The line-up at last year’s Cannes Film Festival—which included a staggering eight films that went on to be nominated for Oscars, among them best-picture contenders Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, and Killers of the Flower Moon—was one of the strongest in years, cementing the festival’s reputation as the ultimate awards season launchpad. So, naturally, the illustrious French showcase has put together an even starrier shortlist for its 77th edition, due to run from May 14 to 25. Greta Gerwig will serve as jury president, George Lucas is due to receive the honorary Palme d’Or for lifetime achievement, and the releases on the roster range from mind-blowing action epics to surreal musical comedies and one particularly breathlessly anticipated (and expertly timed) political biopic. These are the 10 films you need to look out for.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Almost a decade after George Miller’s high-octane, nerve-jangling, running-on-fumes blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road thundered into theaters, the visionary is back with an equally ambitious prequel, casting Anya Taylor-Joy as the titular road warrior previously embodied by a steely Charlize Theron. Snatched from the mythical “green place” as a child, she journeys across the wasteland to the citadel ruled by Immortan Joe, but once she comes of age, she vows to escape by any means necessary. Add Chris Hemsworth as a mustache-twirling warlord, Tom Burke as a warpaint-covered love interest, gasp-inducing stunts, eye-popping explosions, and an appropriately booming soundtrack, and you have a big-screen spectacle like no other.
Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos’s madcap follow-up to Poor Things zips us from a mind-bending Victorian London to the present—or, at least, a (characteristically bonkers) version of it—in which double Oscar winner Emma Stone dances with reckless abandon as cars are nearly crashed and bodies are dragged down hallways. A three-part sci-fi anthology which also stars Hunter Schafer, Joe Alwyn, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, and Mamoudou Athie, it looks set to be a surreal romp from an auteur who is, undeniably, at the peak of his powers.
The Apprentice
After making a splash at Cannes in 2018 with the Swedish fantasy Border, and then again in 2022 with the Persian-language thriller Holy Spider, Ali Abbasi returns to the Croisette with something far more conventional, though no less exciting: an account of Donald Trump’s rise in ’70s and ’80s New York, with Pam & Tommy’s Sebastian Stan donning prosthetics and a blonde wig to play a younger iteration of the former president. Meanwhile, a still-very-much-Kendall-Roy-adjacent Jeremy Strong takes the role of Roy Cohn, the prosecutor and fixer who acted as Trump’s mentor, while Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s Maria Bakalova becomes the aspiring real estate tycoon’s first wife, Ivana, and Martin Donovan his father, businessman Fred Trump. With the next presidential election looming and the film’s real-life subject still neck and neck with Joe Biden in the polls, this examination of corruption and deceit couldn’t feel more timely.
Megalopolis
A passion project that’s been over two decades in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s first big-screen release since 2011 is easily the festival’s most-talked-about Palme d’Or contender: a debauched and decadent cautionary tale about America’s future, with a star-packed cast featuring everyone from Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza to Giancarlo Esposito, Chloe Fineman, and Nathalie Emmanuel. Early viewers’ responses have ranged from shock and bafflement to euphoria, though all agree that the 135-minute epic—which has, tellingly, still not secured a distribution deal—is an audacious piece of work. Cannes will be crucial to determining its fate: there’s a chance it could dazzle audiences and scoop the top prize (as another long-gestating and once seemingly cursed Coppola project, Apocalypse Now, did back in 1979), or it could be a major misfire. Either way, the entire industry will be watching with bated breath.
Emilia Perez
Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldaña, Édgar Ramírez, and Karla Sofía Gascón lead this musical crime caper from Palme d’Or winner Jacques Audiard, which centers on a lawyer who receives an unexpected request: to aid a formidable Mexican cartel boss who wishes to retire from the business and undergo sex reassignment surgery—the latter, both to evade authorities and to finally affirm her gender. With original songs penned by French singer Camille, and Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello creating the costumes and serving as a co-producer, it’s guaranteed to be a wild and stylish ride.
Rumours
A pitch-black political comedy helmed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, this satire follows the seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies at the annual G7 summit as they become lost in the woods and face ever-increasing peril while attempting to draft a provisional statement regarding a global crisis. Dressed in a pastel pink suit and wispy wig in the first released footage, its star, Cate Blanchett, looks like an amalgamation of Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton, though Cannes’s festival director, Thierry Frémaux, has said that she’s something closer to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. Joining her are fellow power players Alicia Vikander and Charles Dance, with the cast rounded out by the likes of Persuasion’s Nikki Amuka-Bird, Inglourious Basterds’s Denis Ménochet, Giri/Haji’s Takehiro Hira, and Triangle of Sadness’s Zlatko Burić. Prepare for mayhem.
Oh, Canada
Paul Schrader—best known for penning Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, as well as directing American Gigolo and First Reformed—has secured a stellar ensemble for his latest portrait of male anguish, an adaptation of the searing Russell Banks novel Foregone: Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, Kristine Froseth, Richard Gere, and Jacob Elordi. The latter pair play older and younger incarnations of the protagonist, an enigmatic American documentarian who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War and now, decades later, finds himself on the brink of death. As he looks back on his youth, he’s forced to confront the foundational lies of his past and come to terms with his own mortality.
Horizon: An American Saga
Yellowstone fans, assemble: Kevin Costner is helming and starring in this sweeping new drama chronicling the true cost of the settlement of the American West, the first film in what the industry stalwart hopes will ultimately be a barnstorming four-part saga. Lending support in and amongst the gun fights and nocturnal ambushes are Sienna Miller, Jena Malone, Sam Worthington, Luke Wilson, Owen Crow Shoe, Tatanka Means, Danny Huston, Abbey Lee, Jamie Campbell Bower, Glynn Turman, and Giovanni Ribisi.
Bird
Barry Keoghan trades Oliver’s antlers and embroidered blazer in Saltburn for tattoos, gold jewelry, and a flat cap for Andrea Arnold’s first scripted film since 2016’s American Honey, another account of renegades living on the fringes of society. Opposite him is Passages’s Franz Rogowski, as well as Top Boy’s Jasmine Jobson, Industry’s James Nelson-Joyce, and newcomer Nykiya Adams. Plot details are still shrouded in mystery, but given the director’s impressive track record (the BAFTA-winning Red Road and Fish Tank, the Oscar-winning short Wasp), not to mention Keoghan’s habit of choosing challenging, provocative, and awards-worthy projects, expectations are sky-high.
The Substance
In this blood-soaked feminist body horror, Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid are under the direction of Coralie Fargeat, who proved her capacity to thrill (and her stomach for gore) with her breathless, candy-colored 2017 action movie Revenge. It promises to be a pulpy delight, with Thierry Frémaux likening it to Julia Ducournau’s recent Palme d’Or winner Titane—a good omen for its competition chances, if there ever was one.
Editor
Radhika Seth
