PARIS, April 17 (Reuters) - Hollywood star power will mix with world cinema at the 67th Cannes Film Festival in May, after the announcement on Thursday that one of the films to be shown in competition will be the Tommy Lee Jones-directed frontier drama "The Homesman."

Among the 18 films competing for the top Palme d'Or prize at the festival will be movies from Russia, Turkey, Canada, Japan and France, plus several by women directors, festival director Thierry Fremaux told a news conference. Among the other films in competition are two from Canada with director David Cronenberg's "Maps to the Stars" and Atom Egoyan's "The Captive", plus British directors Ken Loach's "Jimmy's Hall" and Mike Leigh's "Mr. Turner."

Also to be shown are "Leviathan" by the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, the Turkish film "Winter Sleep" (Kis uykusu) by director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako's "Timbuktu." Japanese director Naomi Kawase's "Futatsume no mado" (Two Windows) will compete, as will several French entries including director Bertrand Bonello's bio-pic "Saint Laurent" about the fashion guru and "Sils Maris" directed by Olivier Assayas and starring Juliette Binoche.

Another Hollywood offering will be the out-of-competition world premiere of the 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks Animation co-production "How to Train Your Dragon 2", the sequel of the adaptation of the successful book series about a boy growing up with a dragon as his life partner. The festival, which runs from May 14-25, will open with an out-of-competition screening of "Grace of Monaco," a bio-pic starring Nicole Kidman and directed by French director Olivier Dahan.

The parallel, more art house-focused "Un Certain Regard" schedule kicks off with "Party Girl" by French director Marie Amachoukeli, starring Claire Burger and Samuel Theis. Oscar-winning New Zealand director Jane Campion will lead the jury for the main competition. She is the first and only woman to have won the top Cannes prize, the Palme d'Or, in 1993 for "The Piano."

A total of 49 long-form films were chosen to be shown at the festival out of 1,800 submitted. The selected movies are from 28 countries and 15 of the directors are women. The festival is one of the world's oldest and swankiest, with stars and movie moguls often showing up at the Mediterranean port city on enormous yachts. But there will be time and space for serious world affairs, with documentaries about the Syrian conflict and the political upheaval in Ukraine, Fremaux said. The official poster this year for the festival, which always pays homage to the film greats of the past, is a sepia-toned portrait of the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, who starred in Federico Fellini's classic "8½".

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