The 2024 Cannes Film Festival is underway with Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act starring Léa Seydoux and Louis Garrel serving as the opening-night film.
This year’s lineup includes major Hollywood premieres like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, Kevin Costner’s first film of a planned four-part series Horizon: An American Saga, Francis Coppola’s long-gestating Megalopolis, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness in a reteam with Emma Stone, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada and Andrea Arnold’s Bird to name a few.
They are joined by new films from stalwart auteurs including David Cronenberg, Jacques Audiard, Ali Abbasi, Jia Zhang-Ke, Christophe Honoré, Paolo Sorrentino, Gilles Lellouche, Mohammad Rasoulof and Michel Hazanavicius, Guy Maddin, Noémie Merlant and Oliver Stone.
Read all of Deadline’s takes below throughout the festival, which runs May 14-25. Click on the title to read the full review and keep checking back as we update the list.
Armand
Section: Un Certain Regard
Director: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Endre Hellesveit, Øystein Røger, Vera Veljovic
Deadline’s takeaway: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s lineage should give you a fair idea of what’s in store here, but, surprisingly, Armand doesn’t dig especially deep into the human psyche, finally falling into a strange no man’s land between intense character drama and jet-black comedy.
Director: Andrea Arnold
Section: Competition
Cast: Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Jason Buda, Jasmin Jobson, James Nelson Noyce, Frankie Box, Franz Rogowski,
Deadline’s takeaway: Andrea Arnold knows just how to get under our skin. She embellishes the film with fantastical elements, but whether they’re really happening or part of Bailey’s childlike desperation to believe in anything magical, the film doesn’t make clear. But Arnold certainly wants us to know one thing: Bailey will be OK.
Caught By the Tides
Section: Competition
Director: Jia Zhangke
Cast: Zhao Tao, Zhubin Li
Deadline’s takeaway: Jia Zhangke leads his partner and muse, Zhao Tao, on a decades-long romantic odyssey in Caught By the Tides, which tries too hard to play with time and form for the connection between its leads to be its central preoccupation.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
Director: Tyler Taormina
Section: Directors’ Fortnight
Cast: Matilda Fleming, Michael Cera, Chris Lazzaro, Elsie Fisher, Gregg Turkington
Deadline’s takeaway: It’s hard to categorize Taormina’s film, and, for some, its freewheeling, indie American Graffiti vibe might take a little getting used to. But Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is a trip for anyone willing to roll with it, and more than cements Taormina as a talent to watch.
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
Director: Nanette Burstein
Section: Cannes Classics
With: Elizabeth Taylor
Deadline’s takeaway: The tapes recorded in 1964 weren’t actually lost, but it all makes for a satisfying journey through one of Hollywood’s most memorable careers. There is the feeling of intimacy that makes this one special, if not exactly full of new revelations.
Emilia Pérez
Director: Jacques Audiard
Section: Competition
Cast: Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez, Mark Ivanir, Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez
Deadline’s takeaway: None of this ever seems ridiculous, because Audiard leans into the musical genre’s conventions; rather than bending his provocative story to fit it, he bends the form itself. It may be too soon to call the Palme d’Or with a week of the Cannes Film Festival left to run, but Emilia Pérez looks very much like a winner.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Director: George Miller
Section: Out of Competition
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, Lachy Hulme, Matuse, Goran Kleut, Charlee Fraser
Deadline’s takeaway: With Furiosa, George Miller, now seemingly ageless at 79 (he was 34 when the first Mad Max came out), has perhaps given birth to the greatest Max yet, a wheels-up, rock-and-rolling epic that delivers on the origin story.
Director: Laurent Bouzereau
Section: Cannes Classics
With: Faye Dunaway
Deadline’s takeaway: You will find yourself with renewed respect for this great star after watching this documentary on her life. Time for a Faye Dunaway retrospective, and this fine film is perfect reason to do it.
Ghost Trail
Director: Jonathan Millet
Section: Critics’ Week
Cast: Adam Bessa, Tawfeek Barhom, Julia Franz Richter, Shafiqa El Till
Deadline’s takeaway: On the surface, Ghost Trail uses the traditional tropes of the spy movie, but it isn’t exactly thrilling, certainly not in the manner of a John le Carré novel. Closer in spirit to Spielberg’s Munich, it’s a quietly profound character study about the need for a closure that may never come.
The Girl with the Needle
Director: Magnus von Horn
Section: Competition
Cast: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm
Deadline’s takeaway: It is because this story’s truths are so stark that this high-wire work succeeds. Magnus von Horn is a masterful talent, and there is plenty of prize potential within his film. It’s an unequivocal and beguiling triumph.
Kinds of Kindness
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Section: Competition
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau
Deadline’s takeaway: Kinds of Kindness is about a ubiquitous interdependence between ruthless power and willing submission that crops up everywhere, which implies that we are all in its thrall. That makes it their gloomiest film yet. Of course, it is also very funny.
Megalopolis
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Section: Competition
Cast: Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf
Deadline’s takeaway: Watching Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire and eating cheese afterwards would be the only way to replicate Megalopolis‘ fever-dream grandeur, a series of stunning images, carried along by the loosest of plots, that pontificate on the self-destructive nature of humankind, the only species capable of civilizing itself to death.
Oh, Canada
Director: Paul Schrader
Section: Competition
Cast: Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, Michael Imperioli, Zach Shaffer, Kristine Froseth, Jake Weary
Deadline takeaway: Oh, Canada is made up of pieces of a life put under a cinematic microscope at different periods, all moving in and out of the mind of a man who is dying but still lucid enough to tell the truths of his life as time is running out, some revealed for the first time as he grapples with both morality and mortality.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Director: Rungano Nyoni
Section: Un Certain Regard
Cast: Susan Chardy, Henry B.J. Phiri, Elizabeth Chisela
Deadline’s takeaway: In Nyoni’s sophomore film, the focus is the rub between tradition and modernity, using the occasion of a family funeral as the jumping-off point for a slow-burn drama that builds, rather stealthily, to an unexpectedly emotional climax.
Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot
Director: Rithy Panh
Section: Premiere
Cast: Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, Cyril Gueï
Deadline’s takeaway: The journalists in Rithy Panh’s film aren’t superheroes; their quest for that truth has its own motivations. Yet the importance of their journey to find it cannot be understated. The film might not walk totally fresh ground for Panh, but there is real power in one filmmaker’s dedication to re-examining real world horror from many angles over many years.
The Second Act
Director: Quentin Dupieux
Section: Out of Competition
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon, Raphaël Quenard
Deadline’s takeaway: Maybe Quentin Dupieux should have paid more attention when he was writing; maybe he should have spent longer in the editing suite. But if the results are always a bit ragged, does it matter? Dupieux might never make a masterpiece, but his slapdash, wild entertainments are irresistible.
The Surfer
Director: Lorcan Finnegan
Section: Midnight Screenings
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julian Mcmahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak, Rahel Romahn, Finn Little, Charlotte Maggi
Deadline’s takeaway: Nic Cage as a surfer dude? Unlikely, but who cares? The Surfer is an object lesson in how to make a film economically by using a single location, a bunch of surfing extras and some stock footage of lizards. Which is the grindhouse ethic at work, for sure.
Three Kilometers to the End of the World
Director: Emanuel Parvu
Section: Competition
Cast: Bogdan Dumitrache, Ciprian Chiujdea, Laura Vasily
Deadline’s takeaway: Parvu is careful to show the complexity of these characters as well as of their weave of betrayals, mistakes and wrongdoing. The actors bring to their portraits the naturalistic ease combined with intensity that is a hallmark of Romanian New Wave cinema, each one a whole person with their own reasons.
When the Light Breaks
Director: Rúnar Rúnarsson
Section: Un Certain Regard
Cast: Elín Hall, Katla Njálsdóttir, Ágúst Wigum, Mikael Kaaber, Baldur Einarsson, Gunna Hrafn Kristjánsson
Deadline’s takeaway: As an opening-night choice for Cannes‘ Un Certain Regard, When the Light Breaks sets a standard for the original and specific vision that is expected of films in this section.
Wild Diamond
Director: Agathe Riedinger
Section: Competition
Cast: Malou Khebizi, Andréa Bescond, Idir Azougli, Ashley Romano
Deadline’s takeaway: Riedinger’s debut feature approaches her subject with remarkable empathy, taking Liane on her own terms and seeing her surroundings largely through her eyes.
