The 15 Best Movies at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival

‘Anora’

“Anora — or ‘Ani,’ as she prefers to be called — is a brassy, 23-year-old Russian-American stripper who shares a small house with her sister in Brighton Beach. Ivan — or ‘Vanya,’ as he uses interchangeably — is the 21-year-old son of a Moscow billionaire who stays in his father’s cocaine mansion on the far side of Brooklyn whenever he’s in New York, which if it were up to him would be always. She works seven nights a week at the Manhattan strip club where she’s the only Russian-speaker. Ivan, meanwhile, has clearly never worked a day in his life. She’s the child of a mom who lives in Miami and a dad who doesn’t exist, while he’s a hyper-juvenile nepo baby who may never be mature enough to graduate into a large adult son. 

“There’s probably an effervescent rom-com to be made about these two wildly mismatched kids meeting over a lapdance and falling in love with each other after Ivan pays Ani $15,000 to be his ‘very horny girlfriend’ for a week. Lucky for us, there is no way on God’s green Earth that Sean Baker — who’s devoted the better part of his career to destigmatizing sex workers across raw and frenzied and utterly exhilarating films like ‘Tangerine’ and ‘Red Rocket’ — would ever allow these characters to settle for such an inauthentic story. Not even a little bit.” —DE

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‘All We Imagine as Light’

“The intimate way that women move through a city sprawl gives Payal Kapadia’s drama about two nurses in Mumbai a deeply romantic gauze. This romance has to do with the way that people occupy their space in this world, whether alone or sharing it with others. The younger nurse Anu (Divya Prabha) comes in from the rain and, although she is giving her roommate Prabha (Kani Kusruti) the silent treatment after an earlier insult, she is still comfortable stripping her top off in front of her, in order to change into something dry. All the while Prabha is trying to make good, saying that she has made Anu’s favorite dish. 

“This casual everyday vignette is brimming with a sensuality (the rain, the clothes, the food, the women) that people don’t tend to notice when caught up in the rhythm of life. It takes a snapshot from a photographer removed from the situation to make you realize how full these moments are. Each shot by Ranabir Das in this gorgeous and absorbing film has been composed to have the skin-prickling effect of a photograph taken by someone with a deep and attentive care for their subject — a photographer sufficiently removed to see clearly while still close enough to feel the thrum of a lifeforce.” —SMK

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‘Eephus’

“Carson Lund’s directorial debut (he also serves as cinematographer on another Cannes premiere, ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’) shares its name with a slow-moving pitch that has largely been forgotten by modern baseball players — and it’s a fitting title for a film that embraces the leisurely pacing of America’s national pastime.

“Television executives have spent countless hours in recent years obsessing over how to make baseball games move faster, but many a true devotee will tell you that part of the game’s charm lies in its ability to facilitate socialization. A few seconds between pitches gives the first baseman time to exchange pleasantries with the runner trying to steal second, and spectators can usually find time to buy a hot dog without worrying about missing anything important.

“‘Eephus’ is a film that understands this, and the script (which Lund co-wrote with Michael Basta and Nate Fischer), shuffles along with the rhythm of a baseball game. Exposition comes out in brief two-sentence exchanges between pitches and longer asides between innings, allowing audiences to experience the game with the same cadence that the players do.” —CZ

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‘Flow’

“There’s a moment near the end of Latvian animation director Gints Zilbalodis’ ‘Flow’ that powerfully tugs at the heartstrings. It’s when the film‘s central character, a black cat who you’ve come to have a profound emotional connection with, rediscovers a lost ball that he and his animal friends (especially a lemur) had been playing with earlier in the movie. He thought he’d never see it again. And suddenly he does. Sometimes, lost things can be found again.

“If you thought that emotion elicited without cloying manipulation was something lost in animation, it is found again in ‘Flow’ as well. A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory, and, beyond that, groundbreaking too. The anthropomorphic animal characters of 21st century U.S. animated features have nothing on the animal stars of ‘Flow,’ who never utter a word and act as nothing more than animals. That’s enough.” —CB

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‘Gazer’

“Imagine if ‘Baby Driver’ was a tragic, music-free exploration of mental decay, and you might be able to start picturing the tensest robbery sequence in ‘Gazer.’ Just like Ansel Elgort’s tinnitus-inflicted getaway driver, Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni) needs to put her headphones in before she tackles a dangerous job. But she’s not blasting Queen or The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

“The struggling single mother suffers from dyschronometria, a deteriorating mental condition that leaves her unable to accurately perceive the passage of time. Seconds and minutes seamlessly turn into hours and days in a way that leaves her constantly questioning when she is. It’s a workable, if inconvenient, situation when your biggest fear is missing a doctor’s appointment or zoning out at work. But when you have a matter of minutes to steal car keys from a dangerous man’s apartment before he comes home, the risks become considerably greater. So she pre-records second-by-second instructions for herself with the hope that she can keep herself in the moment by listening to her own pleas. But when the doorknob turns and she’s forced to hide under the bed, her choreographed plans crumble and she has to plan her escape without a net — or an internal clock.” —CZ

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‘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

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‘Miséricorde’

“Alain Guiraudie is back at Cannes with a bittersweet and unexpectedly warmhearted dark comedy about latent homosexual desire, ‘Miséricorde.’ Remember, the French writer/director is the filmmaker behind the 2013 perverse gay classic ‘Stranger by the Lake,’ a simmering and sinister cruising tale about how our drives toward death and sex are of the same flesh. ‘Miséricorde,’ debuting in the Cannes Premiere section, is a decidedly lighter-on-its-feet (in all senses of the idiom) story of a lonely and faithless man’s obsession with his dead former boss, who’s also the father of the childhood best friend he maybe once loved.

“When Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to Saint-Martial, a provincial village nestled in a wood in Southern France, he immediately bonds with his former boss’ widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Is it romantic obsession, or projecting a mother figure upon her? Or is Jérémie really in love with her dead husband, and so she’s now the replacement? Guiraudie’s film asks complex questions about the natures of desire, internalized homophobia, and the ways in which we cast the moldings of parental figures onto strangers when we’re so very alone ourselves.” —RL

Read IndieWire’s interview with Alain Guiraudie. 

‘My Sunshine’

“As lovely and lilting as hearing Claude Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ over a crackly record player on a snow-flecked day, Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Okuyama‘s second feature ‘My Sunshine’ is a moving coming-of-age drama about kids facing up to the troubles of adulthood.

“This gently composed story of an ice-skating coach on the island of Hokkaido, and his two young pupils, has darker dynamics under its sleeve than the emotionally generous time-to-face-the-music-of-growing-up story that’s on its surface. It’s told in furtive glances and silent pacts against a frost-dappled backdrop, the end of winter coming soon, as two adolescents form a bond on the ice rink that complicates the private life of their instructor. Japan would be wise to submit ‘My Sunshine,’ the second feature from ‘Jesus’ director Okuyama, for the Best International Feature Oscar. Both the glass-half-full and the glass-half-empty corners of the audience will resonate with Okuyama’s understated storytelling as this triad gets trickier as the movie moves along.” —RL

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‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’

“Rungano Nyoni’s lucid and incandescently furious ‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ is a stiff middle finger to wishful thinking. Set in a middle-class Zambian suburb that’s located at a well-trafficked but poorly maintained intersection between global influences and Bemba mores, the ‘I Am Not a Witch’ filmmaker’s second feature tells the story of a Westernized young woman who’s forced to hold her extended family tree together by its roots during a crisis that leaves her wanting to rip the whole thing out of the earth with her bare hands.

“There are moments of beauty and resilience to be found amid the buried pain she uncovers along the way, but don’t be fooled by the heroine’s Zoom meetings with her British co-workers or her sad penchant for American life hack podcasts: The future might not have all the answers, but it’s the past that she won’t be able to forgive. Which leads us to another fascinating way that Nyoni manages to subvert one of recent cinema’s most calcified sub-genres: The protagonist’s family may be her greatest connection to her cultural memory, but their eagerness to forgive the past ultimately requires them to forget it.” —DE

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‘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

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‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’

“‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ is an anguished cry from the heart of Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian filmmaker who just fled his home country for Europe after an eight-year prison sentence from the Islamic Republic. This is not the first brush with theocratic law for the dissident director, who’s been working steadily out of Iran for two decades.

“So while Iran will never, ever submit his deeply unsettling latest masterwork for the Best International Feature Oscar — often the only harbinger of anti-establishment Middle Eastern films making their way to the U.S. — this searing domestic thriller deserves the widest audience possible. With the brutal 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini by government hands as his launching point, Rasoulof crafts an extraordinarily gripping allegory about the corrupting costs of power and the suppression of women under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect.” —RL

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‘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

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‘The Substance’

“An immensely, unstoppably, ecstatically demented fairy tale about female self-hatred, Coralie Fargeat’s ‘The Substance’ will stop at nothing — and I mean nothing — to explode the ruthless beauty standards that society has inflicted upon women for thousands of years, a burden this camp-adjacent instant classic aspires to cast off with some of the most spectacularly disgusting body horror this side of ‘The Fly’ or the final minutes of ‘Akira.’

“If the ‘Revenge’ director’s immaculately crafted debut tried to dismantle male toxicity with a shotgun blast square to the balls, Fargeat’s Cannes-approved follow-up turns that same attention inwards, allowing her to take aim at both the pointlessness she’s been conditioned to feel as a forty-something woman, and also at the resentment she’s been conditioned to feel toward her younger self. Squelching with fury at how a woman’s ‘fuckability’ is used as the ultimate measure of her worth, the result of Fargeat’s mad experiment is equal parts ‘Freaky Friday,’ ‘All About Eve,’ and Andrzej Żuławski’s ‘Possession’ — simple enough for a child to understand, but gross enough to make squeamish adults spew out their lunch. Those with the stomach to stick it out will be rewarded with the most sickly entertaining theatrical experience of the year, one carried by the kind of go-for-broke performance that Hollywood stars only tend to give after they reach a certain age and start running out of options.” —DE

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‘To a Land Unknown’

“The brilliant Palestinian-Danish documentarian Mahdi Fleifel (‘A World Not Ours’) leaps successfully into fiction with a feature debut that borrows a narrative container from ‘Midnight Cowboy’ and a tormented soul that is all Palestinian. 

The film opens with a quote from the celebrated Palestinian scholar, Edward Said: ‘In a way, it’s a sort of fate of Palestinians not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.’ These words have been cutting since the moment they were first spoken years ago, but released into the world now during the horrific genocide in Gaza, they have an extra, desperate bite, as another generation is forced to seek displacement as the only alternative to violent death. Premiering at Cannes in this climate, Fleifel’s portrait of two individual characters asks questions that cannot be confined to the screen. Where do you belong after you have been driven from your homeland? When your existence is criminalized, how can the laws of so-called civil society apply?” —SMK

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‘Universal Language’

“Despite being set in a parallel-universe Winnipeg where the people talk in Farsi and the world around them seems as if it’s been frozen in time since the mid-1980s (when Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and the other masters of Iranian meta-realism were exploding onto the international stage), the haunted but hopeful ‘Universal Language’ is an unmistakably modern film at heart. 

“Described by writer-director Matthew Rankin as a piece of ‘autobiographical hallucination,’ this wonderfully deadpan whatsit is the work of a white 43-year-old Canadian man who fell in love with the movies a time when ‘foreign’ cinema was becoming more available to people outside major cultural hubs. He found that Kanoon-style fables like ‘Where Is the Friend’s House?’ and ‘The White Balloon’ spoke to him in a way that few English-language films ever had. That discovery sparked a cross-cultural dialogue that eventually compelled Rankin to visit Tehran in an effort to locate the auteurs who had inspired him and learn why their films had whispered in his ear. Rankin’s search didn’t come up empty so much as it led him all the way back home to Winnipeg, where — in close collaboration with co-writers Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi — he was newly able to appreciate that boundarylessness itself can be one of cinema’s greatest virtues.” —DE

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