Cannes 2024 Rundown: The films that I saw at the Cannes Film Festival (ranked)
10. Oh, Canada
Oh, brother. Paul Schrader’s reputation precedes himself. Before walking into this screening, I had already been privy to his notorious ramblings on Facebook — countless predictable Scrooge-like critiques on the work of his peers. Not to mention, he has solidified his place in American cinema as a troubled man who makes films about troubled men. Admittedly, I was not watching this film with a clean slate. And yet, even if I was, I doubt I would have come to a different conclusion.
“Oh, Canada” tells the story of Canadian documentarian Leonard Fife (played by Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi as the older and younger versions) as he recounts his young adulthood in his final moments of life. In just the first few scenes, “Oh, Canada” feels dated. Like a film (and a filmmaker) shackled to a different time, with surprisingly uninspired directing and incredibly flat characters across the board. When the film isn’t lulling you to sleep, it’s relying on flaunty black and white scenes and visual representations of an unreliable narrator that would be pretentious if they weren’t so rudimentary. Saying the film is self-aggrandizing feels inadequate. It has nothing to say unless it’s to meta-analyze the hardened man behind the camera.
9. Motel Destino
In it’s quieter moments, Karim Aïnouz’s film “Motel Destino” suggests flickers of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” — another Latin American film centered around masculinity, violence, and sex — but lacks subtext and nuance to draw too many similarities. Don’t get me wrong, “Motel Destino” looks good. Tropical settings shot on warm, textured 16mm super 8 cameras will always be a plus.
In a Christopher Doyle-like fashion, you can feel the desire, fear, and tons of sweat rolling off of Heraldo (Iago Xavier), a 20-something year old boy who camps out at the roadside sex motel to hide from the local gang after a job gone wrong. It is here that Heraldo meets Elias, the motel’s owner, and his wayward wife Dayana which sets off a tangled web of animalistic tensions soundtracked by Brazilian house music. And yet, the film’s denouement is captured in a single meta-textual monologue that Heraldo delivers to a police officer which begs the question: How long can a film run on aesthetic vibes? Answer: not for long.
8. The Apprentice
If you haven’t gotten your fill of Donald Trump on your big screen, you’re in luck! “The Apprentice” is Ali Abbasi’s long-awaited (and long tweeted about) follow up to his previous Cannes film “Holy Spider.” It follows a young and hungry Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) in his Godfather-esque rise to power. Integral to his ascent is Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the ruthless New York lawyer who enjoyed the pleasures of prosecuting suspected Communists and queer people alongside Senator McCarthy before guiding Trump through the New York social scene. Stan and Strong are a dream duo with Stan coming off of another physically transformative role in “A Different Man” and Strong as no stranger to delivering monologues in the back of a New York black car.
As expected, Abbasi’s version of a Trump biopic is nowhere close to MAGA fan fodder. Ample time is dedicated towards Trump and Ivana’s relationship including references to the sexual assault claims against him. While Trump isn’t painted as sympathetically as Micheal Corleone, biopics serve as a character study of our protagonist. Unpacking his strained relationship with his father and brother while also following his success in real estate is enough to garner sympathy and respect from a casual viewer. “The Apprentice” leaves you dreadful of a cruel man’s increasing power while also questioning the purpose of the film if you were already feeling dreadful in the first place.
7. Parthenope
In this A24-acquired film, a girl is ceremoniously birthed from the shores of Capri and the island bows at her feet. Her name is Parthenope (played beautifully by Stephania Sandrelli), a reference to a siren in The Odyssey, so it becomes clear pretty quickly that Paolo Sorrentino is not beating around the bush: she’s hot. As far as sensual voyeurism goes, the first 30 minutes are a buffet for the eyes. It’s a extended perfume commercial with slim white Europeans in head-to-toe YSL (Saint Laurent is a co-producer of not only one, but two films on this list), an abundance of cigarettes, and even more large bodies of ridiculously blue water.
The visual filmmaking alone is enough to keep you company in an aimless story. However, as we follow Parthenope throughout the years, we lose some of the magnetic supporting performances that opened the film (including a quirky Gary Oldman cameo). Beneath the aesthetic gloss of 17th century palazzos is the potential for a curious dissection of Italian society — the isolated luxury island of Capri that turns up it’s nose at Naples, it’s urban, working-class mother city. But it doesn’t seem that Sorrentino cares enough about this to do more than mention it (I guess we’ll leave that to Mario Martone). Instead, Sorrentino dives straight into some heavy-handed fantasy which had me going, “huh?” instead of his intended, “wow, cool choice dude.”
6. L’Amour Ouf (Beating Hearts)
Vivre la France! Vivre la romance! The stylized pop love story is a surprisingly commercial pick for an in Competition Cannes film and yet a brave inclusion considering the Cannes Jury’s stuffy reputation. “L’Amour Ouf” is the decades-long romance between Jackie, the head-strong new girl, and Clotaire, the leader of his rag-tag group of delinquent boys, in northeast France. The teenage versions of the couple, portrayed by Mallory Wanecque (in a not-so-distant role from her 2022 Cannes film “Les Pires”) and Malik Frikah, literally crash into each other in a charming meet cute soundtracked to The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.” It’s one of many pop needle drops which, paired with the countless Doc Martens, Chucks, and Adidas Sambas walking through each scene, complete the 1980s cosplay.
As Clotaire falls deeper into his life of crime, the lovers’ montage-filled glory days are stamped out until they reunite as their older counterparts played by Adele Exarchopoulos (“Passages”) and François Civil. Both duos are equally as sweet and seductive and yet, it’s Exarchopoulos and Civil who bring a much needed darkness and complexity to an otherwise straight and narrow romance. In these more serious moments I give immense credit to how Gilles Lellouche subverts the good girl-bad boy trope through to the very end. He approaches romance with a level of respect for the genre that is often reserved for more critically acclaimed stories, begging the question: We’ve got prestige drama, horror, comedy… isn’t it time for prestige romance?
5. Megalopolis
It is another level of peculiar when Adam Driver’s character earnestly delivering the complete “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the more conventional choices in Coppola’s self-proclaimed magnum opus. Shakespeare, particularly Julius Caesar and Ancient Rome set the foundation for Coppola’s world. Julius Caesar and “Megalopolis” are stories of men, brilliant and bold, but often blinded by power and fated to fall. Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver), a charming yet pompous architect has a vision of rebuilding the ruined city of New Rome into Megalopolis, a utopian paradise. Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the mayor of New Rome, remains the chief adversary in Catalina’s way, arguing that the city must focusing on rebuilding the past rather than constructing the future.
Calling “Megalopolis” an allegory for American politics is low-hanging, and yet, freely given fruit. Catalina’s views embody Coppola’s own in his criticism of current conservative ideology and narrow-minded philosophies. And yet, this morally simple story is presented in the most LSD-tripping fashion. It is a bold choice, one that can truly only be pulled off by the naive avant-garde filmmaker or the carte-blanche veteran auteur. Coppola, being the latter, has all but disregarded any concerns of commercial success and poured over $100 million of his “pinot noir” blood money into CGI set-pieces and borderline unreproducible fourth wall act breaks played over nonsensical dialogue. It’s frustrating at times and delightful at many more, a multi-million dollar project that, despite it’s nuttiness, is more worthy of acclaim than anything currently churning out of the superhero multiverse factory.
4. The Substance
Everything about “The Substance” makes me want to bottle it up and send it down a catwalk. It’s stylish, sexy, and just the right amount of tacky to tweet screenshots of Demi Moore or Margaret Qualley with the caption “i woke up like dis.” “The Substance” opens with a decision: Does an aging celebrity, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) consent to taking the Substance — a neon green mystery goo in minimalist Glossier-like packaging — for the opportunity to share her body with a younger, hotter version of herself, Sue (Margaret Qualley)? Predictably, Elisabeth takes the bait, undergoes the gruesome transformation, and switches between her host body and Sue every seven days (nevermind the rules of the Substance, they aren’t too important to the story — let alone to Fargeat).
“The Substance” is, quite plainly, a motivated critique of the beauty industry and western culture’s treatment of female aging. Now, I can’t say that the film gives an overarching moral or new perspective to take on these looming themes. But maybe that’s the point? Perhaps it simply is just an eccentric, prophetic allegory about how our culture breaks women until they just can’t bear it anymore. Talk about a horror story. Wherever you land on the feminist or not-so-feminist themes, Fargeat’s brazen domination of the camera is undisputed. It’s the kind of sheer confidence and subtextual awareness that can burn a simple image of a Hollywood Walk of Fame star into my brain.
3. All We Imagine as Light
Perhaps the most artistically quiet film on this list, “All We Imagine as Light” parallels the lives of two young women, Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), who are, at once, co-workers at a Mumbai medical clinic, and roommates in a shared flat. In fact, the film is full of parallels — methodically dissecting the differences in romantic love, gender roles, and the confines of bustling cities vs. limitless beach towns. The film’s first half sees Prabha and Anu go through their similar routines at the clinic before diverging — Anu has been secretly dating a Muslim boy while Prabha is already married with a husband who has abandoned her for work in Germany. These scenes are a masterclass in slow cinema, director Payal Kapadia, grants the audience insight into the girls’ most quotidien acts and, in the films mundane moments, delivers the most emotionally pounding dialogue. The city seems to pressurize both Anu’s yearning and Prabha’s loneliness which serves as an emotionally reverent set-up to the girl’s trip to a nearby seaside town.
The shift in energy from Mumbai to the splashing ocean shore is exquisite. The town is an oasis, a liminal space where both girls can, for the first time, explore their desires. It is here where the film lights up. In a sequence that is tastefully akin to Alice Rohrwacher-style magical realism, Kapadia elegantly demonstrates how it can be just as beautiful to fall in love with someone as it is to let someone go. It’s the film’s small moments that nestle into you. A lonely woman hugging a rice cooker. A couple that never was (and never will be) sitting on swings. A bartender replying “We can be open as long as you like” to a sole patron. It is beautiful here.
2. Anora
In many ways, “Anora” is the first Palme d’Or winner that captures my generation — our language, our music, our humor… It’s acclaim feels representative of shift in international cinema. Out goes the genre-leaden, non-Hollywood (or English-spoken) films winning the top prizes, in comes the hipster NEON dramedies with social media, vaping, and lots of sex. The film centers around Anora (Mikey Madison), a 23-year-old Brooklyn sex worker who hits it off with Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eidelstein), the son of a Russian oligarch. The “Pretty Woman” comparisons practically write themselves — shopping sprees, 5-star hotels, romantic escapades — until their idyllic love story takes a turn.
What follows are a series of set-pieces from a strip club to a mansion to a candy store which set the scenes for an overwhelmingly performance-forward story. Madison, along with the supporting cast, is enthralling. In record time, you are rooting for Anora like your life depended on it. This is a credit to Sean Baker, his love for his characters is incomparable to many of his contemporaries. The film flows effortlessly and time flies as you’re pulled through all of the emotions in the handbook. I laughed just as much as I cried and all the while was simply happy to be there, staying with those characters for a little while longer.
1. The Shrouds
David Cronenberg, King of Cannes. I don’t believe that another film this year has shown the breadth of what the science-fiction genre can encompass than “The Shrouds”. Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is a wealthy entrepreneur of a high-tech burial shroud, one that sends a live feed of a loved one’s decomposing corpse to the user’s smartphone. It is quickly revealed that Karsh is a user of the technology himself after the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). His shrouds, while technologically fascinating, are only a vessel to dive into Cronenberg’s more thoughtful and adventurous themes of intimacy, voyeurism, spirituality, and a quite bizarre examination of post-modern conspiracy theory culture. As such, perhaps “The Shrouds” isn’t a sci-fi film at all. Cronenberg, who has crafted such a statement career as a genre filmmaker, challenges political and philosophical ideas in complex and, at times, outlandish ways, bending and reshaping our understanding of genre in the first place. Above all, he accomplishes this while maintaining an earnest and playful warmth to an obviously cold subject matter that almost certainly originates from the film being a response to the death of Cronenberg’s own wife. And if that isn’t up your alley, settle in for gorgeous scenes of Vincent Cassel in custom YSL suits (courtesy of Saint Laurent Productions). Who says God doesn’t give with both hands?
If there was a lesson that I learned from watching Cronenberg’s previous film, “Crimes of the Future”, it was that David Cronenberg rewards the viewer who suspends judgement (or any critical analysis) until the credits roll. “The Shrouds” settles into you as you are departing the cinema. Theories swirl around your head and leave you with more questions than when you started — and in a good way. It is a story that goes beyond death. Or, at least, our comprehension of it.
