Cannes has long been a festival of chickens and eggs, and it can be fiendishly hard to distinguish the two in advance. Do films matter because they premiere there, or do they premiere there because they matter? After losing ground to its statelier rival Venice before the pandemic, the French festival has blazed back on form in recent years, carefully rebalancing its annual mix of blockbusters, discoveries, artistic coups, global pulp and succès de scandales like a master chemist squeezing their pipettes.
Four of the last five winners of the Palme d’Or, the highest honour in Cannes’ suite of awards, have gone on to find serious mainstream success: Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall and this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Anora, were all first seen in its competition strand. (And during Oscar season, the Cannes press office won’t let you forget it.)
Side by side with prestige, it’s also become an amusingly high-stakes platform for glossy summer entertainments: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny fell on its face there in 2023, but the buzz for Inside Out, Top Gun: Maverick and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that pushed all three to extraordinary box-office highs first ignited at their respective Cannes unveilings.
Jury president Juliette Binoche and her colleagues will be hoping for more of the above from the 45 features announced this morning: more will follow later in the separate Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week strands. We critics will be crossing our fingers for some havoc and fiascos too, though: Cannes wouldn’t be Cannes without an Emilia Pérez in the mix. Will one of the titles below supply it? We’ll find out next month.
1. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Barring last-minute additions – not unheard of at Cannes – the last instalment in Paramount’s venerable action thriller series is by far the highest-profile title at this year’s event, and in Tom Cruise it brings with it the festival’s highest-profile guest – just edging out Robert De Niro, who’ll be on site to receive an honorary Palme d’Or. Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie will walk the red carpet on Day Two, Wednesday 14th May, for an Out of Competition premiere before the film opens worldwide on Friday of the following week. The plot is largely unknown and, let’s be honest, also utterly irrelevant: it’s all about the spectacular, boundary-pushing stunts, of which an early trailer has promised a slew.
2. The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson and Cannes are old friends at this point: three of the fastidious auteur’s previous features have premiered there, and this quirky-sounding espionage caper will take the tally to four. Starring Benicio del Toro, and featuring many of his ever-expanding gang of repertory players (Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch among them), it centres on del Toro’s bruised business magnate Zsa-zsa Korda and his protegée-slash-daughter, played by Anderson’s newcomer Mia Threapleton; herself the offspring of one Kate Winslet.
3. Eddington
Rumour has it that multiple noses were knocked out of joint when Ari Aster’s previous film, the Kafkaesque nightmare comedy Beau is Afraid, was flatly turned down by Cannes in 2023. Clearly the two have kissed and made up, because his follow-up, which also stars Joaquin Phoenix, has ended up in this year’s competition lineup. Also starring Emma Stone, Austin Butler and Pedro Pascal, it appears to be a satirical horror-western hybrid set during the Covid pandemic: Phoenix plays the sheriff of a remote town who decides to run for office against Pascal’s incumbent mayor, following a set-to over mask use in the supermarket.
Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in Ari Aster’s Eddington
4. Sentimental Value
The last time Norway’s Joaquim Trier teamed up with actress Renate Reinsve, the result was one of the best ‘smart’ romantic comedies in eons: 2021’s The Worst Person in the World. Their follow-up feature (and third collaboration to date) is this domestic drama which also stars Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning, and has already been nabbed by arthouse distributors MUBI for a UK release. Pitched as “an intimate and moving exploration of family, memories, and the reconciliatory power of art,” this is one of this year’s competition strand’s hottest tickets.
5. The Mastermind
Kelly Reichardt – a patient, ruminative soul in any genre she works in – has now turned her hand to the art heist thriller, recruiting The Crown’s Josh O’Connor to play a daring master thief who orchestrates some sort of outrageous raid. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the women’s liberation movement, it was shot late last year: that’s about all that we know at this point, though further nuggets will presumably leak out in the weeks ahead. At the moment, it sounds like a sister film to her paranoid eco-terrorist escapade Night Moves, which played Venice in 2013: if it ends up matching that film’s stripped-down mystery and tension, all the better.
6. Nouvelle Vague
Bold is the American filmmaker who tries to offer the French a hot take on the life and work of Jean-Luc Godard, but Richard Linklater has nothing to prove. This period piece, shot in Paris last spring (in black and white, mind you), offers an on-the-ground chronicle of the making of Breathless, with Guillaume Marbeck as the audacious young filmmaker and Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, his leading lady and muse. The predominantly French cast play an Eye Spy book of New Wave notables, with Belmondo, Truffaut, Chabrol, Varda, Cocteau, Rohmer and Rivette all featuring in some capacity. Linklater’s previous foray into directorial history, 2008’s Me and Orson Welles, was a delight, so hopes for this one are high.
Richead Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague
7. Alpha
Julia Ducournau, France’s leading in-house jeune provocatrice, has a spotty track record when it comes to scandal. Her debut feature Raw, which played in the 2016 Critics’ Week sidebar, caused multiple walkouts with its gory scenes of teenage cannibalism – but 2021’s Palme d’Or-winning automotive body horror Titane was a would-be outrage that didn’t actually seem to cause much: those who didn’t think much of it received it with less of a snort than a shrug. Her third feature, an 1980s-set allegorical treatment of the Aids epidemic, is her first work in English, and centres on an 11-year-old girl ostracised by her friends over rumours that she’s spreading a grim new disease.
8. The History of Sound
Fresh – ish – off the back of Gladiator II, the always-busy Paul Mescal is heading to Cannes with this historical romance from Olivier Hermanus, about two folk music scholars who fall for one another while cataloguing the traditional songs of rural New England. His partner is played by Josh O’Connor, whose starring role in The Mastermind, above, will make him one of the busier actors on the Croisette this year. Mescal’s track record at the festival is strong: alongside the decent small-town psychological drama God’s Creatures, his acclaimed big-screen breakthrough Aftersun premiered there in 2022, for which he was eventually nominated for an Academy Award.
9. Pillion
Potential late additions notwithstanding, this is shaping up to be a lighter year for British talent, though BBC Films’ media team were quick to trumpet four of their projects that made the cut. As well as laying claim to Sentimental Value above – fair enough; they’re among its half-dozen production companies – three smaller titles also feature, including Akinola Davies’ Lagos-set My Father’s Shadow and this punchy-sounding gay S&M biker drama from Harry Lighton, in which Alexander Skarsgard’s beefy motorcycling hunk takes on a submissive lover, played by the brilliant young character actor Harry Melling. Both of the latter will play in the eclectic Un Certain Regard sidebar, along with the BBC’s fourth and final entry, below.
10. Urchin
“‘Arris Dique-een-son’. Maybe you don’t know the name,” said festival supremo Thierry Frémaux at this morning’s press conference – though to the young British actor’s admirers at home, he’s one of the most notable rising screen stars around. Dickinson, 28, may be about to play John Lennon in Sam Mendes’ forthcoming Beatles films, but before immersing himself in those he directed and starred in this London-set social-realist tale about a homeless Londoner trying to heave his life back on course. Nor is he the only actor with a directorial debut in this year’s programme: Scarlett Johansson’s May-December friendship drama Eleanor the Great will also be screening.
Harris Dickinson in Urchin
