Memo to Distributors: Buy These 2024 Cannes Movies

‘Caught by the Tides’

“A searching and scattershot portrait of displacement that’s as likely to resonate with Jia Zhang-ke devotees as it is to mystify those who are new to his work, ‘Caught by the Tides‘ finds the Chinese auteur returning the most pivotal characters and locations that have defined his movies over the last two decades. Then again, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never left them. 

“Tracing the faintest contours of a scripted love story around the scaffolding of some documentary footage that Jia has collected over the course of 22 years, this elusive chimera of a film strains to literalize the delicate relationship between time and memory — a theme that has become increasingly central to the director’s work since the Three Gorges Dam was constructed in 2006 (see: ‘Still Life’), submerging 13 entire cities and forever displacing the millions of people who once lived in them. Here, even more so than in his sweeping epics ‘Mountains May Depart’ and ‘Ash Is Purest White,‘ Jia’s focus is squarely on resilience instead of erosion. How do we maintain a coherent sense of self, let alone love somebody else, in a world so volatile and impermanent that people will sink centuries of history to the bottom of the sea just to make way for tomorrow?” —DE

MK2 Films handles sales. Read IndieWire’s full review.

‘Armand’

“Renate Reinsve, the marvelous Norwegian with just over a decade on the scene, emerged as one of the best actors of her generation through one key performance: in Joachim Trier’s ‘The Worst Person in the World’ as a shiftless, drifting millennial without a compass. But her character, Julie, was at least always relentlessly curious, much like Reinsve herself, who won Best Actress at Cannes in 2021 for the film.

“She’s back at the festival with ‘Armand,’ a claustrophobic and surreal classroom drama from writer/director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, who’s also the grandson of Swedish cinema giants Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman. Like his grandparents’ own medium-defining work, Ullmann Tøndel’s directorial debut is an intimate character study told in close-ups and breakdowns, as single mother Elisabeth (Reinsve) is up against another set of parents, Anders (Endre Hellestveit) and Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), about a schoolyard spat involving their sons.

“For a film that unfolds mostly in real time, ‘Armand’ flushes a hell of a lot of past resentments, secrets, and traumas into the present. Here, the sinister nature of the did-it-really-happen-or-not incident in question brings to light a gauntlet-flinging parental conflict with no détente in sight.”

Charades handles international sales. Read IndieWire’s full review.

‘The Balconettes’

“It’s hard to remember the last time a director prominently displayed their own vagina onscreen. Statistically speaking, most of them wouldn’t be able to do it if they tried. But Noémie Merlant has never shied away from an opportunity to redefine how female bodies are depicted on film, and the ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ star’s recent pivot behind the camera has only emboldened her efforts to reject the male gaze by inviting her characters to reclaim its oppressive hyper-sexualization on their own terms. 

“Needless to say, she’s happy to lead by example in her poisoned but delicious midnight snack of a second feature. Playing Élise, a C-list starlet who’s recently been cast as Marilyn Monroe in a TV movie (only to steal her boyfriend’s car and flee the set in a panic), Merlant crashes into ‘The Balconettes‘ dolled up to look like a cheap synonym for male desire. It’s a costume that Élise will strip away over the course of the physically uninhibited and formally unbound rape-revenge horror-comedy that follows, until — at her lowest moment — the actress’ pursuit of an abortion leads her to the world’s most apathetic gynecologist, who instructs Élise to place her feet in the stirrups and point her body towards the audience as she waits and waits and waits to be examined.” —DE

MK2 handles international sales. Read IndieWire’s full review.

‘Black Dog’

“Lang (Eddie Peng) is a changed man since coming out of prison. Emotionally callused and silent by choice, you’d never guess that he was once a beloved entertainer who played rock music and rode motorcycles in the local circus. But when he leaves the joint and returns to his small hometown in China’s Gobi Desert, there’s nothing waiting for him except bad vibes. His father is drinking himself to death at the local zoo, his neighbors resent him for his perceived crimes and assume he got a light sentence because of his celebrity, and his town is overrun with rabid dogs. To make matters worse, the local snake meat and kebab mogul is ready to sick his goons on Lang and his family to get revenge for old grievances.

“So begins ‘Black Dog,’ Guan Hu’s desert-set redemption saga that marries a pulpy thirst for revenge with the sentimental belief that sometimes a good dog is enough to turn everything around. Lang succumbs to the age-old neo-noir protagonist’s fallacy of thinking that the ghosts of his past will leave him alone if he just keeps his head down and mouth shut while he builds a new life. He takes a job on a squad tasked with rounding up all of the stray dogs ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a grueling task made harder by the fact that the town lives in fear of a black dog that purportedly has rabies. Everyone has been warned to steer clear of the dangerous animal at all costs, but out of some combination of contrarian instincts and sympathy for a fellow outcast, Lang decides to defy orders and befriend the animal. Suffice it to say, that proves to be a wise choice when his world starts to close in around him.”

Read IndieWire’s full review. Playtime handles international sales.

‘Blue Sun Palace’

While many eyes are on the competition at Cannes, Critics’ Week off the Croisette’s beaten path is a chance to champion first- and second-time filmmakers working on a smaller but no less impactful scale. Winner of the French Touch award at the 2024 edition, Constance Tsang’s “Blue Sun Palace” centers on the days and ways of a Chinese immigrant community living in Queens. This melodrama, inspired by Tsang’s own migrant upbringing in Flushing, follows Amy (Ke-Xi Wu) and Didi (Haixpeng Xu), who work in a massage parlor with all-male clients, with outstanding performances as well from Ke-Xi Wu, Lee Kang Sheng (a longtime collaborator of Tsai Mingliang and who plays Didi’s romantice interest), and Haixpeng Xu. Everyone has dreams of breaking out of their station in life in this meditative, mood-filled, time-spanning drama that takes its leisurely time exploring the ensemble of people connected to the massage parlor. Cinematographer Norm Li shoots with a verite style that lends ever to the feeling of being immersed in the community. This gently moving but unsentimental class portrait could tempt arthouse distributors looking to tap into an Asian-American audience, but its themes are universal. —RL

‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’

“Like any Christmas film worth the time it took to wrap, Tyler Taormina’s wry but melancholy ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’ has a bone-deep understanding of why all the best holidays are so painfully bittersweet: They bring the evanescence of our lives into focus, crystallizing the passage of time, while slowing it down just enough for us to appreciate how much of it has already melted into memory. Unlike the rest of its way too crowded genre, Taormina’s contribution has precious little interest in doing anything else. 

“And god bless this movie for that, because its tinselly charm depends on conjuring a feeling so pure and hyper-specific that even the slightest flurry of a plot might threaten to dilute the effect. Even more so than Taormina’s previous features (‘Ham on Rye’ and ‘Happer’s Comet,’ which also flirted with the surreal as part of an outside bid to achieve complete sincerity), ‘Christmas in Miller’s Point’ is just happy to be an immaculately conceived vibe.” —DE

Magnify handles international sales. Read IndieWire’s full review.

‘Limonov: The Ballad’

“Sex is politics and politics is sex in Kirill Serebrennikov’s recklessly beautiful, wildly entertaining English-language debut ‘Limonov: The Ballad.’ This punk rock epic moves at the pace of a train coming off its tracks across Moscow, New York, Paris, and back to Russia again, starring Ben Whishaw in a career-crowning lead performance as the self-styled alternative poet and political dissident Eduard Limonov (who died in 2020). Based on French writer and journalist Emmanuel Carrère’s biographical novel, ‘Limonov’ spans the 1960s to near present-day Siberia to tell with orgiastic excess the life story of the eventual founder of the National Bolshevik Party, which married a far-left youth movement to far-right fascist ideology. But while Limonov’s politics are inextricable from the libertine hedonist he was, Serebrennikov’s film is more a purely pleasurable romantic odyssey than political deep dive, radiating a countercultural energy that smacks of freewheeling ‘70s cinema more than a film of its current time.” —RL

Vision distribution handles international sales. Read IndieWire’s full review.

‘Lula’

“Brainy political lightning rod Oliver Stone isn’t making feature films anymore. Sure, he’d love to add a 21st to his 20 films to date; he just can’t find backers. His alternate route, like many other directors today, from fellow Cannes entrant Ron Howard (‘Jim Henson: Idea Man’) to Martin Scorsese, is documentaries.

“More informed than most, historian Stone’s complex global viewpoint is more nuanced than the current polarized American political landscape will tolerate. He has alienated folks on every side of the political debate.

“Now he’s taking a walk on the Left side with ‘Lula,’ co-directed with frequent collaborator Rob Wilson, a friendly portrait of Brazil’s working-class hero president Lula da Silva, who never finished school, learned to read at 10, built a labor movement, commanded an 83 percent approval rating when he left office in 2011, and then was thrown in jail on a trumped up charge by the right-leaning courts, abetted by the corporate-owned right-wing media, opening up a path for controversial right-wing Jair Bolsonaro to win the office of president.” –AT

Gersh Agency handles sales. Read IndieWire’s interview with Oliver Stone.

‘Megalopolis’

“As personal and egoless as you could ever hope to expect from an $120 million self-portrait that doubles as a fable about the fall of Ancient Rome, Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis‘ is the story of an ingenious eccentric who dares to stake his fortune on a more optimistic vision for the future — not because he thinks he can single-handedly bring that vision to bear, but rather because history has taught him that questioning a civilization’s present condition is the only reliable hope for preventing its ruin. Needless to say, the movie isn’t arriving a minute too soon. 

“After more than 40 years of idly fantasizing about the project (and more than 20 years of actively trying to finance it), Coppola is bringing ‘Megalopolis‘ to screens at a moment when his chosen medium is struggling to find a way forward, and the world around it seems teetering on the brink of collapse. Just as in 63 B.C., when an evil patrician named Catiline appealed to a coalition of malcontents in a bid to overthrow the Republic, we are choked by the grip of delusional aristocrats and vertically integrated conglomerates whose lust for power and profit is only matched by their lack of foresight. Even with the past as our guide, we are at imminent risk of allowing the now to destroy the forever.” —DE

Goodfellas handles sales. Read IndieWire’s full review.

‘Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron’

An extended version of his documentary ‘2,399 Days with Hayao Miyazaki & Studio Ghibli,’ which aired on Japanese television last year, Kaku Arakawa’s ‘Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron’ understandably screened to little fanfare at Cannes, where it was screened the night before Studio Ghibli received an honorary Palme d’Or for its illustrious work over the years; this rough-and-ready glimpse at the making of ‘The Boy and the Heron’ boasts the texture and shapelessness of something that would typically premiere on the bonus disc of a Blu-ray release instead of at the most prestigious film festival in the world. And yet, Ghibli fans in attendance at Salle Agnès Varda that night were in for exactly the kind of revelation that Cannes exists to provide, as Arakawa’s doc offers the most intimate and humanizing portrait of Miyazaki that anyone has ever been allowed to create.

Shot over the course of a decade and detailing every step in the long and tortured process to bring Miyazaki’s latest ‘final’ movie to the screen, ‘Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron’ pierces the mystique that has grown around the legendary animator’s working life, blending together Miyazaki’s personal loss and artistic struggle as fluently as ‘The Boy and the Heron’ does itself. To watch it is to feel as if you were working alongside him all those years, and to understand — once and for all — that Miyazaki won’t truly retire until the day that he dies. Arakawa’s doc might not make sense for a theatrical release, but an anime-focused distributors like GKIDS or Crunchyroll would be smart to nab the streaming rights and put their stamp on a movie that will surely be inspiring memes and gifs for generations to come. —DE

NHK handles international sales.

‘Motel Destino’

“Nihilism and neon-popped lust collide in Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz’s Portuguese-language ‘Motel Destino,’ set in a love motel so sordid that lay tourists should best avoid it, and only criminals and castaways are likely to check in. The ‘Invisible Life’ director’s steamy psychosexual thriller set in the sweatiest armpit of the equator speaks melodrama and noir but with a Brazilian accent, Aïnouz returning to his home state of Ceará to shoot on his own turf for the first time in five years. The writer/director lifts from classics such as Lawrence Kasdan’s ‘Body Heat’ and Billy Wilder’s ‘Double Indemnity’ but also from ‘70s Brazilian sex comedies to tell a perverse yarn of extramarital betrayal turned murderous. But while the pre-’Body Heat’ noirs he’s channeling could only suggest rather than spell out sex, Aïnouz goes graphic — and relentlessly — in an arthouse-only erotic genre piece that will alienate just as many audiences as it enthralls. It’s sexy, disturbing, yet cold despite the simmering equatorial heat and hot lava of freely flowing attractions.” —RL

The Match Factory handles sales. Read IndieWire’s full review.

‘Savages’

“The best part of ‘Savages‘ is its opening scene, which says less about the overall quality of Claude Barras‘ sophomore feature and more about the strength of the vignette that establishes the stop-motion movie’s world. Against atmospheric music, the quote ‘The world does not belong to us. We borrow it from our children’ flashes on screen, followed by images of a lushly rendered clay forest, brimming with life and energy. An adorable baby orangutan is briefly threatened by a small but deadly snake, before being rescued and cared for by his protective mother. Atop a tree, the mother gently breastfeeds her young son, in an idyllic image that is quickly disrupted by the sound of chainsaws, and abruptly, the tree falls to the ground, revealing a construction site filled with lumber and a factory spewing pollution into the air. The title ‘Savages’ comes on screen against this image, and it’s clear that it isn’t the animals the film is referring to.

“Whenever the title crops up in dialogue from then on, it’s used by the humans responsible for this deforestation: French workers razing the forest to establish an oil palm plantation on the Indonesian island Borneo. The target of their derision is a tribe of nomadic people residing in the rainforest, known as the Penan, who seek to prevent the mowing down of their ancestral home. The representatives of the company treat the Penan, who always protest peacefully against the encroachment of their home, with undisguised disdain, frequently ordering enforcers to brandish guns on the nomads even as they call them uncivilized and dangerous. It’s an irony that Barras’ fiery film doesn’t need to acknowledge for it to be readily obvious to the viewer, but it makes the film’s full-throttled attack on colonialism and unchecked capitalism all the more stirring.” —WC

Gebeka International handles sales. Read IndieWire’s full review.

‘The Shrouds’

“Inspired by the loss of the director’s wife, ‘The Shrouds‘ is a grief story as only David Cronenberg would ever think to shoot one: Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen. And really, what else would you expect? I suppose it’s possible that the story’s deeply personal context might have spurred Cronenberg to push against the tender sterility of his recent features, or even dare to expose the soft underbelly that’s always been hiding inside his tumorous body of work and its many layers of scary-beautiful new flesh. If so, it almost immediately becomes clear that he had zero interest in accepting that invitation. 

“A quintessentially late film from an artist who’s always been ahead of his time, ‘The Shrouds’ is Cronenberg at his most inhospitable; so far as the project’s emotional availability and commercial appeal are concerned, it makes ‘Crimes of the Future‘ seem like ‘Barbie‘ by comparison. And yet, as with so many of Cronenberg’s most resonant movies, its morgue-like coldness eventually reveals itself to be deeply comforting to some degree — if not while you’re watching it, then perhaps as its big ideas begin to seep into your bone marrow during the days and weeks that follow.” —DE

SBS International handles sales. Read IndieWire’s full review. 

‘When the Light Breaks’

“In movies (as in real life), when a boy promises another paramour that he’s going to break up with his girlfriend, he’s usually lying. Una (Elín Hall) seems clever enough to know better, but she trusts Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), a tall, handsome and charismatic student at her art school in Reykjavik, Iceland. They fantasize about where they most want to be — Diddi says Japan and Una, having traveled plenty as a young child and preferring peace and quiet at the grand old age of 19, opts for the Faroe Islands, a tiny archipelago between Iceland and the north of Scotland. Diddi mocks Una’s lack of ambition, but he does appear sincere when he says he’ll break up with his girlfriend Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir) before a flight the following morning. 

“Diddi never makes it to Klara, and he can’t be blamed for failing to break up with her. He’s one of a dozen or so people killed in a tunnel fire, the worst road accident in Iceland’s history. Director Rúnar Rúnarsson’s ‘When the Light Breaks‘ is mostly refined in its visual choices, but this wordless sequence is tremendously gripping to watch, a few seconds of sound and fury that set up 80 minutes of grey ennui that look more like a modernist painting populated by stickmen in top hats.” —Adam Solomons

The Party Film Sales handles sales. Read IndieWire’s full review.