Cannes film festival brings out stars including Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp and Cate Blanchett
France’s annual celebration had the new Indiana Jones blockbuster, stars including Juliette Binoche and Cate Blanchett, and outstanding new features from Wim Wenders and Ken Loach.
The Cannes Film Festival is about to wrap for another year, and will hand out its awards on Saturday, local time, including the Palme d’Or for best film. So which films have been the highlights of the 76th festival?
Standouts in the competition include Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, Justine Triet’s Hitchcockian courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, and Aki Kaurismaki’s working-class love story Fallen Leaves, the Finnish filmmaker’s first film in six years.
Given that Sweden’s two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Ostlund (Triangle of Sadness, The Square) is head of the competition jury, the always quirky Kaurismaki stands a strong chance.
There have been raves for Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot-au-Feu, a Belle Epoque romance around gourmet food starring Juliette Binoche and her former real-life partner Benoit Magimel. And 86-year-old Ken Loach delivers what will probably be his final film, The Old Oak, an initially combative and ultimately tender tale of downtrodden Durham locals coming together with resident Syrian refugees.
If Loach wins the Palme d’Or it would make him a three-time winner, the most of anyone in Cannes history.
Wim Wenders’ comedy drama Perfect Days, about a man who cleans Tokyo toilets, is still to come, but the most outstanding film this year is Wenders’ 3D documentary about his friend, German artist Anselm Kiefer, which is screening out of competition. It’s just as compelling as Wenders’ superb 3D film about choreographer Pina Bausch.
Warwick Thornton’s new film with Cate Blanchett, The New Boy, screened in the Un Certain Regard selection and has been warmly received by critics. Shot in South Australia and set during World War II, The New Boy follows the titular character – played by 11-year-old Aswan Reid – as police deliver him in a sack to a monastery orphanage where Blanchett’s heavy-drinking renegade nun, Sister Eileen, is now in charge.
Thornton wrote, directed and shot the deeply spiritual film which is his most personal to date. His 2009 film Samson and Delilah won the Cannes Camera d’Or for best first film while 2017’s Sweet Country screened in Venice and Toronto. Screen Daily notes that Reid is “a wild and natural force”, Variety says the film is “an eerie atmospheric clash of faiths”, while Indiewire calls it “a spiritual fairytale”.
The Hollywood Reporter says Thornton’s “command of visual storytelling has possibly never been as striking as it is in the rural setting”, and also hails the “majestic” score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Sydney Film Festival director Nashen Moodley has programmed The New Boy to open his festival on June 7.
Martin Scorsese has received plaudits for Killers of the Flower Moon, another indigenous story about murders of the Osage people after white men attempt to swindle them of their money when they strike oil on their land. Set in Oklahoma in the 1920s, the lengthy crime epic is based on David Grann’s revelatory 2017 book, although Scorsese favours the perspective of the indigenous people and tells his story through Mollie, played by a remarkable Lily Gladstone. Leonardo DiCaprio plays real-life Ernest Burkhart, a man with no morals who marries Mollie for her money and becomes embroiled in the murders. Scorsese’s other famous collaborator, Robert De Niro, plays Ernest’s equally underhand uncle. It marks the first time De Niro and DiCaprio have appeared together in a Scorsese feature.
Two sets of fathers and daughters have appeared in separate high-profile Cannes entries. Johnny Depp is fine as King Louis XV in Jeanne du Barry, which is probably most interesting for its opulent Versailles setting. His daughter, Lily-Rose Depp, stars as a famous pop singer in the controversial and risque HBO series The Idol.
Ethan Hawke co-stars with Pedro Pascal in Pedro Almodovar’s half-hour gay cowboy drama, Strange Way of Life. Hawke’s daughter, Maya Hawke (from Stranger Things), is among the all-star cast of Wes Anderson’s 1950s sci-fi comedy Asteroid City. That film has received a mixed reception from critics, and Variety has deemed it “visually dazzling and dramatically inert”. Both Asteroid City and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – the final outing for Harrison Ford’s rollicking adventurer – are screening at the Sydney Film Festival.
Australian actor Mia Wasikowska appears in the satirical film Club Zero, directed by Austrian director Jessica Hausner and screening in competition for the Palme d’Or. Wasikowska is frighteningly convincing as a new teacher at an English boarding school whose lessons hinge on the idea that food is bad for her students.
Also in competition is Firebrand, the English-language debut of Brazilian filmmaker Karim Ainouz, with Jude Law unrecognisable as King Henry VIII at the end of his reign during his marriage to Catherine Parr (Alicia Vikander). It’s a feminist reworking of history where Vikander’s Parr should be the focus, but Law as the sickly and grumpy monarch manages to steal every scene in this well-received competition title.
Law was only briefly at the festival as he is in Canada shooting a feature, The Order, directed by Australia’s Justin Kurzel, in which he plays an FBI agent. The English actor is set to appear in a survival drama, Origin of Species, directed by Ron Howard and which Law reveals will possibly shoot in Queensland.