10/05/2024 - In advance of the most prestigious film event of the year, we delve into the line-up to highlight its unmissable options and hidden gems

The Cannes Film Festival has an odd ability to magnify and draw attention to what’s afflicting the rest of the world, as much as it provides insight on global cinema. The war in Gaza has seen an unparalleled and often brave response of solidarity from those working in the arts, however they’ve come into conflict with other industry power brokers. This year, the festival's Official selection features Yolande Zauberman’s The Belle From Gaza [+see also:
film review
interview: Yolande Zauberman
film profile] while the Directors' Fortnight includes another by Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel, titled To a Land Unknown [+see also:
trailer
interview: Mahdi Fleifel
film profile]; a charged atmosphere is to be expected at both premieres.

Meanwhile, a strike by seasonal film festival workers in France has been approved by their union, forcing Cannes itself to open “collective” talks. A rumoured press exposé on sexual assault in the French industry is also expected to be published on the festival’s opening day, which may impact the eventual line-up and, more importantly, could force an overdue reckoning with harmful tendencies. 

With new president Iris Knobloch – who previously headed the French division of WarnerMedia – in tow, the festival's response to the recent revival of big business in theatrical exhibition is to have Greta Gerwig, who masterminded Barbie, heading the competition jury. George Lucas, who’s also worth consulting when thinking about cinema as a monocultural force, will enjoy an honorary Palme d’Or and a “rendez-vous” live talk. 

Cineuropa will have everything you need to know about Cannes on its pages over the next fortnight; the festival is certainly fun to attend in person, but it also reliably creates a great array of writing (and other audiovisual content) to enjoy and disagree over online. 

The Apprentice [+see also:
film review
film profile] - Ali Abbasi

(Canada/United States/Denmark/Ireland - Competition)

A Trump film like this one was inevitable, particularly in a US election year, so be thankful the director of Border [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ali Abbasi
film profile] and Holy Spider [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ali Abbasi
interview: Ali Abbasi
interview: Zar Amir Ebrahimi
film profile] has been tasked to provide a novel perspective. Fresh from a Berlinale Best Actor trophy earlier this year, Sebastian Stan portrays a younger, and likely more verbally coherent Trump as he grows his property empire in 1980's New York. Will we finally see the origin story of his feud with the Coca-Cola Company, resulting in this classic? 

Premieres 18.30 Monday 20th May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Bird [+see also:
film review
film profile] - Andrea Arnold

(United Kingdom/United States/France/Germany - Competition)

It's hard to believe that Andrea Arnold’s last fiction feature, the vibrant American Honey [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Andrea Arnold
film profile], is already almost a decade old. With the British filmmaker also picking up the Carrosse d’Or at the Quinzaine, she returns to the Cannes competition and her hometown of Kent for this coming-of-age tale about two kids, Bailey and Hunter, being raised in a squat by their single father Bug (a tatted-up Barry Keoghan). Franz Rogowski is the title character, Bird, but how might the contemporary German acting legend figure into the story? 

Premieres 15.30 Thursday 16th May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Anora - Sean Baker

(United States - Competition)

Following Red Rocket, Baker appears to have joined that highly select group of US directors (à la Haynes, Gray et al.) granted a competitive Cannes bow for each new movie they make. With Anora, he continues his unbending career focus on the sex industry and its underground economies. Mikey Madison (a Manson kid in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) is Ani, a young Brooklyn escort who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, the parents attempt to intervene and scotch the marriage. It sounds like a 1930's screwball comedy, except it runs a likely well-paced 138 minutes. 

Premieres 15.00 Tuesday 21st May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Megalopolis - Francis Ford Coppola

(United States - Competition)

Adam Driver plays the visionary architect Caesar Catilina, while Aubrey Plaza and Dustin Hoffman are the more eccentrically named Wow Platinum and Nush ‘The Fixer’ Berman. So every detail goes when you – or Francis Ford Coppola – are answering to no major Hollywood studio, and holding your own purse strings to the sum of $120m. Early footage promises something both grandiose and goofy, but we simply hope it's good. 

Premieres 19.00 Thursday 16th May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

The Substance [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] - Coralie Fargeat

(United States/United Kingdom/France - Competition)

Initially announced as a full studio release through Universal Pictures, and shot two full years ago, perhaps that original backer wasn’t keen on the end result or deemed it uncommercial – but now, Fargeat's awaited follow-up to Revenge [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Coralie Fargeat
film profile] has been relaunched as a MUBI title, and is hyped as very gore-driven. Margaret Qualley and a comeback-courting Demi Moore lead a still-under-wraps premise promising body horror and beauty industry satire. 

Premieres 22.15 Sunday 19th May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

To a Land Unknown [+see also:
trailer
interview: Mahdi Fleifel
film profile] - Mahdi Fleifel

(United Kingdom/France/Germany/Netherlands/Greece/Qatar/Saudi Arabia/Palestine - Directors’ Fortnight)

With Israel’s assault on Gaza further progressing to terrifying results, this fiction debut from acclaimed documentarian Mahdi Fleifel is credibly one of the whole selection’s most important films. Alighting on the displacement shared by Palestinians both in the region and elsewhere, To a Land Unknown, with the tempo of an "edgy thriller”, finds two cousins from a camp in Lebanon now stranded in Athens, and tracks their defiant but flailing attempts to reach Germany.

Premieres 8.45 Wednesday 22nd May in the Théâtre Croisette

Grand Tour [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marta Donzelli, Gregorio Pa…
film profile] - Miguel Gomes

(Portugal/Italy/France/Germany/Japan/China - Competition)

Miguel Gomes gets his deserved first stab at the Palme with this period travelogue, its place secure in the lineup after the selection committee saw it late last year. A British civil servant stationed in Burma gets cold feet on his wedding day and flees, only for his fiancée to chase him across the rest of East Asia. Filmed largely on sound stages, with shots by a documentary crew in the real locations patched in, this might be the edition's real cutting-edge piece of filmmaking. 

Premieres 15.00 Wednesday 22nd May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

All We Imagine as Light [+see also:
film review
film profile] - Payal Kapadia

(France/India/Netherlands/Luxembourg/Italy - Competition)

The first Indian feature in competition for three decades, Payal Kapadia's fiction debut is also an anticipated follow-up to her L'Œil d’or-winning and career-making documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing [+see also:
film review
interview: Payal Kapadia
film profile]. Here excelling in a contrasting and partly more accessible filmmaking mode, Kapadia closely follows the deceptively simple story of two Mumbai nurses and their romantic fortunes. The nocturnal urban ambience she creates is so compelling that you never notice how the narrative is slyly wrong-footing you.

Premieres 22.00 Thursday 23rd May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière 

Kinds of Kindness [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] - Yorgos Lanthimos

(Ireland/United Kingdom/United States - Competition)

A return to original screenplays and a co-writer credit with Efthimis Filippou, this new one from Lanthimos has promisingly been described as “hostile”, in a tonal sense. An anthology film composed of three segments, the cast of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Margaret Qualley are also tripling up, playing new characters in each successive tale. 

Premieres 18.00 Friday 17th May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - George Miller

(United States/Australia - Out of Competition)

And now for something completely different: an out-of-competition Hollywood film with more fire-throwing spectacle than likely the majority of the line-up put together. But it’s also pleasingly, and equally, an uncompromising auteur vision, as George Miller takes us back to his post-apocalyptic monster truck wasteland. Early reactions suggest a worthy follow-up to his multi-Oscar-winning Fury Road. 

Premieres 19.00 Wednesday 15th May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

The Damned [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] - Roberto Minervini

(Italy/United States/Belgium/Canada - Un Certain Regard)

Rumoured to have been culled from the competition lineup at the last moment, a new work from Minervini always delivers some high nutrition at elite festivals. A US civil war-set film made exclusively with non-professional actors, we alight on a band of Union conscripts sent to patrol the then less populated western territories; soon, the purpose of the mission starts to elude them. Still, be sure this will avoid a rote acid western-type trajectory. 

Premieres 11.00 Thursday 16th May in the Salle Debussy

Oh, Canada - Paul Schrader

(United States - Competition)

The man who turned Facebook status grousing into an art form returns to one of his old habitats, the Croisette, where he was once a competition regular and sort-of Palme d’Or winner for his deathless Taxi Driver script. In this adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel Foregone, Richard Gere plays a health problem-ridden latter-day Schrader stand-in, a former radical documentary maker finally venting the truth about his troubled life, whilst Jacob Elordi incarnates him in 70s-set flashbacks.

Premieres 22.00 Friday 17th May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Parthenope [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] - Paolo Sorrentino

(Italy/France - Competition)

Of the crop of Cannes habitués back this year – also including Jacques Audiard, David Cronenberg, Jia Zhangke – Paolo Sorrentino's latest film seems like the surest bet, with A24 having already bought US rights. Elaborating on the myth of the titular siren figure seen in Homer’s Odyssey, Parthenope is the story of a beautiful woman entwined with her home city of Naples across the decades. 

Premieres 22.15 Tuesday 21st May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière

Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point - Tyler Taormina 

(United States - Directors’ Fortnight)

Michael Cera – once the go-to teen nebbish in American film and TV – has matured into quite a fine screen actor, equipped with a real, off-beat edge, whose appearances now transcend what you would usually call stunt casting. Here he gets to strut his stuff as a mild-mannered cop in Tyler Taormina’s holiday comedy, about an unruly Italian-American family gathering for their traditional yuletide meal in the sleepy suburbs. Appearing like Sundance fare from the outset, it apparently develops into something quite experimental.

Premieres 12.30 Friday 17th May in the Théâtre Croisette

The Girl with the Needle [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Magnus von Horn
film profile] - Magnus von Horn

(Denmark/Poland/Sweden - Competition)

After simmering in sidebar sections during previous editions, Magnus von Horn has now earned a competition upgrade with this “fairytale about a horrible truth”. In what looks to be a piercing, monochrome-shot psychological drama – the sort Scandinavian cinema does better than anyone else – Vic Carmen Sonne (Godland [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Elliott Crosset Hove
interview: Hlynur Pálmason
film profile]) plays a wet-nurse at an adoption agency hiding more than it lets on, in post-WW1 Copenhagen. 

Premieres 22.30 Wednesday 1th May in the Grand Théâtre Lumière