener The Da Vinci Code, the DreamWorks ’toon Over the Hedge and the 9-11 film United 93 among the major Hollywood films screening out of competition.

Ron Howard’s anticipated big-screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s mega-selling Code, starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, gets things rolling on May 18.

Meanwhile, among the key films in competition is a subject bound to go over well with the locals: Marie-Antoinette from writer-director Sofia Coppola, who is making her appearance at the festival and aims to follow in the Palm d’Or-winning footsteps of her dad, Francis Ford Coppola, who won the top prize for his 1979 masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. Her stylized retelling of the life of the ill-fated the French queen stars Kirsten Dunst.

More star power will be provided by such other dramas in competition as: Volver, the latest from Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar in which Penélope Cruz plays a ghost who returns to her town to resolve issues with her family she couldn’t resolve in life; Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation , an ensemble drama based on the nonfiction bestseller by Eric Schlosser that takes aim at the fast-food industry; Babel, a drama from Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) following three stories set in different cultures around the world and starring Cate Blanchet, Brad Pitt and Gael García Bernal; The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a rumination on 20th century Irish Republicans from master of British social realism Ken Loach; and Italian maestro Nanni Moretti’s The Caiman, a comedy-drama satirizing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"Art is always political," festival director Thierry Fremaux said in a press conference Thursday unveiling this year’s lineup. "Filmmakers are not citizens from different planet."

Aside from Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette, other American first-timers include Pan’s Labrynth, the new fantasy-horror flick from Hellboy helmer Guillermo Del Toro, and Southland Tales, a comedy-musical-sci-fi thriller about a future Los Angeles beset by upheaval from Donnie Darko mastermind Richard Kelly and starring the Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott and Mandy Moore.

Other notable films screening out of compeition include: Shortbus, an exploration of art and sexuality in New York from Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer-director John Cameron Mitchell; An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary chronicling Al Gore’s battle to raise the alarm about global warming that premiered at February’s Sundance Film Festival; and French filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s drama Transylvania, starring Asia Argento, which will close the festivities on May 28.

Chinese auteur Wong Kar Wai will head up this year’s judging panel which will also include actors Samuel L. Jackson, Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Roth and Monica Bellucci.