Vulture’s Own Cannes Film Festival Awards

Matthias Schoenaerts, Rust and Bone Make way for your next Euro-brute obsession: Schoenaerts was by far the sexiest of the many shirtless men to hit Cannes screens. In Jacques Audiard’s latest raw look at violent, inarticulate men and the women who love them, Schoenaerts doesn’t speak much, but boy, does his body convey volumes, whether it’s the rage he unleashes as a street fighter, or the sexy, tender romance he strikes up with Marion Cotillard, or the frustration he feels for his failings as a father. He’s like some unholy combination of Vincent Cassell’s French sexual energy and Tom Hardy’s animal vulnerability. Plus, he can speak English with barely an accent (and has two English-language movies coming up). Get him to American cineplexes (and into our pants) STAT.

Tye Sheridan, Mud At 15, Tye Sheridan has already been to the Cannes Film Festival twice. Last year, he had a nearly silent role as one of Brad Pitt’s kids in The Tree of Life. This year, he returned as the star of Mud, from Take Shelter director Jeff Nichols, playing a teenage boy who befriends a fugitive (Matthew McConaughey) living on an island in the Mississippi River. It’s a performance of such authenticity and maturity that it was hard to believe we’d barely seen him speak a line before. Not a bad run for your first two films, eh, kid?

Emmanuelle Riva, Amour The 85-year-old Riva, best known for her work in Hiroshima mon amour, found success at Cannes with another film that had “Amour” in the title. In Michael Haneke’s devastating Palme d’Or winner, Riva plays a lively wife who succumbs to dementia and other ravages of old age, and she’s so utterly convincing in every scene that you don’t even notice all the work she had to do to get there … and clearly, it’s a ton. Her scene partner Jean-Louis Trintignant is amazing as well, but Riva deserves a little more amour.

“Your prostate is asymmetrical,” Cosmopolis Nicole Kidman’s infamous “If anyone’s gonna pee on him, it’s gonna be me” has already gotten plenty of play, so let’s go with this memorable line uttered by a concierge doctor in Robert Pattinson’s Cosmopolis limo during an unusually erotic examination. The knowledge of said asymmetry is the beginning of the end for Cosmopolis’s hero.

Post Tenebras Lux This divisive Carlos Reygadas film had plenty of surreal moments — a glow-in-the-dark devil tiptoeing through a house at nighttime, a man pulling off his own head — but the oddest sequence had to be the one where the central married couple visits a sex club (seemingly out of nowhere and out of chronology, to judge from the different haircuts) where the wife gets double-penetrated while an older woman with massive pendulous breasts cradles her head. Yeah, that happened.

Holy Motors Not every sequence in the highly regarded Holy Motors works, but the scene where protagonist Denis Lavant dons a motion-capture suit and then has a black-lit assignation with an anonymous mo-cap actress? That one’s definitely a keeper.

Beasts of the Southern Wild All five American movies in the official competition got shut out of the end-of-festival awards, but that hardly seems to matter given the success of another American movie, the plucky Beasts of the Southern Wild. One might assume that a film that had already won the top prizes at the Sundance Film Festival would be shut out at Cannes, but instead, it took home the prestigious Camera d’Or for best first film, as well as the FIPRESCI prize from a jury of international critics, proving that this little American independent can dance on the international stage.

7 Days in Havana In the omnibus travelogue 7 Days in Havana, seven directors like Gaspar Noe have their go at creating a short film set in Cuba’s capital, but the cutest short belongs to director Benicio Del Toro, who casts Hunger Games star Josh Hutcherson as an American hoping to get lucky abroad. He successfully invites a striking Cuban girl to leave a bar and come back to his hotel … only this girl is actually a guy, and when Hutcherson finds out the truth, what could have been an awkward situation turns into something sweet and unexpectedly triumphant.

Beyond the Hills We had high hopes for the latest film from director Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), but after a promising beginning, this tale of two strongly bonded women — one a nun, and one the friend who loves her — becomes awfully repetitive, with both the screenplay and the lead performances hitting the same note over and over (and over and over). Naturally, the script and the actresses won jury prizes.

Antiviral In this directorial debut from the son of David Cronenberg, the people of the near-future are so obsessed with celebrities that they’ll pay for STD rashes that come directly from the star, and they’ll even eat “cellular meat” cloned from celebrity tissue. It’s such a stomach-churning high concept on its own that you hardly need the movie’s 8,000 close-ups of syringes plunging into flesh.

The Sapphires Harvey Weinstein would like to clarify that his new pickup isn’t quite on the level of The Artist, and critics mostly agreed. Still, audiences went wild for this musical about a group of Aboriginal girls who perform soul classics for American troops, and when the actresses and costar Chris O’Dowd hit up the movie’s official premiere party and belted out “I Can’t Help Myself” with a full backing band, it was simply irresistible. (Try that sometime, Uggie.)