The 10 Best Movies We Saw at Cannes 2024 (2024)

It was thebest of Cannes, it was… well, not exactly the worst of Cannes, though the consensus throughout the first half of the festival was that it was a bit of a slow-burning edition this year.

Unlike the 2023 fest — which droppedAnatomy of a Fall,May DecemberandThe Zone of Interestbefore the halfway point — the competition took its time getting warmed up. “Divisive” didn’t begin to describe the reaction to films as varied as Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawling, apocalypse-already-in-progress epicMegalopolisand Jacques Audiard’s transgender-druglord musicalEmilia Pérez. And while plenty of talent under the age of 70 showed up, the 2024 fest could be characterized as The Year of Old Masters Refusing to Go Gently Into the Night. Coppola’s riff on the Roman Empire was arguably his most ambitious work to date; George Miller gave us aFury Roadprequel,Furiosa,that matched the original in terms of demolition-derby destruction; both David Cronenberg (The Shrouds) and Paul Schrader (Oh, Canada) premiered late works rife with philosophical handwringing and filmmaking chops. Even Kevin Costner showed up with his own personalMegalopolis, i.e. the first installment of the multi-partHorizon: An American Saga, a partially self-funded, trad-grandad Western opus he’s been trying to make since the 1990s.

Once things begun to warm up in the festival’s second half, however, Cannes soon became a bounty of riches — the odds for what might walk away with the Palme d’Or began changing on an hourly basis with each new Grand Lumière gala screening. And when all was said and done, it was clear that what started out as a potentially mild year had more than its share of standouts. Here are the 10 best things (technically, 10 1/2) we caught at this year’s Cannes — from the misadventures of a Brooklyn sex worker to an indictment of social repression that forced a filmmaker to flee his country for his own safety.

(Honorable mentions go out to: the “Trump — The Early Years” biopicThe Apprentice; a chilly character study courtesy of Ingmar Bergman’s grandson,Armand; writer-director-star Noemie Merlant’s dark farceThe Balconettes; Andrea Arnold’s magical-realism meets kitchen-sink-miserablism dramaBird; Yorgos Lanthimas’ characteristically uncomfortable anthologyKinds of Kindness; the Corsican crime thrillerThe Kingdom; Alain Guiraudie’s surprisingly hilarious yer unsurprisingly hornyMisericordia; Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s as-the-world-leaders-turn soap operaRumours; and Cronenberg’s haunting mediation on perpetual mourning,The Shrouds.)

‘All We Imagine as Light’

Part ode tofemale friendships and part city symphony — Mumbai after hours has rarely looked so enticing onscreen — Payal Kapadia’s tale of two nurses struggling to reconcile respective romantic issues and feeling of loneliness was the first Indian film to play in competition in 30 years. But it would be a landmark work even if it had not broken that particular M.I.A. streak, with Kapadia building off the docu-hybrid style of her previous movieA Night of Knowing Nothing(2021) and imbuing her portrait of life in the big city with a genuine sense of lived-in lyricism. It was the very last competition entry to screen this year — and very much worth the wait.

‘Anora’

LE PACTE

Just your typicalboy-meets-girl romp, if the boy was a Russian oligarch’s filthy rich son and the girl was an exotic dancer/escort from Brooklyn who accepts his impromptu marriage proposal. The latest from Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) plays like a mash-up ofPretty WomanandUncut Gems,with Mikey Madison’s working-class sex worker getting swept off her feet by Mark Edelshteyn hedonistic rich kid and settling in to a life of mansions and Vegas getaways. Then a trio of guys who work for the young man’s parents show up to inform them the party is over, and the film slams its foot down on the gas pedal. As with all of Baker’s movies, there’s an attention to class structures and life on the fringes that adds a serrated edge to the sharp comedy here. And theBetter Thingsactor couldn’t ask for a better showcase; this truly gives Madison’s her star-is-born moment. (Ditto Yura Borisov, whose dim-witted thug gives the movie its stealth heartbeat.) Bonus: an absolutely perfect final shot.

‘Caught by the Tides’

Sifting through oldfootage during the pandemic, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Unknown Pleasures, Still Life) came up with the idea of using outtakes and scenes from his previous films — all of which featured his longtime actors Tao Zhao and Zhubin Li — to craft something new. For a while, you ride shotgun through a stream-of-conscious tour through the nation’s cities and rural provinces, complete with corporate-sponsored pageantry and personal strife. It’s only when you get to the final third of the movie that Jia drops the hammer, and you suddenly realize that what felt like a free-form slideshow of China’s prosperity in the early 21st century has been carefully crafted to break your heart. Simply stunning.

‘Megalopolis’

AMERICAN ZOETROPE

Some 45 yearsafter unveiling a “work-in-progress” version ofApocalypse Nowat the festival, Francis Ford Coppola returns with another huge swing for the fences, detailing a crumbling fictional empire that looks a lot like contemporary America. A visionary named Caesar (Adam Driver) dreams of a utopian city for all; his rival, Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) is determined to keep the powerful in power by any means necessary. Naturally, his party-girl daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with Caesar. Meanwhile, the world around them is spiraling out of control. And we haven’t even got to Shia LeBeouf in drag, Jon Voight’s conspicuously Trump-like billionaire or the fact that Aubrey Plaza plays a character named Wow Platinum. Coppola has embedded a lifetime’s worth of literature, philosophy, cinephilia, and fretting for the human race into this massive epic, and having chased this white-whale project in one form or another for decades, he’s finally caught it. Even at its craziest, corniest and most baffling moments, it still manages to leave you breathless. It isexactlythe grand-statement film Coppola set out to make. There’s nothing else like it.

‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’

A24

Rungano Nyoni’s follow-upto 2017’sI Am Not a Witchstarts with a woman named Shula (Susan Chardy) coming across a dead body in the road. The fact that she’s dressed exactly like Missy Elliott from “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” video, down to the silver helmet and puffy black jumpsuit, shows you that Nyoni has a wicked sense of humor; the revelation that the corpse is “Uncle Fred,” a well-known pedophile who chronically abused the village’s young women for years without consequences, demonstrates that the movie is also not f*cking around. A pointed take on the social protections afforded to predators to avoid “awkwardness,” the unnecessary shame shared by survivors and the need to call out complicity and speak out regardless of such stigmas.

‘The Seeds of the Sacred Fig’

PYRAMIDE

The new filmfrom filmmaker Mohammad Rosoulof (The White Meadows) had already generated controversy prior to its first screening at Cannes, with the Iranian government issuing a warrant for the director’s arrest and Rosoulof being forced to flee the country to live in exile. It is indeed an incendiary work, focusing on the damage done to a family when its patriarch (Misagh Zare) accepts a promotion and becomes an investigator of political-prisoner cases. Meanwhile, the Jina Uprising — represented by actual cell phone footage of real police brutality and mass arrests — is causing chaos throughout Tehran, which makes the matriarch (Sohelia Golestani) fear for the safety of her two college-age daughters (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki). In Rosoulof’s eyes, the political is never less than 100-percent personal, as is the paranoia that accompanies living under a repressive regime. When the third act makes use of a Chekhovian gun planted on the mantle early on and turns what was a family drama into something close to a horror movie, you can feel the rage emanating through the screen. A profound work of protest art.

‘Spectateurs!’/’It’s Not Me’

LES FILMS DO LOSANGE

Two separate worksfrom two of France’s most vital modern filmmakers, which somehow managed to complement each other beautifully despite screening almost a week apart.Spectateurs!is Arnaud Desplechin’s love letter to theamour fouthat is obsessing over movies, tracing his own burgeoning cinephilia as a kid while interviewing a variety of fellow devotees, waxing poetic about the late actor Misty Upham and dramatizing several key moments that led to his career behind the camera. Leos Carax’sIt’s Not Meis a free form take on his own career through a lens darkly, spending its 40-minute running time (this was the “1/2” we referred to in the intro) throwing shade at Roman Polanski, aping Jean-Luc Godard’sHistoire(s) du Cínemadocuseries and, just for full-circle kicks, having the title character fromAnnettereplicateDenis Levant’s dance to Bowie’s “Modern Love”fromMauvais Sang.Seeing both of these tributes to the agonies and ecstasies of cinema in an environment that still treats the seventh art asthemodern art form was, hands down, the highlight of this year’s fest.

‘The Substance’

CANNES

You’d assume thatthe latest provocation from French genre expert Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) would be smart, savvy, bold and bloody. Not even a foreknowledge of her past work could prepare you for the instant body-horror classic she delivered right at Cannes’ midpoint, which watches as a TV star (Demi Moore, delivering what may betheperformance of the fest) deals with being pitilessly aged out of the industry. She then finds out that a secret subscription service would allow her to foster a younger version of herself, although the plan requires both her and her dewy twentysomething “twin” (played by Margaret Qualley) to abide by a strict set of rules. Let’s just say that things go awry and get very gory, and what starts as a satire of Hollywood hypocrisy turns into a take-no-prisoners indictment of youth fixations and impossible beauty standards. My favorite film of this year’s festival.

‘Three Kilometers to the End of the World’

MEMENTO DISTRIBUTION

Romanian cinema strikesagain, this time with a tense drama about a closeted young man (Ciprian Chiujdea) who’s gong back to his rural hometown during a college break. He becomes the victim of a hate crime when two locals spy him kissing a male tourist. His father (Bogdan Dumitrache) demands a proper investigation, only to become conflicted once he finds out his son is gay. The young man’s mother (Laura Vasiliu) demands that a local priest perform an exorcism on her boy. He just wants to put the whole incident behind him, which soon proves to be impossible. Director Emanuel Parvu uses what’s now become the recognizable aesthethic of the Romanian New Wave — long takes, meticulously composed frames, extended conversations that strip language of meaning and twist moral conundrums into tight knots — and uses it to tighten a noose around its characters necks. You know this simply is not going to end well. You’d be right.

‘Universal Language’

METAFILMS

The breakout titleof this year’s Director’s Fortnight sidebar fest, Matthew Rankin’s comedy is quite possibly the funniest example of deep film-nerd trolling we’ve ever witnessed. Having made a name with his frantic, Guy Maddin-esque debutThe Twentieth Century(2019), the Canadian filmmaker switches up his game and presents an uncanny parody of an early 1970s Iranian movie. The setting may still be Winnipeg, all beige buildings and nondescript highways, yet everything from the character names to the language to the cinematic vocabulary is a dead ringer for those early Abbas Kiarostami, et al. movies about kids on quests. If you’ve ever been curious to see what the sign of a Tim Horton’s donut shop would look like written in Persian, now’s your chance. Turkeys also play a big role, because why wouldn’t they? An absolute left-field delight. Between this film and the extended riff on world leaders behaving badly that isRumours,it was a hell of a year for Canadian Absurdism. Let a thousand ridiculous, surreal, Great White Northern flowers bloom.

From Rolling Stone US.