The 6 Movies That Mattered at Cannes This Year
The festival is over, but the movie year has just begun. Here’s what you’ll be hearing about for the next 10 months.
They had us in the first half! After a nine-day sojourn to Cannes for my first (and the festival’s 79th) edition, I experienced what so many attendees have felt over the years—inconsistency followed by exultation. After a perfunctory and disappointing week one, the Croisette sprang to life over the weekend. Premieres with verve, oddity, and audacity just barely reset the tone for what seemed like a truly dreary competition lineup for the first time in years.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I think the grade-inflated recent spate of Oscar-accepted titles like The Zone of Interest, Parasite, and Drive My Car that will also go down as all-time festival classics had prepped me for something spiritual here in France. I guess I just assumed I’d be confronted with a masterpiece in real time, an experience I’ve had very rarely in my life at festivals. (Uncut Gems at Telluride was a particularly memorable evening.) Alas, I didn’t see anything that had me levitating out of my chair. Several good films, some urgent, others delicate and worthy of deeper examination. But near as I could tell, there was no Drive, The Tree of Life, or Melancholia (all of which premiered in competition in 2011.) And while I did miss a few films in the early days of the festival—still kicking myself about not seeing La Gradiva, Iron Boy, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma—none of those seemed to cross the barrier to the truly sublime.
Still, there are movies that made an impact, that have now entered the thunderdome of discussion for the next 10 months. You can hear Amanda and I break down our experience in full, from black-tie premieres to parties to navigating the madness to Oscars odds and jury prizes.
But there’s more to know. These are the ones to track, to namedrop at a cocktail party, to add to your watchlist.
