The full line-up for this year’s Cannes has been announced and it’s packed full of exciting new offerings from some of the world’s greatest filmmakers. As usual, it looks to have a few surprises and new discoveries in store, too.
And for anyone who things that that the festival is just bunch of film industry types drinking rosé and chin-stroking cineastes using the phrase ‘mise en scène’ a lot, Cannes has re-established its preeminence on the movie calendar in recent years to the extent that it’s become a reliable supplier of Oscar winners. Last year’s festival introduced the world to Jonathan Glazer’s singular vision of the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest, and Justine Triet’s knotty Alpine murder-mystery Anatomy of a Fall. Not to mention recent Palme d’Or winners like Parasite, Triangle of Sadness and Shoplifters.
But it’s fresh new big-screen releases that get us fired up and the line-up is chock full of movies that will be gracing our local cinemas in the months ahead. Here’s ten to keep a close eye on. What’s the French for ‘we’re so back’?
Kinds of Kindness
Yes, it’s another Yorgos Lanthimos joint – the Greek auteur does not rest on his laurels – and another team-up with Poor Things’ Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe. This time Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, The Favourite’s Joe Alwyn and Hong Chau (The Whale) join his ensemble for a ‘triptych’ fable following three characters facing some seriously unusual challenges in their lives.
The Shrouds
David Cronenberg’s last festival premiere was middling body horror sci-fi Crimes of the Future. Hopes are higher for the Canadian legend’s return to Cannes with another film that explores our corporeal anxieties – and one that he’s calling one of his most personal yet. It stars Vincent Cassel as a grieving widower who installs a device in a burial ground that enables him to commune with the newly dead, and also features Diane Kruger and Guy Pearce. Cronenberg’s compositions of decomposition should be a sight to behold.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
This year’s festival goers will be staggering down the Croisette after George Miller’s follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road blasts from the Palais des Festivals screens. But how do you follow up the greatest action movie of the past decade? In Miller’s case – and judging by the trailers – by making it even louder, crazier and more juiced up on that chrome aerosol stuff than the first time out. Cannes likes to show off with a big Hollywood blockbuster, just to remind the world that it’s not all about solemn French character studies, and they don’t come much bigger than this.
September Says
Alongside Yorgos Lanthimos at this year’s fest is his old Alps and The Lobster star Ariane Labed. The French actress-turned-filmmaker will be unleashing her directorial debut at Cannes. September Says stars Wonka’s Rakhee Thakrar and Mia Tharia (Taika Waititi’s new sci-fi Klara and the Sun) and is adapted from Daisy Johnson’s much-praised 2020 novel ‘Sisters’. If it’s as good as the book, a story of sisters joined by a supernatural bond that’s drawn comparisons with Shirley Jackson, this one could go off.
The Apprentice
This one’s a flex: Ali Abbasi, the Iranian-Danish filmmaker behind migrant fantasy Border and Iranian serial-killer drama Holy Spider, is turning his attention to Donald Trump via The Apprentice. It stars Marvel’s Sebastian Stan as Trump and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as his ruthless long-time lawyer Roy Cohn, and promises ‘a dive into the underbelly of the American empire’ that examines the ‘Faustian’ pact ‘the Donald’ made with Cohn in his earlier years.
Bird
Two actors really willing to sip the bathwater – figuratively and literally – Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski feels like a collaboration that needed to happen. Happily, Andrea Arnold agrees and the American Honey director has combined the pair for a drama set in South East England. Saltburn’s Keoghan is playing neglectful single dad Bug, who lives with his adventure-seeking 12-year-old daughter and her brother in a squat in Kent. No word on Rogowski’s role yet, but this one should be a festival highlight.
Megalopolis
Back in 1979, Cannes gave the Palme d’Or to a troubled Vietnam War movie called Apocalypse Now and saved it – and its director, Francis Ford Coppola – from possible disaster. Coppola will be hoping for a repeat this year when he introduces another troubled epic, Megalopolis, after 40 years of labour. The movie, which stars Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Laurence Fishburne and Dustin Hoffman, is ‘a story of political ambition, genius and conflicted love’ where ‘the fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems’. The great man doesn’t do ‘easy’. Does he still do masterpieces?
Parthenope
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
Docs are big at Cannes, too, and a new one from the man behind James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck, is big news. The Haitian filmmaker has recruited LaKeith Stanfield to narrate the story of pioneering South African photographer Ernest Cole, who risked everything to capture Black life under apartheid. Peck will explore his art and reportage, as well as his life in exile in the US, to introduce ‘a pivotal Black artist to a new generation’.On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni caught the eye with 2017’s magical realist odyssey I Am Not a Witch. The writer-director is back in the spotlight this year with a BBC Film and A24-backed film about which almost nothing is known, but which will be well worth keeping an eye out for on the Un Certain Regard line-up.
The 77th Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14-25, 2024.