Cannes 2024: 10 of the festival’s best films, from Palme d’Or winner Anora to Nicolas Cage’s The Surfer to Emilia Pérez with Selena Gomez
Cannes always has moments like no other festival.
This year I was interviewing Daniel Auteuil when Catherine Deneuve walked past, and the French actor had to get up and give the legendary star a warm embrace – years after they starred together in 1996’s Les Voleurs. Nowhere else but Cannes, you might say.
The 77th edition of the world’s biggest movie marathon perhaps did not serve up enough memorable moments on screen, but there was still enough variety to excite and entertain.
Here, then, is a guide to the 10 best films that were unveiled at this year’s festival.
1. Anora
Sean Baker’s breezy Brooklyn-set romp slightly upset the odds, taking the Palme d’Or ahead of more fancied candidates. Still, after his earlier Cannes entries The Florida Project and Red Rocket, this felt like a step up.
Mikey Madison is terrific as Anora, or “Ani”, a lap dancer who marries one of her clients, the spoiled son of an obscenely wealthy Russian, only to feel the full wrath of his family.
Frequently teetering on the brink of hysteria – and tipping over during one extended fight scene – it is a smart piece of filmmaking from Baker, the first American to win the best film prize at Cannes since Terrence Malick for 2011’s The Tree of Life.
2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
One of the big news stories of the festival was the arrival of Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. He fled his country in May after learning he was due to be sentenced to several years in jail, as well as enduring flogging and confiscation of property – his films deemed to be “propaganda” in the eyes of the authorities.
Certainly, his latest will do nothing to smooth over relations; a compelling near three-hour drama, it depicts Iman (Missagh Zareh), a father of two whose work as an investigator puts him in conflict with his own family. The jury gave Rasoulof a special award; he deserved more.
3. The Girl with the Needle
Some competition films will inevitably go home empty-handed, but Swedish director Magnus von Horn (Sweat) can count himself extremely unlucky not to take home a prize for this immaculate black-and-white period piece.
Set in post-World War I Copenhagen, the shocking drama follows a young factory worker (Vic Carmen Sonne) who falls pregnant and forges a bond with a woman (Trine Dyrholm) who runs a covert adoption agency for mothers dealing with unwanted children.
A horror film of sorts, highly inspired by The Elephant Man, this was easily the most striking-looking movie in the official selection.
4. The Substance
The festival crowd-pleaser, French director Coralie Fargeat’s feminist body horror, gave Demi Moore the role of her career as Elizabeth Sparkle – a television fitness guru who, quite literally, births a younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) when she injects a mysterious liquid.
Exploring issues of ageing, beauty and the male gaze, Fargeat won best screenplay and the hearts of Cannes audiences, who revelled in the film’s increasingly demented prosthetics and unhinged performances.
Fargeat felt like a natural successor to David Cronenberg – whose own film The Shrouds, also in competition, felt dry and dull by comparison.
5. The Surfer
That one-man meme machine Nicolas Cage started another viral social media craze when he took to the stage after the late-night screening of Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer. “Mangez le rat!” he yelled, bringing a Gallic twist to the film’s most amusing line.
While Cage has graced Cannes before with crazy films (think Mandy or Dog Eat Dog), this tale of a father who clashes with a posse of aggressive local surfers on an Australian beach required more subtleties from the actor.
Engineered with a clever script that plays with perceptions of reality, this one really caught a wave.
6. Limonov: The Ballad
Playing poet/dissident Eduard Limonov, Ben Whishaw richly deserved the best actor prize (he did not get it; it went to Jesse Plemons’s trio of roles in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness).
This aside, Kirill Serebrennikov’s radical account of Limonov’s life, from little-known writer to political player, still came bursting with a deeply felt energy.
Rattling with Lou Reed songs, it boasts some bravura filmmaking moments, not least a whirlwind transition across the 1980s as the director spirits us to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Certainly it cut deeper than fellow competition entry The Apprentice and its portrait of 70s-era Donald Trump.
7. Emilia Pérez
Deserved of the Palme d’Or, Jacques Audiard’s Mexico-set musical ended up taking the Jury prize and saw its four female stars – Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz – jointly awarded best actress, which felt like a solid decision.
The story of a cartel boss (Gascón) who undergoes gender reassignment surgery, one critic wrote: “Imagine a world in which Stephen Sondheim made Sicario.”
With lively songs by French singer Camille and equally arresting choreography by Damien Jalet, it has all the fizz of a Hollywood show-stopper, but comes armed with a social conscience too.
8. Gazer
Programmed in Director’s Fortnight, Ryan J. Sloan’s debut had the feel of early Christopher Nolan.
His co-writer and wife, Ariella Mastroianni, starred as a young mother with dyschronometria, a condition that means you cannot perceive time. The result was a slow-burn noir, humming with a moody sax score from Steve Matthew Carter, that truly reels the audience into its world.
The film will go down as one of those punchy indie gems – an electrician by trade, Sloan made it over two years, self-financing; and while at Cannes, he learned that the power had been cut at his and Mastroianni’s flat. What a story.
9. Bird
A three-time Jury prizewinner, Andrea Arnold surprisingly got nothing here, but there was widespread critical admiration for her fable-like coming-of-age film set in Britain’s North Kent region.
Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan was the big draw, playing a wayward father who even bashes out a version of Blur’s “The Universal” in one touching singalong scene. But the film spins on the relationship between his rebellious 12-year-old daughter Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and the mysterious Bird (Franz Rogowski), a curious individual who has returned to the area.
Films like Kes and Birdman are evoked as Arnold switches from social to magic realism with a deft click of her finger.
10. Caught by the Tides
Jia Zhangke’s mysterious, sometimes baffling, hybrid piece felt like a Greatest Hits of the Chinese director. You might even call it a summation of his career, as he wove a new narrative shot around Covid times with footage shot earlier in his earlier years, including some from 2002’s Unknown Pleasures.
His wife and long-time collaborator, Zhao Tao, is graceful as Qiaoqiao, a woman from Datong in northern China who goes on an extensive quest to find her shady boyfriend, who has left the city to seek his fortune. It is a film that captures the undulating mood of a nation.
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