What You Cannes Watch from Home
A preview of the Official Competition
It’s her time … and by “her,” I mean Monica Bellucci aggressively pronouncing directors’ names at the Cannes Film Festival. Click the photo below to see just what I’m talking about 👇
There are even five legendary directors she rattles off that have films in this year’s festival: Wim Wenders, Nanni Moretti, and Ken Loach, plus Martin Scorsese and Maïwenn (although out of competition)!
The eyes of the global cinematic universe train themselves on the south of France for the next two weeks as the Cannes Film Festival gets underway today. It could be upwards of a year before some of these titles wash up on the shores of America, but I’ve come up with a good way to scratch the itch of massive FOMO for those not gracing the Croisette. It’s a great time to catch up with previous works from directors represented in the competition, and I’ve rounded up 10 titles to help you do just that.
Karim Aïnouz, Firebrand
While I’m generally allergic to British costume dramas, I’m open to new perspectives on the genre — and always have a soft spot for anything related to Henry VIII. Firebrand features Alicia Vikander as the sixth and final wife, Katherine Parr, and comes from the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz. I was very impressed with his previous feature Invisible Life, a soaring melodrama about two separated sisters. As I wrote at the time in my review for /Film:
“For the tonal and aesthetic maximalism that Aïnouz brings to the film, it's what we do not – what we cannot – see that exerts the strongest pull. While a full 140 minutes of this can get occasionally exhausting, Aïnouz makes it more than worthwhile in his stirring conclusion when the full impact of a life apart becomes wrenchingly apparent.”
Invisible Life is available on Amazon Prime Video.
Catherine Breillat, Last Summer
The transgressive French director Catherine Breillat is sure to stir up some discourse with her new film Last Summer, a romance between a stepmother and … her teenage stepson. (For what it’s worth, I reviewed the film Queen of Hearts that she’s remaking, and it’s actually far less lurid than you’d imagine.) I know she’s going to leave us beautifully bruised like she did with 2001’s Fat Girl, widely regarded as her finest work to date. Her unsparing depiction of life centers on an overweight young girl experiencing the first pangs of sensual attraction. Breillat locates the roots of society’s sexual dysfunction as generated from the youngest ages.
Fat Girl is available on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel.
Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest
A new Jonathan Glazer movie is always a true event — it’s been a decade since his last, Under the Skin, whose anthropological gaze at humanity has already shaped more movies than you probably realize. (Paid subscribers may remember that Glazer took home Best Director in my A24-Scars.) Little is known about his new film The Zone of Interest other than that it takes place inside a Nazi concentration camp. I’m ready to be shaken to my core.
Under the Skin is available on HBO Max.
Jessica Hausner, Club Zero
“In all my films, I try to reflect on those ideas in our heads that are as strong as reality,” filmmaker Jessica Hausner told me in 2019. We were talking about Little Joe, her sci-fi/horror-adjacent tale of a female scientist working on a plant that can chemically induce happiness. It looks like there might be a similar genre mix at play in Club Zero, which centers around a boarding school teacher who begins to suggest her students don’t eat as a nutritional practice. I’m curious to see where the lines begin to blur between her fantasy and our recognizable reality.
Little Joe is available to rent from various digital providers.
Todd Haynes, May December
The great Julianne Moore really should have her Oscar for one of her collaborations with Todd Haynes, for whom she’s served as muse for nearly three decades now. May December could be the most fascinating meta-text yet for this duo as Moore plays an actress preparing to let a younger performer (played by Natalie Portman) interpret her life for the screen. It stands to be yet another fascinating exploration of finding authentic emotion through artifice that follows in the spiritual footsteps of Far from Heaven. This 2002 film serves as both homage to and commentary on the “women’s weepie” melodramas popularized in the mid-century by Douglas Sirk, further elevating the subtext to the point of text.
Far from Heaven is available on Starz and to rent through various digital providers.
Aki Kaurismäki, Fallen Leaves
If you haven’t experienced the droll comic sensibilities of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, give yourself a treat. Though he’s been at this for decades now, I’m startled by how contemporary the understated humor of his films feel — almost like it presages the anti-joke mentality popularized by nihilistic TikToks. That sensibility is on vibrant display in Drifting Clouds, a blistering satire of a recently jobless couple’s efforts to regain employment. Both are too proud to accept help from the safety net and remain convinced in the power of their own self-sufficiency to self-defeating ends. The director’s newest film, Fallen Leaves, is reportedly the latest in his “working-class trilogy.” While I haven’t seen what precedes this Cannes premiere, I’m excited all the same given that it seems in the vein of what I’ve loved thus far.
Drifting Clouds is available on the Criterion Channel.
Hirokazu Kore-eda, Monster
Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is on a TEAR, back in competition in consecutive years following 2022’s Broker. Can he win a second Palme d’Or with Monster, a film that returns him to his native country and re-centers his intergenerational focus on children? It does sound awfully similar to his 2018 Shoplifters, which won the festival’s highest laurels, though that hasn’t stopped juries from rewarding directors in other instances. Shoplifters is an empathetic triumph with sociological heft as it details the lives of a makeshift family on the margins. As Kore-eda told me in 2018:
“It is definitely not a criticism of society, but the feeling that I had going into this movie was definitely anger. It’s not so much anger at a system or at a politician, but rather, as Cate Blanchett put it [during Cannes], “These are invisible people.” Who makes these people invisible? It’s our society as a whole, every one of us. I think this is an issue that I feel very strongly about.
Shoplifters is available for free with ads on Tubi.
Ken Loach, The Old Oak
We can always count on good ol’ lefty Loach to come through with another lionization of the benevolent working class and how they’re put upon by uncaring elites and bureaucrats. It feels like he’s been making some variation of this for decades, and at 86, he shows no signs of slowing down or falling behind the times. The Old Oak uses the community institution of a bar as the locus for a story of a British town dealing with an influx of Syrian refugees. It’s just as timely as Loach’s previous film, Sorry We Missed You, which featured a family buckling under the impossible demands of the gig economy as the patriarch suffers under the thumb of an Amazon-like retailer.
Sorry We Missed You is available on MUBI and to rent through various digital providers.
Alice Rohrwacher, La Chimera
“I grew up in a country in which the present and the past coexist at the same time,” Alice Rohrwacher told me in 2018. Therefore, my gaze was shaped by growing up in such a country in which the temporal closeness of time is never linear. That tension has been present since 2011’s Corpo Celeste, her feature debut about a young girl whose immersion into Catholic tradition through first communion makes her rebel against her surroundings. Rohrwacher’s latest feature La Chimera, starring the great Josh O’Connor as a treasure hunter and grave robber, feels like another grand canvas onto which she can paint another riveting portrait of her nation. I’m convinced she’s always just one feature away from being properly recognized as one of global cinema’s greats.
Corpo Celeste is available to rent from various digital providers.
Wim Wenders, Perfect Days
The great German director Wim Wenders not only has fictional feature Perfect Days, the gentle tale of a Japanese janitor, in Cannes’ Official Competition. Oh no, this overachiever also has a documentary feature, Anselm, playing out of competition. Wenders is the rare filmmaker to find success in both fiction and nonfiction, though the latter seems to have surpassed the former in terms of what finds him critical regard. While it’s necessarily going to lose some luster when not presented in the vivid 3D in which he shot it, Wenders’ dance documentary Pina is a great example of what makes him so special. He doesn’t just tell us why the late choreographer Pina Bausch was a revolutionary figure. He shows us through vivid restaging of her legendary pieces that restore the immediacy and intimacy of live dance performance.
Pina is available for free (with ads) on Tubi.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
I enjoyed this discussion of who our top movie stars over 35 are, even if the build is to an undeniable #1.
Nodding emphatically along with Jacob Oller’s analysis on Paste of how the V.C. mentality of the intellectual property era has left movies bankrupt.
I noticed how much Renfield internalized the logic of therapyspeak and really appreciated this Little White Lies essay looking at how widespread it has become in recent films.
Many exciting items were published, chief among them a long-gestating essay analyzing the slippery stardom of Rachel McAdams. I’m pleased to be back on Little White Lies after a 5-year hiatus with this analysis of a great actress who deserves her due.
Elsewhere on The Playlist, I interviewed The Starling Girl’s leading actress Eliza Scanlen (who you might be familiar with from TV’s Sharp Objects or Greta Gerwig’s Little Women). My prediction that this was a summer movie worth seeking out came true! It should start expanding nationwide on Friday 5/19.
I also participated in a quick junket interview with Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton about their roles in the anti-Social Network tech origin story BlackBerry. You can read that conversation over on Slant Magazine.
For Decider, I said stream it to Saint Omer and skip it to both Alone at Night and Bar Fight! on Hulu.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
Back for subscribers later this week with a little something on a legendary cinematographer.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
You had a small typo by mentioning that La Chimera was available to stream at home. I cannot wait to see that. Always used to enjoy these posts and happy to see them here.