This year marked a major first for me — it was the first time I ever attended the Cannes Film Festival. Although I’ve been working as a film critic for JoBlo for nearly twenty years and have covered loads of festivals, including TIFF and Sundance every year since 2009, as well as SXSW in recent years, for some reason Cannes always felt like too much of a reach to me. After all, it’s in Europe and, to me, always seemed so elite that — truth be told — I wasn’t sure I belonged. As such, I was thrilled this year when JoBlo’s CEO and founder, Berge, decided I should cover the festival for the site, and I had the time of my life in the South of France, watching great movies and enjoying some of the nicest weather I’ve ever experienced — as Cannes really is a lovely place.
While there’s been a lot of talk about the absence of studio films in this year’s lineup, I didn’t find it lacking at all. In fact, I covered more movies at the festival this year than I have at many others — filing twenty-one reviews (read them all here). You’ll be hearing about a lot more of these movies as the year goes on, with the vast majority likely being saved for the fall awards season. It was actually tough to narrow down the best movies I saw this year to five, but here are the ones I thought really stood out.
Fjord:
The eventual winner of the Palme d’Or, Cristian Mungiu’s film has already proven to be divisive, with its win both being celebrated online and slammed. Why are the reactions so extreme? Because the movie does something pretty daring in our modern climate — it asks us to empathize with, and even take the side of, someone whose views might be considered hard to swallow for a large chunk of the people watching. It’s a movie that depicts how extremism of any kind — which includes extreme, unchecked progressivism in this case — could infringe on people’s individual freedoms. At any rate, Neon has this one, so you’ll be hearing a lot about it as the year goes on, and I’d be shocked if it doesn’t end up nominated for, or even winning, Best International Feature at the Oscars next year.
The Man I Love:
This one might be another potential awards nominee. In Ira Sachs’ movie, Rami Malek delivers the performance of his life as a man in the final stages of AIDS in 1980s New York. His character is prickly and real, with him narcissistic and prone to self-destructive behaviour, but there’s something incredibly touching about his rage against the way he’s being cut down in his prime and his need to make the most of the time he has left — damn the consequences.
Hope:
Lest you think Cannes was only dedicated to awards material, it also featured one of the most kick-ass action movies I’ve seen in ages — Na Hong-jin’s Hope. An alien invasion thriller, the first forty minutes of this movie is one long, sustained action sequence, and it’s not even the best one in the movie, with the finale — which includes an incredible car chase featuring a hair-raising horse-to-car transfer — knocking all of us at the fest right on our collective asses. Neon has this one too, and they’d be nuts not to give it a major summer release, as this is blockbuster material.
Paper Tiger:
Neon also has the rights to James Gray’s Paper Tiger, which I personally feel didn’t get enough love out of the fest. Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson star in this crime drama about a family that runs afoul of the Russian Mafia, with tragic consequences. Driver, in particular, delivers a charismatic tough-guy performance that reminded me of peak Robert De Niro or Al Pacino.
Club Kid:
The biggest acquisition of the festival, A24 picked this one up for a cool $17 million. The directorial debut of Jordan Firstman, this film adeptly mixes comedy and drama, with it telling the story of a non-stop club-goer who discovers he has a child (the result of the one heterosexual encounter he ever had) and turns over a new leaf to rise to the occasion. Some have said it’s like the A24 version of Big Daddy, but to me it felt almost like a modern version of the Dudley Moore classic Arthur.
Which Cannes title are you most excited for? Let us know in the comments.
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