A24
The Cannes Film Festival generates more attention and excitement than any other film festival in the world, but each year is an unpredictable journey. The Official Selection, alongside the sidebars of Directors Fortnight and Critics Week, offer up a tightly-curated into a range of international cinema from both familiar sources and surprising newcomers. This year’s edition is a reliable combination of top-tier directors whose work will be shown at Cannes until the end of time, notable filmmakers who usually deliver something worthwhile, and unproven quantities with a lot of potential.
In order to work through all of these different possibilities, we’ve broken down our list of anticipated Cannes titles into three categories: A-list auteurs, Discoveries and Safe Bets. Every day of Cannes will bring new updates on the latest films, some of which will live up to the hype while others will come up short. For now, we can only hope that these titles are worthy of our expectations, but chances are pretty good that most of them will be worth writing home about. Expect to hear a lot more soon.
A-List Auteurs
“Happy End”
Sony Pictures Classics
Michael Haneke went to the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 with “The White Ribbon” and won the Palme d’Or. He returned three years later in 2012 with “Amour” and won the Palme d’Or again. He’s one of only nine directors to take Cannes’ highest honor twice, and now he returns after a five-year hiatus to try and become the first director to win three. “Happy End,” starring Isabelle Huppert, centers on a bourgeois family living an isolated life as the European migrant crisis happens around them. The chance to witness Haneke go for the Cannes history books is too important to miss. -Zack Sharf
“Before We Vanish”
YouTube/Before We Vanish
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been one of Japan’s premier genre auteurs for more than 20 years now, and he’s back at it less than a year after debuting “Daguerreotype” in Toronto. His latest, a sci-fi drama about an alien invasion, is sure to be more off-kilter and elliptical than that high-concept premise makes it sound: Masami Nagasawa, Ryûhei Matsuda and Hiroki Hasegawa play a trio of extraterrestrials on a scouting mission for their home planet, which is planning to make landfall on our humble abode. Might they learn some valuable lessons about humanity along the way? -Michael Nordine
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