Now that Cannes is over, you can prepare yourself to see an “Official selection of the Cannes Film Festival” emblem leading off countless trailers at your local art-house cinema. This imprimatur automatically adds a subconscious “classy!” to the film’s aura, but as anyone who has endured an immersion at a film festival knows well, just because a movie got in doesn’t mean it’s worth seeing. So, in order to help you sort through the impending onslaught, here are this year’s fest’s nine most intriguing, buzzy films: Some were unanimously lauded and some were divisive, but all had the most passionate champions. Two notes: We’re not including Tree of Life and Midnight in Paris, as they’ve already opened Stateside and their reviews have said it all. And also, we tried to separate the movies with general buzz from those that seemed buzz-worthy only if you were French (such as the cop-drama jury-prize winner Polisse, and the Sarkozy docu-drama La Conquete, which apparently had some grand revelations about his marriage, but that many Americans found so impenetrably boring that they walked out).
After director’s Lars von Trier’s
off-the-rails jokes about being a Nazi in his press conference, the movie’s backers canceled the cast party, and rumor is the festival almost stopped showing the movie altogether. Fortunately they didn’t, as the movie has nothing to do with Nazism, but is instead a beautiful, intriguing portrait of a depressed bride whose wedding takes place while a newly discovered planet, Melancholia, is hurtling toward Earth. People called it the performance of Kirsten Dunst’s career, and
the pained expressions she wore while sitting next to the imploding von Trier were wiped away when she was given the Best Actress award. It also stars Charlotte Gainsbourg as her poised and practical sister, and Kiefer Sutherland as Gainsbourg’s rich but ultimately cowardly husband.
We heard two diametrically opposed takes on this black-and-white silent movie about the advent of talkies, and they were split by age group. The older group hoped it would win not only the Palme d’Or but also the Oscar. (It ended up just walking away with the Best Actor prize for Jean Dujardin.) The younger group thought the concept was strong enough for only a fifteen-minute short. The younger group also fell asleep, and are dismayed at the idea that it might be a novelty hit. When we told them the older group’s thoughts, that this would be a movie people would talk about, the younger group replied, “Is that because it sucks?”
The early, red-soaked shots of Lynne Ramsay’s first movie in nine years portend violence ahead. We meet Tilda Swinton’s character as a fallen woman, scraping and sanding off red paint that’s been splashed menacingly on her front porch. We soon come to realize she is the mother of a young man who’s done something unspeakably terrible. Is Swinton, the reluctant mother of a demon child, the cause of his sociopathy or just a victim of it? Or is she both? Audiences were split on the film, but nearly everyone was in awe of Swinton’s performance.
Wonderfully twisted, as one should expect from Pedro Almodódovar. Antonio Banderas plays a plastic surgeon whose wife was burned in a car accident, and it caused him to be obsessed with creating a new skin that could have protected her. After twelve years, he succeeds, thanks to a lack of scruples and a human guinea pig. And that’s when the story gets really twisted.
Nicolas Winding Refn was named Best Director for this ultraviolent tale of a Hollywood stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a getaway driver for hire for the criminal underworld.
Sony Classics snatched up this fast-paced Israeli dark comedy about rival father and son Talmudic scholars. Some complained of the overbearing score and the Bourne Identity–style flash-cut editing. But it will most certainly be the most entertaining look at Hebrew academia you will see all year.
A quiet, moving movie by the always-good Dardenne brothers: Cyril, an 11-year-old kid abandoned by his father at a children’s home, finds salvation in the form of Samantha, a hairdresser who takes him in for weekends. The film shared the Grand Prix award, and as the boy, newcomer Thomas Doret is that rare child actor who actually plays a kid as a kid, with the lack of facility of expression that an angry young boy would have.
A Finnish movie made in French, this story of a misanthropic shoe-shiner who takes in an African refugee boy got standing ovations in press screenings and the highest critical consensus of any movie at Cannes. Word of mouth spread so quickly that it became impossible to see it without showing up to the theater two hours early.
We heard only raves for this dark comedy about a village of young North African women who band together to withhold sex from their men in order to force them to take over their most grueling chore: making an arduous hike up a mountain to get water.
