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Twelve Films to Get Excited About at This Year’s Cannes Film Festival

Photo: Magnolia Pictures
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

The 64th edition of the Cannes Film Festival has begun, and there’s a lot of excitement on the Croisette this year: Not only is there an unusually generous number of promising English-language films (and a whole lot more foreign films that could instantly vault to the top of many a critic’s ten-best list), but there’s also a clutch of directors returning to the fore who work too infrequently, including Lynne Ramsay and Terrence Malick. As the movies begin to unspool, we’ve selected a dozen that we can’t wait to watch — from the high-profile question marks to the underrated dark horses — and we talked to some of the talented people that have brought them to the screen. (And keep checking back, since Vulture will have plenty more interviews and reports from the scene as Cannes continues.)

Gus Van Sant’s latest film has been teased as a ghost story and a strange romance, and unlike Van Sant’s recent string of relatively realistic films, this one is a dreamy gamble: Rising star Mia Wasikowska stars as a terminally ill teen who falls for a morbid funeral crasher who pals around with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot. “It’s a love story between two teenagers who are dealing with mortality and death,” explains Wasikowska, who was so inspired by the Harris Savides’s aesthetic that she began shooting her own photos on set. “They form a unique friendship and it’s their love story. Gus just has a way of seeing things, even if it’s not done before. This is definitely something you haven’t seen before.”
Pedro Almodóvar has had many female muses, but with The Skin I Live In, he finally reunites with Antonio Banderas, who launched his career in Almodóvar movies like Law of Desire and Labyrinth of Passion. It’s said that The Skin I Live In will be an unsettling thriller about a plastic surgeon who keeps his wife prisoner, and Almodóvar can always be counted on to bring some welcome style and sizzle to Cannes.
We need to talk about the fact that Lynne Ramsay doesn’t make enough movies. The acclaimed Ratcatcher director hasn’t helmed a film since 2002’s Morvern Callar (for a while, she was trying to mount The Lovely Bones), but she returns to the big screen with this dark drama, which casts Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly as the parents of a teen son who commits mass murder.
“Steve McQueen brought Peter Yates from London to do Bullet with him and Ryan [Gosling] was instrumental in bringing me from Copenhagen to Los Angeles to do Drive,” Nicolas Winding Refn explains. The startling Dane provocateur behind the violentPusher trilogy, Valhalla Rising, and Bronson was recruited by Gosling to put an aggressive new spin on a stunt driver turned wheelman thriller that co-stars Christina Hendricks, Bryan Cranston, and Carey Mulligan. “Essentially, it’s a movie about a man who is two people: half-man, half-machine,” says Refn, who probably shocked some of his art-house admirers by taking on a project that is so clearly targeted at the mainstream. “It’s certainly commercial, but it’s a good movie: It’s a movie about the mythology of Hollywood itself, made in Hollywood, within the heart of the system.”
Last year at Cannes, Jafar Panahi’s arrest and imprisonment by Iranian authorities prompted righteous outrage, since the auteur’s perceptive, adversarial films (Offside, Crimson Gold, The Circle, and others) have been critical encapsulations of modern Iranian culture. Panahi’s new film announces that is not a film, in order to get around and tweak the absurd ban placed on his career, and it recounts how Panahi waited for months in a kind of legal limbo. At Cannes, he’ll be joined by fellow also-banned Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who will premiere Bé Omid é Didar (Good Bye).
How about some languid eroticism? (It’s France, after all.) Australian novelist Julia Leigh makes her directorial debut with this film, which casts Sucker Punch star Emily Browning as a call girl whose major draw is falling unconscious during sex. The movies comes with high praise from Cannes favorite Jane Campion, so we’ll soon see whether it heralds the arrival of a major new female director.
It just isn’t a proper Cannes without Lars von Trier. The Antichrist bad boy returns to the fest with this oddity, which boasts an eclectic cast (which includes Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland, two Skarsgards, and Udo Kier) and an intriguing concept laced with sci-fi. We can’t wait to see it, but we also can’t wait for von Trier to mischievously defend it at the press conference.
No film has been more anticipated or debated in advance of its premiere than Terrence Malick’s mysterious Brad Pitt-starring, generation-skipping epic, slated for theatrical release on May 27. Is it a cosmic creation myth? A fifties family drama about how a young boy grows up (and into Sean Penn’s body)? We’ll see.
In the mad art-house hits Il Divo and The Family Friend, Italian director Paolo Sorrentino and his thrilling cinematographer Luca Bigazzi have created some of the most go-for-broke stylish shots in recent cinema. Now the duo is crossing over with their English-language debut, starring Sean Penn as a Robert Smith look-alike who tracks down the Nazi prison guard who tormented his dead father (of course). Frances McDormand co-stars with Harry Dean Stanton, Bono’s daughter Eve Hewson, and David Bryne, who scores the film along with original songs by Will Oldham.
Takashi Miike’s recent samurai film Thirteen Assassins was a bloody blast. What could be better? Perhaps a remake of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 film of the same name — in 3-D, where the blood can splatter out into the audience.
In 2006, Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier debuted with Reprise, a marvelously tangled piece of meta-storytelling about two writers and friends with very active imaginations about the many different ways their lives might branch out. Five years later, he’s reuniting with that film’s star, Anders Danielsen Lie, and co-writer, Eskil Vogt, for a film about an Oslo man in the midst of a personal crisis. Soon we’ll see if all that hype was justified.
Hong Sang-Soo’s Woman on the Beach, Woman Is the Future of Man, Night and Day, and Tale of Cinema  have made him the art-house star of tweedy Korean cinema. His new film returns to the intellectual milieu he knows best, as a young film professor reunites with his mentor in a small village for a three-day stint that will no doubt be filled with quiet, obscure revelation.
Twelve Films to Get Excited About at This Year’s Cannes Film Festival