This year, the Cannes Film Festival, which wraps up Saturday, is beholden to 38 movie-theater-ready films sparkling with Hollywood’s brightest. Much like Berlinale 2024, politics was all the buzz — director Caroline Fargeat’s dark feminist tale “The Substance” is serendipitously timed with France’s rise of their own #MeToo movement. Then, the social commentary on transgender identity within Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” is just as fragrant in the United States as the movie set in Mexico.
In true Cannes tradition, standing ovations dared to outlast one another. Tied in first, the teary-eyed Barry Keoghan and cast stood for the Andrea Arnold-directed film “Bird” for over seven minutes while Anya Joy-Taylor had to redirect the camera to director George Miller during a standing ovation for “Furiosa: A Max Max Saga.” What could have been a “Saltburn” reunion for Keoghan and Jacob Elordi (starring in “Oh Canada,” which premiered at the festival last Friday) ended in a no-show from the latter, while on the other hand, a “Poor Things” reunion did ensue at the premiere of Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, “Kinds of Kindness,” which sees stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley together on screen again for another weird masterpiece.
As the Cannes Film Festival comes to its close (but not before the annual AmFAR Gala and the premiere of more films still to come, such as The “Seed of The Sacred Fig” and “She’s Got No Game”), these are the eight films that remain the most memorable thus far.
Emilia Pérez
What singer-turned-beauty-mogul Selena Gomez felt was a “subpar performance” earned the star a standing ovation at the “Emilia Pérez” premiere screening. The Spanish-language movie centers three women – Jessi (Gomez), Rita (Zoe Saldaña), and the film’s title character; Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) – in an ambitious musical that both unravels a Mexico City cartel plot, and highlights the country’s trans issues in what can be easily agreed to be a “jack of all trades” film by “Rust and Bone” (2012) director Jacques Audiard.
Oh, Canada
Despite Jacob Elordi’s absence on the red carpet, director Paul Schrader’s second book-to-film adaptation of Russell Banks’ literary work – succeeding “Affliction” (1997) – rocked Friday’s screening of “Oh, Canada” with an outstanding performance from lead actor Richard Gere, who plays the war draft deserter, Leonard Fife. Alongside Uma Thurman and Elordi (who plays a younger Fife), “Oh Canada” is an all-revealing interview of the now cancer-ridden Fife as he demystifies his exodus to The Great White North to evade the Vietnam War draft, among other jarring lies of his lifetime.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
Michael Cera in a comedy is a no-brainer, but “Miller’s Point” is a Christmas return-to-form film that is soaked in a certain suburban tradition that twinkles in every Norman Rockwell painting. However, the dysfunctional Italian-American Balsano family isn’t picture perfect, especially as generational tensions rise on Christmas Eve in what could be the last gathering in their ancestral home. Bejeweled with a jazzy Sinatra soundtrack and some truly detestable cranberry jam, director Tyler Taormina seals “Miller’s Point” in a feel-good nostalgia that drunken in-laws can’t even ruin.
The Substance
Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley star in Coraline Fargeat’s latest body horror, “The Substance,” which centers on a cell-replicating black market drug fading celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) uses to temporarily create a younger, better version of herself. In the the somewhat same vein of her debut feature film, “Revenge” (2017), Fargeat’s gore powers her latest feminist statement through horror pioneer David Cronenberg-isms and subliminal #MeToo messages.
Megalopolis
Acclaimed “Godfather” trilogy director Francis Ford Coppola more or less delivers his 50-years-worth of fantastical film ideas into his latest watch, which stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Aubrey Plaza, and tells the fable of an architect (Driver) on a mission to rebuild a utopic New York City following a devastating disaster.
Bird
Fresh off his “Saltburn” (2023) success, Barry Keoghan ditches teenage debauchery for deadbeat parenting as he plays a single dad of two named Bug in Andrea Arnold’s “Bird.” The film explores the glum coming-of-age for the all-too-small, 12-year-old film heroine Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who’s just as enduring and lost as the insufferable summer heat in northern Kent.
Kinds of Kindness
For Emma Stone’s fourth time on set with Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (following last year’s “Poor Things”), the two-time Academy Award winning actress is joined again on screen by Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley for “Kinds of Kindness.” Alongside them are Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie and Hunter Schafer, together, the ensemble cast of yet another signature Lanthimos “Greek weird” film that — this time — leans more “bizart-house,” shuffling through multiple point-of-views in a “triptych fable” that follows a troubled man, a policeman faced with his once-missing wife, and a woman set on tracking down a prodigious spiritual leader.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
In the exalting prequel to the “Mad Max” saga, Hollywood It-girl Anya Taylor-Joy takes on the deserted Wasteland as the renegade warrior Furiosia in director George Miller’s newest installment, supported alongside another villainous (and heavily-bearded) Chris Hemsworth, who plays Dr. Demuntus.
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