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Hollywood has taken a pass on this year’s Cannes, with none of its big-beast blockbusters making their bow at the world’s most famous film festival this week. Make no mistake, though, the fest has always been a better barometer for the health of independent cinema from around the planet – and judging by last year’s line-up, its pulse is still beating strongly. Sentimental Value, Sirât, It Was Just an Accident, Sound of Falling and The Secret Agent were just a few of the Cannes premieres that were wowing moviegoers and dominating the Oscars conversation months later.
For the next 12 days, expect the likes of The Wailing’s Na Hong-Jin, Drive My Car’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Corsage director Marie Kreutzer and Iranian maestro Asghar Farhadi to deliver gold on the Croisette. Here’s what to look out for.
The Dreamed Adventure
Director: Valeska Grisebach
German filmmaker Grisebach returns with the austere patience that made Western a sensation. Set in the hazy borderlands where Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey converge, a woman agrees to help an old acquaintance – a simple act that pulls her, slowly and irrevocably, into morally murky territory. Expect non-professional performers, landscape as character, and silences that do more heavy lifting than most scripts. Thriller in premise; poetry in practice.
Gentle Monster
Director: Marie Kreutzer
Marie Kreutzer's Corsage, a period film that felt completely modern, is a feminist classic. So there is a lot of excitement for Gentle Monster, starring French acting royalty Léa Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve, in a tale of two women, two very different lives, one shared predicament: men with secrets they'd rather not share. A pianist who sacrificed her career for a rural fresh start. A detective burning out while her father fades away. What unites them is a creeping, awful clarity. Brace yourself.
Hope
Director: Na Hong-Jin
One of the most anticipated films in the competition, Hope marks the long-awaited return of Na Hong-jin, a decade after The Wailing cemented his reputation as one of cinema's great genre voices. In a remote coastal village near the Korean DMZ, a suspected tiger sighting triggers a police investigation that spirals into extraterrestrial territory – it sounds like an Edgar Wright plot, but shot by Parasite cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo and played, one assumes, completely straight. It reunites real-life couple Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender on screen for the first time in ten years. Unmissable.
Parallel Tales
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Everybody wants to work with Asghar Farhadi, who has two Oscars to his name, one of which is for A Separation, a film that helped define Iranian cinema. The cast of Parallel Tales reads like a fantasy acting team: Isabelle Huppert, Catherine Deneuve, Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney. Inspired by Kieślowski's Dekalog: Six, a novelist who spies on her neighbours for material hires a young man who proceeds to consume her life entirely. Expect moral quicksand in the form of a voyeuristic thriller.
The Birthday Party
Director: Léa Mysius
Léa Mysius makes her Competition debut with The Birthday Party, an adaptation of a thriller by Prix Goncourt-winning author Laurent Mauvignier. In a remote rural hamlet, a surprise celebration for a wife's 40th is violently upended when three uninvited strangers arrive at the door, and long-buried secrets begin to surface. Monica Bellucci leads a strong French ensemble. For a filmmaker who has turned domestic drama into slow dread, Mauvignier is the perfect source: his sentences get longer as the terror gets worse
Her Private Hell
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
A decade after The Neon Demon divided Cannes – boos, bravos, walkouts – Nicolas Winding Refn returns out of competition with Her Private Hell. Shot in Tokyo, it drops Sophie Thatcher into a futuristic city swallowed by a deadly mist, searching for her missing father. Refn calls it ‘glitter, sex, and violence’. You know exactly what you're getting, and half the room will hate it. The other half wouldn't miss it for the world.
All of a Sudden
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Drive My Car put Ryusuke Hamaguchi (and Saab 900s) on the map. The Japanese auteur returns with another literary adaption, this time based on a non-fiction book, You and I – The Illness Suddenly Get Worse, that’s set in Paris and stars Benedetta’s Virginie Efira as the director of a nursing home who forms a bond with a Japanese playwright (Tao Okamoto).
Fatherland
Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
The British-based Polish filmmaker behind Ida and Cold War returns with another penetrating snapshot of post-war Europe. This time he uses German literary titan Thomas Mann (frequent Wim Wenders’ collaborator Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) as his conduit to a newly-divided Germany, and a struggle for the soul of an artist. Inglourious Basterds’ August Diehl is the son and brother whose absence casts another shadow on their road trip.
Minotaur
Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Now exiled from his motherland, Andrey Zvyagintsev delivered a barbed comment on Putin’s Russia with 2014’s Leviathan and followed it up with devastating family-in-freefall drama Loveless three years later. His latest takes us behind the curtain of his secretive homeland to follow a businessman (Dmitriy Mazurov) through a financial, moral and emotional crisis that throws his life off its axis and threatens to bring violence in its wake. It’s the Russian’s first film in nine years and should be a real Palme d’Or contender.
Coward
Director: Lukas Dhont
The trenches of World War I make a bloody backdrop for a story of comradeship and an investigation into the nature of courage and cowardice through the eyes of a young Belgian soldier. Lukas Dhont’s emotionally eloquent coming-of-age story Close and trans drama Girl showed off his empathetic worldview. This one could get grittier. ‘A film about love and death, creation and destruction,’ is how the filmmaker describes it. ‘A film about survival and how, sometimes, even in darkness, something beautiful manages to grow.’ Hankies at the ready, in other words.
Sheep in the Box
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
The great Japanese humanist (Shoplifters, After Life) returns with a sci-fi with shades of Brian Aldiss and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence; and a title inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic The Little Prince. The story sees a couple (Haruka Ayase and Daigo Yamamoto) adopts a humanoid robot when their son dies. Neon has picked up distribution in the US – expect another Oscar run for Kore-eda.
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
Director: Clio Barnard
Irish playwright Enda Walsh and English filmmaker Clio Barnard (The Arbor, Ali and Ava) team up fro a state-of-the-nation drama that follows a tight-knit group of Birmingham thirtysomethings through the ups and downs (and more downs) of their lives. Barnard has assembled some elite UK actors – Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo, Daryl McCormack – for a relatable and poignant story of working lives that aren’t working.