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Every year, the Cannes Film Festival expands the conversation on world cinema. Last year’s edition elevated movies from Iran (Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident), Brazil (The Secret Agent), and Norway (Sentimental Value, which went on to win the Oscar for Best International Feature Film). This time around, the focus was even more global than usual, as the bigger American studios had a minimal presence.
Cannes obsessives tend to stay the whole time, as the 10-day competition unveils new contenders for the top prizes throughout the week. If you leave early, you risk missing out on some biggies. As a regular attendee, I usually scramble to catch anything building buzz, but since I left at the halfway point, I missed out on at least two major titles that received widespread acclaim following their late-festival premieres: The Russian crime thriller Minotaur and the multi-generational queer Spanish drama La Bola Negra.
Fortunately for me and many American moviegoers, the movies that receive the most acclaim at Cannes tend to find their way to U.S. theaters down the line. In the meantime, I found no shortage of cinematic goodies to write home about. Here are 10 of them.
10. Jim Queen
For all the talk of the Palme d’Or, the bigger race this year may be for the Queer Palme, the official prize for the best LGBTQ+ film of the festival. Several contenders made this list, starting with this hilariously irreverent animated French-language feature from the midnight section.The musical adventure envisions a disease that turns gay men straight, a concept that doubles as a scathing satire of Parisian gay life and the many layers of its ecosystem. Lots of rowdy, raunchy, fun.
9. Ashes
Diego Luna may be best known as an actor in everything from Y Tu Mamá También to Andor, but he’s directed a fair share of movies as well, and Ashes may be his best to date. An adaptation of Brenda Navarro’s novel, Ashes follows a young Mexican woman who immigrates to Spain to reunite with her mother, only to find a life just as alienating and uncertain as the one she left behind. A poignant, timely study of the immigration crisis in miniature.
8. Gabin
Cannes doesn’t showcase a lot of documentaries, but this one from the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar was a hidden gem. The movie follows 10 years in the life of a French child growing up on a farm, as he clashes with his working-class parents over everything from schoolwork to his future career prospects. It’s an engrossing look at the coming-of-age process, one small moment at a time.
7. Fatherland
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski won an Oscar for his intimate drama Ida in 2013 and followed it up with the equally compelling Cold War in 2018. Both movies were lush, black-and-white character studies exploring the personal reverberations of WWII-era Europe, and his latest follows that trend with impressive results. Fatherland tracks the experiences of celebrated novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Huller) as they tour Germany in the midst of the Cold War, navigating the remnants of the Nazi Party and the uncertainty of the country’s future. A profoundly intellectual look at the implications of national pride in the aftermath of global humiliation, this subtle work will benefit from repeat viewings and many riveting conversations about its modern-day implications.
6. The Man I Love
Rami Malek follows his Oscar-winning turn in Bohemian Rhapsody with an even more compelling look at a musically-inclined gay man facing the boundaries of his own mortality. Acclaimed director Ira Sachs (Keep the Lights On) follows Malek’s character Jimmy George, an AIDS-afflicted singer who alienates some of his closest friends while living in denial of his disease. Despite this bleak scenario, The Man I Love relishes in the sobering beauty of Jimmy’s talent, and the sense that the romantic center of his life commits to supporting him at all costs. This is a rich, immersive look at the personal stakes of the creative process that hands Malek his best performance to date.
5. All of a Sudden
Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who won the Oscar a few years back for Drive My Car, delivers his first movie outside of Japan without compromising the meditative brilliance that put him on the map. The French-language drama follows a leisurely pace across its three-hour-plus runtime as it follows the manager of a nursing home who befriends a theater director over the course of a long, talky night. This encounter, which forms the centerpiece of the movie, culminates in an extensive debate about capitalism mapped out on a whiteboard. If that sounds like a chore, well, no. Hamaguchi’s work bears comparison to the great French New Wave director Eric Rohmer for the way he treats dialogue like music, drawing us into its nuances and the quest to make sense of the world one word at a time.
4. Teenage Death and Sex at Camp Miasma
Jane Schoenbrun’s clever self-referential look at the horror genre stars Hannah Einbinder as a filmmaker tasked with rebooting a treasured horror franchise and the relationship she forms with its mysterious star (a first-rate Gillian Anderson doing her best Gloria Swanson). Over the course of a long, dreamlike weekend, the pair swap ideas about the nature of slasher movies and their implications for people who feel out of sorts in the world. This is a fascinating, multilayered achievement loaded with smart ideas about the impact of storytelling on young minds searching for their place in the world.
3. The Devils
The Cannes Classics section delivered a festival highlight on its first weekend with this dizzying 4K remaster of British director Ken Russell’s harrowing 1971 look at religious extremism in the 17th century. Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed star in the story of a lecherous priest who gets put on trial after he’s accused of communing with the devil. While it was censored at the time of its release, the newly restored director’s cut brings Russell’s intense vision back to life with all the wild, transgressive energy that deserves the big-screen treatment. Warner Bros. will give it a proper theatrical release in October.
2. Paper Tiger
James Gray excels at crafting immersive New York stories that bring the intricacies of the city’s characters to life. Paper Tiger is his strongest effort in years, a taut family crime thriller that builds in intensity throughout. Adam Driver and Miles Teller play a pair of brothers who attempt to woo the Russian mafia with a consulting gig only to find themselves in too deep before they even get started. Driver’s character, an ex-cop committed to protecting his family at all costs, sits at the center of the movie as a physical embodiment of its queasy moral ambiguity. Meanwhile, Scarlett Johannsson’s turn as Teller’s concerned wife heightens the stakes as specter of violence constantly threatens to overwhelm their stable existence.
1. Club Kid
Comic Jordan Firstman may be familiar to TV audiences for his supporting role on I Love LA or his hilarious turn in the raunchy comedy Rotting in the Sun, but Club Kid establishes an exciting new path for him: Auteur-grade filmmaker. Firstman wrote, directed, and starred in this major festival breakout, as a hard-partying burnout who discovers he has a young son and must contend with the implications for his reckless lifestyle. A queer riff on Kramer vs. Kramer, Firstman’s winning debut sold to A24 for a whopping $17 million price tag during the festival, and has already been stirring up Oscar buzz. Stay tuned.
RUNNERS UP: Cristian Mungiu’s riveting look at religious extremism and family values, Fjord; Diary of a Chambermaid, Radu Jude’s French-language look at a woman acting in a play that reflects her everyday life; and Clarissa, a winning adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway that transplants the action to Africa. See them all.