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The commencement of the Cannes Film Festival has everyone’s attention focused on the Croisette. The 76th edition of France’s premiere festival, which runs from May 16 to May 27, features one of the most anticipated lineups in years, including the latest works from auteur filmmakers Wes Anderson, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Steve McQueen, as well as a record seven films directed by women in competition, glamsquad reports
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Not to be outdone by last year’s star-studded lineup — which included eventual Best Picture nominees such as Elvis, Top Gun: Maverick, and Triangle of Sadness — this year’s festival contains a number of movies that are already generating buzz: Harrison Ford’s final adventure as Indiana Jones, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, will get an out-of-competition world debut at Cannes, as will Disney and Pixar’s Elemental. Martin Scorsese, who won the Palme d’Or for Taxi Driver in 1976, returns with Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
The festival’s undisputed centerpiece is Pedro Almodóvar’s 30-minute short film Extraa Forma de Vida (aka Strange Way of Life), a queer Western starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke.
A.frame has compiled a list of ten of our most anticipated films playing at this year’s Festival de Cannes. Continue reading to view the complete list of films in and out of competition, Un Certain Regard, and more.
Asteroid Town
Wes Anderson, like his previous picture, The French Dispatch, has chosen to premiere his new film at Cannes. The plot of Asteroid City centres around the attendees of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention in a fictional desert hamlet in 1955. Even by Anderson’s standards, the cast is stacked, with several of his regulars (Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, and so on) as well as new collaborations like Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks.
The Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher (whose short film Le Pupille was nominated for an Oscar this year) returns to Cannes with the third installment in her Italian-set trilogy, which began with The Wonders in 2014 and continued with Happy as Lazzaro in 2018. La Chimera, set in the 1980s, stars Josh O’Connor as a tomb thief on the hunt for a particular prize: a fabled entrance to the afterlife that will reunite him with his lost love.
Close your eyes for a moment.
Vctor Erice, the Spanish filmmaker behind classics such as The Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur, released his final feature, Dream of Light, in 1992, more than 30 years ago. Finally, he’s back with Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes), a criminal thriller about an actor who goes missing while filming a film, which is set to premiere at Cannes. A TV film crew reopens the case years later.
The Zero Club
Jessica Hausner, an Austrian writer-director, has been a fixture at Un Certain Regard since 2001’s Lovely Rita, before entering competition with 2019’s Little Joe, which won the festival’s prize for outstanding actress for Emily Beecham. Mia Wasikowska stars as a new teacher at an international boarding school who is hired in to conduct a conscious eating course, which she educates in an insidious manner. It may be too late by the time the other teachers and parents realize.
How to Get Sex
Molly Manning Walker, a British cinematographer and filmmaker, will premiere her first movie in Un Certain Regard, with possibly the most enticing title of the entire festival. How to Have Sex follows three adolescent girls on a “rites-of-passage holiday — drinking, clubbing, and hooking up — in what should be the best summer of their lives.” Which may sound more ominous than raucous.
December May
Todd Haynes was last seen at Cannes in 2021 with the documentary The Velvet Underground, but he’s back with his latest scripted movie — and latest collaboration with Julianne Moore, star of Safe, Far From Heaven, and Wonderstruck. Moore plays Gracie Atherton-Yu, a teacher whose tabloid affair with a student (Charles Melton) captured the nation’s attention. Twenty years later, the couple’s life is once again scrutinized when an actress (Natalie Portman) visits their home to research Gracie for a role in a film.
Kaibutsu (Monster)
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s most recent film shot in Japan was Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or in 2018. After shooting two films in Europe, including Broker, which premiered at Cannes last year, he returned to Japan for Kaibutsu (Monster), about a woman (played by Shoplifters star Sakura Ando) who begins to suspect her son has a mental illness. Monster also has a score by late Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Occupied City
Steve McQueen (director and producer of Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave) will have a Special Screening of his first feature documentary at Cannes. The four-hour documentary, co-created with his wife, Dutch journalist and director Bianca Stigter, juxtaposes present-day Amsterdam with its past, especially the atrocities committed under Nazi occupation during World War II. “Living in Amsterdam for me is like living with ghosts,” McQueen adds. “It seems like there are always two or three parallel narratives unfolding at the same time.” “The past is never far away.”
The Best Days
Wim Wenders, a German filmmaker, has premiered 12 of his films in Cannes, including the Palme d’Or-winning Paris, Texas, and he returns this year with two more: Perfect Days, featuring Kji Yakusho as a toilet cleaner living a deceptively simple life in Tokyo, will premiere in competition. Anselm – Das Rauschen der Zeit, a 3D documentary about painter and sculpture Anselm Kiefer directed by Wim Wenders, will also have a Special Screening.
The Interest Zone
Jonathan Glazer’s most recent film, the fascinating sci-fi masterwork Under the Skin, was released ten years ago. The Zone of Interest adapts Martin Amis’ novel about a Nazi officer who falls for his commander’s wife — though the official synopsis frames his adaptation as follows: “The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.”
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