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This year’s Cannes Film Festival has everything: A new Lynne Ramsay starring a driven-insane Jennifer Lawrence, Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, Ari Aster’s certain-to-be-batshit take on the year 2020, Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor as WWI-era lovers, a Kelly Reichardt heist film, and the latest films from Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, Julia Ducournau, and Jafar Panahi. At one point, Tom Cruise will probably parachute directly onto the Croisette to promote Mission Impossible — The Final Reckoning. Here are the 14 films we can’t wait to see at the fest.
Alpha
Photo: MANDARIN & COMPAGNIE KALLOUCHE CINEMA FRAKAS PRODUCTIONS FRANCE 3 CINEMA
Julia Ducournau has shocked and delighted Cannes with both of her previous features, winning major awards at the festival even as some overwhelmed audience members walked out in horror. 2016’s Raw, about a fledgling college cannibal, won the Fipresci Prize, and 2021’s Titane, about a serial killer who fucks cars, won the Palme d’Or. Her work is challenging, tending towards body horror while also defying genre confines. It’s fearless and funny and deeply French, and always completely original. Little is known about her latest, Alpha, but we do know that it stars Golshifteh Farahani, Emma Mackey, and Tahar Rahim, and is set in 1980s New York as the AIDS epidemic proliferates. The titular character, a “troubled 13-year-old” who lives with her mom, sees her “world collapse the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.” The distributors have described the film as Ducournau’s “most personal, profound work,” which is saying something for the deeply private filmmaker. —Rachel Handler
The Chronology of Water
Photo: Cannes Film Festival
Kristen Stewart has been working to bring writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir to the screen for years, a labor of love she began talking about publicly all the way back in 2018. She felt so strongly about making the film that she threatened to quit acting entirely if she couldn’t see it through: “I will quit the fucking business,” she told Variety. “I won’t make a-fucking-nother movie until I make this movie.” Its Cannes premiere marks her feature directorial debut, and she co-wrote the screenplay with Andy Mingo. Imogen Poots plays Yuknavitch, and the film follows her from “her earliest childhood memories in the Pacific Northwest, through explosive misfires and mistakes, children that almost-were, toxic relationships, art heroes, wins and losses.” Stewart has previously described the memoir as something that “honors corporeal experience, radically,” and it’ll be fascinating to see how she translates that to film — what a Kristen Stewart movie looks and feels like. —RH
Die My Love
Photo: Cannes Film Festival
Lynne Ramsay has only made a handful of features over the course of her nearly three-decade career — she’s got appropriately high standards — but each is a total masterpiece, with its own heavy, specific mood and powerful, paradigm-shifting imagery. There’s the woozy, pitch-dark Morvern Callar; the crushingly nihilistic We Need to Talk About Kevin; the deeply haunting Ratcatcher; and her most recent film, the feverishly intense, surreal You Were Never Really Here. A Cannes favorite, Ramsay returns to the Croisette this year with Die My Love, an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel of the same name. Jennifer Lawrence, who originally sent Ramsay a copy of the book, stars as a woman “driven to insanity by her marriage and childbirth.” Robert Pattinson stars as Lawrence’s husband, and Lakeith Stanfield as her lover. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby have both been cited as influences on the film, which is described as a thriller, but which Lawrence has also said will be funny. —RH
Eddington
Photo: A24
Over the last seven years, Ari Aster has given us two of this decade’s greatest horror films, Hereditary and Midsommar — and then he directed Beau is Afraid, a far more polarizing, genre-bending work that saw a pajama-clad Joaquin Phoenix trying and failing to escape Patti Lupone’s bloody maternal clutches. Eddington seemingly strays even further afield from Aster’s horror roots, which is all the more fascinating considering it was originally set to be his feature debut; Aster worked on it for five years before he put it aside to write Hereditary. He’s since tweaked the material, and it’s now an “American contemporary Western” that takes places during May of 2020, centering on a standoff between a sheriff (Phoenix) and a mayor (Pedro Pascal) whose disagreements, seemingly over pandemic-related lockdowns, tear apart their small town. Emma Stone and Austin Butler also star. —RH
Highest 2 Lowest
Photo: David Lee/A24
Don’t call it a remake: Spike Lee, directing a screenplay by Alan Fox, prefers to describe his new movie as a “reinterpretation” of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 High and Low, which starred Toshiro Mifune as an executive whose attempts to take over the shoe company he works for are complicated by a kidnapping plot. Lee’s take finds him transporting the action to New York (naturally), and setting it in the music industry. Denzel Washington plays a mogul whose success has meant that he’s lost touch with his roots, in a reunion that marks his fifth collaboration with Lee. But all eyes are likely to be on A$AP Rocky, who’s done some scattered acting before, but who appears in his biggest role to date as Yung Felon, a part whose place in the story has yet to be revealed, but that’s been affirmed by Lee to be a major one. Also making the jump from the hip-hop world to the screen: Ice Spice, who makes her movie debut. —Alison Willmore
The History of Sound
Photo: Fair Winter LLC
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor co-starring in a gay romance sounds almost like Film Twitter fanfic, but thankfully, it’s real. Adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own Pushcart-Prize-winning short story, the film follows two young men who are “determined to record the lives, voices and music of Americans” after World War I. In the process, the two fall in love, as is the only possible outcome when two people look like Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor. Fascinatingly, both actors signed onto the film years ago, before they became true movie stars; they kept the project alive through international pandemics, strikes, and financing issues, out of a deep connection to the material. Oliver Hermanus directed the film, which he described as an “unexpected love story that needs to be told.”—RH
Honey Don’t
Photo: Karen Kuehn/Focus Features
Last year, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke gave us the first installment in what they’ve described as a “lesbian B-movie trilogy”: Drive-Away Dolls, a charmingly rambling rom-com caper starring Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan as friends-turned-lovers who get unintentionally involved in a dildo-centric crime ring. The second installment, Honey Don’t, also stars Qualley, this time as a private detective who becomes involved, hopefully romantically, with “mystery woman” Aubrey Plaza, as she “delves into a series of strange deaths tied to a mysterious church” run by Chris Evans. —RH
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It Was Just An Accident
Photo: JafarPanahiProductionsLesFilmsPelleas
It Was Just An Accident will be the sixth feature Jafar Panahi has directed since he was officially banned from making films by the Islamic Revolutionary Court. That record of defiance in the face of threats to his freedom and safety alone would be astonishing, but the work itself, shot in secret, has also been fascinating — slippery, introspective, daring, and unbearably moving. In his last feature, 2022’s No Bears, Panahi played a fictionalized version of himself in the midst of one of those forbidden productions, remotely directing actors who are living on the other side of the border with Turkey, a line he refuses to cross. Whether this new film will have the same metafictional bent remains to be seen — the details have been kept secret — but what is obvious is that Panahi’s one of the greatest filmmakers working today, even if he’s unable to accompany his own film to its glitzy premiere. —AW
A Magnificent Life
Photo: What the Prod – Mediawan Kids & Family Cinéma – Bidibul Productions – Walking the Dog
There are scenes from animator and comic book artist Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville that remain stuck in my head like a catchy chorus — like the way that the gangsters who kidnap Madame Souza’s cyclist grandson congeal into a single overcoated blob when standing together, or the explosive technique the singing sisters of the title use to fish for frogs. Chomet’s second feature, The Illusionist, was less stylized but still plenty wonderful. So how can I not be looking forward to his latest animated work, A Magnificent Life, which finds him focusing on filmmaker and writer Marcel Pagnol (voiced by Laurent Lafitte) at the height of his career, when he’s commissioned to write about his youth for a magazine — a job that provokes a vision of being visited by his childhood self. —AW
The Mastermind
Photo: Mastermind Movie Inc
The Mastermind is supposedly a heist movie, though what that means when it comes to Kelly Reichardt is anyone’s guess. Her Night Moves may have been a thriller, though its focus was less the act of environmental sabotage that its characters carried out than its doleful aftermath. First Cow was basically the story of a successful criminal scheme, though in a historical context so distant, and with details so delightfully singular, that it’s hard to frame it that way. But here’s what we do know: Reichardt wrote the script for The Mastermind herself, it’s set in Massachusetts in 1970, and it stars Josh O’Connor and Alana Haim alongside John Magaro, who’s becoming a Reichardt regular. And, like her last film, the wonderful Showing Up, it deals with the art world, though in this case, one that exists during the era of the Vietnam War and the women’s lib movement. —AW
The Phoenician Scheme
Photo: TPS Productions/Focus Features
Cannes veteran and Paris dweller Wes Anderson premiered both of his most recent films at the fest — 2021’s The French Dispatch and 2023’s Asteroid City — as well as 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. The Phoenician Scheme, which was co-written by Anderson and Roman Coppola, stars many familiar Andersonian faces, including Benicio Del Toro. He’s a wealthy businessman named Zsa-zsa Korda, who appoints his daughter, a headstrong nun named Sister Liesl, as sole heir to his estate before the two “become the target of scheming tycoons, foreign terrorists and determined assassins.” As Anderson told Vanity Fair, “There is a gulf between them, but the movie is the story of them negotiating their way across this gulf and making a deal to be a family.” The nun in question is played by Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter, in her first leading role, and she’s already drawing raves for her performance. She’s got excellent company: Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, and Hope Davis. —RH
The Secret Agent
Photo: Victor Juca
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s last narrative film, the dystopian Western Bacarau, was my favorite of the cursed year that was 2020 — a romping, stomping sertão-set work that made equal space for carnage and political commentary and felt like it tapped directly into Brazil’s roiling national subconscious. His new feature brings him back to his home town of Recife, memories of which he also recently explored in his 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, in a time period toward the end of the military dictatorship that controlled the country for over two decades. Brazilian megastar Wagner Moura, who’s spent the last few years kicking around American productions like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Civil War, and Dope Thief, will play Marcelo, a man on the run who hopes to use the cover of Carnival to link up with his son. While the thriller is reported to be Filho’s largest scale production yet, it also finds him reuniting with many of his Bacarau cast members, among them Thomás Aquino, Suzy Lopes, and Udo Kier. —AW
Sentimental Value
Photo: Kasper Tuxen
Joachim Trier has linked back up with Renate Reinsve, the luminous star of his previous film, The Worst Person in the World, for his latest, which is about a pair of sisters and their estranged father. Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) is a formerly famous filmmaker who’s planning a project he hopes will get him back in the spotlight, but when he offers a role to his daughter Nora (Reinsve), and she turns it down, he brings in an American actor (Elle Fanning) instead, introducing another complication into a set of relationships that already have plenty. Trier’s mix of French New Wave-style exuberance and Nordic melancholy has only gotten better over his career, and Sentimental Value, which was written by his regular collaborator Eskil Vogt, sounds like it will be dealing with many of his favorite things, including knotty family dynamics and pursuing the arts for a living. —AW
Sound of Falling
Photo: Fabian Gamper/Studio Zentral
Mascha Schilinski’s second film is a synopsis-defying saga that braids together the experiences of four young women — Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka — who grow up in the same house in the German countryside over the course of a century. Their lives are very different, ranging from raising crops around the first World War to sharing AirPods while listening to a song together in the present day, but Sound of Falling starts offering repeated notes over the eras, like a strange symphony emerging from what initially just sounds like noise, providing a testament to how universal certain coming of age experiences remain. —AW
