The 10 Best Movies We Saw at Cannes 2024

Part ode to female friendships and part city symphony — Mumbai after hours has rarely looked so enticing onscreen — Payal Kapadia’s tale of two nurses struggling to reconcile respective romantic issues and feeling of loneliness was the first Indian film to play in competition in 30 years. But it would be a landmark work even if it had not broken that particular M.I.A. streak, with Kapadia building off the docu-hybrid style of her previous movie A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) and imbuing her portrait of life in the big city with a genuine sense of lived-in lyricism. It was the very last competition entry to screen this year — and very much worth the wait.

Just your typical boy-meets-girl romp, if the boy was a Russian oligarch’s filthy rich son and the girl was an exotic dancer/escort from Brooklyn who accepts his impromptu marriage proposal. The latest from Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) plays like a mash-up of Pretty Woman and Uncut Gems, with Mikey Madison’s working-class sex worker getting swept off her feet by Mark Edelshteyn hedonistic rich kid and settling in to a life of mansions and Vegas getaways. Then a trio of guys who work for the young man’s parents show up to inform them the party is over, and the film slams its foot down on the gas pedal. As with all of Baker’s movies, there’s an attention to class structures and life on the fringes that adds a serrated edge to the sharp comedy here. And the Better Things actor couldn’t ask for a better showcase; this truly gives Madison’s her star-is-born moment. (Ditto Yura Borisov, whose dim-witted thug gives the movie its stealth heartbeat.) Bonus: an absolutely perfect final shot.

Sifting through old footage during the pandemic, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Unknown Pleasures, Still Life) came up with the idea of using outtakes and scenes from his previous films — all of which featured his longtime actors Tao Zhao and Zhubin Li — to craft something new. For a while, you ride shotgun through a stream-of-conscious tour through the nation’s cities and rural provinces, complete with corporate-sponsored pageantry and personal strife. It’s only when you get to the final third of the movie that Jia drops the hammer, and you suddenly realize that what felt like a free-form slideshow of China’s prosperity in the early 21st century has been carefully crafted to break your heart. Simply stunning.

Some 45 years after unveiling a “work-in-progress” version of Apocalypse Now at the festival, Francis Ford Coppola returns with another huge swing for the fences, detailing a crumbling fictional empire that looks a lot like contemporary America. A visionary named Caesar (Adam Driver) dreams of a utopian city for all; his rival, Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) is determined to keep the powerful in power by any means necessary. Naturally, his party-girl daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with Caesar. Meanwhile, the world around them is spiraling out of control. And we haven’t even got to Shia LeBeouf in drag, Jon Voight’s conspicuously Trump-like billionaire or the fact that Aubrey Plaza plays a character named Wow Platinum. Coppola has embedded a lifetime’s worth of literature, philosophy, cinephilia, and fretting for the human race into this massive epic, and having chased this white-whale project in one form or another for decades, he’s finally caught it. Even at its craziest, corniest and most baffling moments, it still manages to leave you breathless. It is exactly the grand-statement film Coppola set out to make. There’s nothing else like it.

Rungano Nyoni’s follow-up to 2017’s I Am Not a Witch starts with a woman named Shula (Susan Chardy) coming across a dead body in the road. The fact that she’s dressed exactly like Missy Elliott from “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” video, down to the silver helmet and puffy black jumpsuit, shows you that Nyoni has a wicked sense of humor; the revelation that the corpse is “Uncle Fred,” a well-known pedophile who chronically abused the village’s young women for years without consequences, demonstrates that the movie is also not fucking around. A pointed take on the social protections afforded to predators to avoid “awkwardness,” the unnecessary shame shared by survivors and the need to call out complicity and speak out regardless of such stigmas.

The new film from filmmaker Mohammad Rosoulof (The White Meadows) had already generated controversy prior to its first screening at Cannes, with the Iranian government issuing a warrant for the director’s arrest and Rosoulof being forced to flee the country to live in exile. It is indeed an incendiary work, focusing on the damage done to a family when its patriarch (Misagh Zare) accepts a promotion and becomes an investigator of political-prisoner cases. Meanwhile, the Jina Uprising — represented by actual cell phone footage of real police brutality and mass arrests — is causing chaos throughout Tehran, which makes the matriarch (Sohelia Golestani) fear for the safety of her two college-age daughters (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki). In Rosoulof’s eyes, the political is never less than 100-percent personal, as is the paranoia that accompanies living under a repressive regime. When the third act makes use of a Chekhovian gun planted on the mantle early on and turns what was a family drama into something close to a horror movie, you can feel the rage emanating through the screen. A profound work of protest art.

Two separate works from two of France’s most vital modern filmmakers, which somehow managed to complement each other beautifully despite screening almost a week apart. Spectateurs! is Arnaud Desplechin’s love letter to the amour fou that is obsessing over movies, tracing his own burgeoning cinephilia as a kid while interviewing a variety of fellow devotees, waxing poetic about the late actor Misty Upham and dramatizing several key moments that led to his career behind the camera. Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me is a free form take on his own career through a lens darkly, spending its 40-minute running time (this was the “1/2” we referred to in the intro) throwing shade at Roman Polanski, aping Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cínema docuseries and, just for full-circle kicks, having the title character from Annette replicate Denis Levant’s dance to Bowie’s “Modern Love” from Mauvais Sang. Seeing both of these tributes to the agonies and ecstasies of cinema in an environment that still treats the seventh art as the modern art form was, hands down, the highlight of this year’s fest.

You’d assume that the latest provocation from French genre expert Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) would be smart, savvy, bold and bloody. Not even a foreknowledge of her past work could prepare you for the instant body-horror classic she delivered right at Cannes’ midpoint, which watches as a TV star (Demi Moore, delivering what may be the performance of the fest) deals with being pitilessly aged out of the industry. She then finds out that a secret subscription service would allow her to foster a younger version of herself, although the plan requires both her and her dewy twentysomething “twin” (played by Margaret Qualley) to abide by a strict set of rules. Let’s just say that things go awry and get very gory, and what starts as a satire of Hollywood hypocrisy turns into a take-no-prisoners indictment of youth fixations and impossible beauty standards. My favorite film of this year’s festival.

Romanian cinema strikes again, this time with a tense drama about a closeted young man (Ciprian Chiujdea) who’s gong back to his rural hometown during a college break. He becomes the victim of a hate crime when two locals spy him kissing a male tourist. His father (Bogdan Dumitrache) demands a proper investigation, only to become conflicted once he finds out his son is gay. The young man’s mother (Laura Vasiliu) demands that a local priest perform an exorcism on her boy. He just wants to put the whole incident behind him, which soon proves to be impossible. Director Emanuel Parvu uses what’s now become the recognizable aesthethic of the Romanian New Wave — long takes, meticulously composed frames, extended conversations that strip language of meaning and twist moral conundrums into tight knots — and uses it to tighten a noose around its characters necks. You know this simply is not going to end well. You’d be right.

The breakout title of this year’s Director’s Fortnight sidebar fest, Matthew Rankin’s comedy is quite possibly the funniest example of deep film-nerd trolling we’ve ever witnessed. Having made a name with his frantic, Guy Maddin-esque debut The Twentieth Century (2019), the Canadian filmmaker switches up his game and presents an uncanny parody of an early 1970s Iranian movie. The setting may still be Winnipeg, all beige buildings and nondescript highways, yet everything from the character names to the language to the cinematic vocabulary is a dead ringer for those early Abbas Kiarostami, et al. movies about kids on quests. If you’ve ever been curious to see what the sign of a Tim Horton’s donut shop would look like written in Persian, now’s your chance. Turkeys also play a big role, because why wouldn’t they? An absolute left-field delight. Between this film and the extended riff on world leaders behaving badly that is Rumours, it was a hell of a year for Canadian Absurdism. Let a thousand ridiculous, surreal, Great White Northern flowers bloom.