... Some films have been excoriated even before they've been shown. That has been the fate of Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun 2. Exodus, his follow-up to his Oscar-winner of 1994. Long in advance of its official screening this weekend, the whispers were going along the Croisette that this was a Sputnik-sized dud. Its box-office performance in Russia, where it was released in a three-hour version, was patchy. Russian journalists, many of whom seem to distrust the director because of his close contacts with the Putin government, were disdainful about the film, which is showing in Cannes in a shorter version. However, buyers who saw the film at advanced screenings described it as an epic war movie in the vein of Elem Klimov's Come and See and full of spectacular, lurid and poignant set-pieces. These include a scene in which a German pilot tries to defecate, from a plane, on Russian refugees on a Red Cross boat. When he is shot, carnage ensures. Equally vivid, apparently, is a scene in which a young nurse tends a dying soldier, allowing him the fleeting glimpse he craves of her naked body. Mikhalkov hopes to make yet another part of Burnt by the Sun. The film's reception this weekend will go a long way to deciding whether he will be given the chance to do so. ... Jurors weary of the intimate, character-driven fare elsewhere in the competition may applaud its sheer scale.