I saw every movie at Cannes
… and here's who flopped.
I’m coming to you from the tarmac at London Gatwick airport, feet freshly back on home turf after two weeks of watching movies. This year marked my 10th excursion to the Cannes Film Festival. The first time I came was 2015 when I saw—in the space of nine days—the first-ever screenings of Carol, The Lobster, Inside Out, Amy, and Gaspar Noé’s fluid-filled Love in 3D, in a screening that started well after midnight. It was a banner year and, for a 20-year-old cinephile crashing on a teacher’s couch in a town nearby, an education. Not much has changed: This is like summer camp to me, where a bunch of film journalists slum it in service to cinema. I’ve skipped only one year since (2019, when Parasite won the Palme d’Or), and never want to make that mistake ever again.
This year’s edition started slow—we had high hopes for some projects that wound up being duds, especially in the festival’s main competition. That is, so we’re told, where the gods of arthouse cinema convene. But it’s starting to feel like an old boy’s club, padded out by sluggish, sub-par movies from directors well past their sell-by date. Elsewhere, in the sidebar strands for younger filmmakers, new stars came to the fore: Jordan Firstman, with his raucous and special Club Kid; French director Marine Atlan’s perceptive movie about the struggles of late adolescence, La Gradiva; and another coming-of-age debut, the German-made, Texas-set I’ll Be Gone in June.
Thankfully, as the festival progressed, the competition got gayer—and therefore better. I was blown away by the one-two punch of La Bola Negra, a behemoth of Spanish queer history, and Coward, the new film by Lukas Dhont about flamboyant Belgian entertainers who fall in love in the WWI trenches. The great films at this festival are typically frosty and severe—here are two worthy contenders for Cannes’ top prize that lead with a knowing nod to the power of empathy.
Here, in alphabetical order, are all the films I saw.
All of A Sudden
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of the very long Drive My Car, crafts an even longer story (3h16mins) of a French nursing home worker befriending a terminally ill theater director. Sharp, moving, and worth three hours of your time.
An Orange-Flavoured Marriage
French director Christophe Honore directs a great Adele Exarchopoulos and a great Paul Kircher in this admirable, if a little cumbersome, family drama.
Avedon
A serviceable doc on the life of the legendary photographer that will probably wind up on streaming somewhere.
Bitter Christmas
Master of gay melodrama Pedro Almodóvar’s new one. A meta tale of a filmmaker confronted for transforming his own friend’s lives into his movies. A bit confounding with a good final 20 minutes. Al-mid-óvar.
Butterfly Jam
A Circassian teenage wrestler in New Jersey has to deal with his dad (played by Barry Keoghan) and his unruly behavior. Great looking with excellent performances, but narratively unmoored.
Clarissa
The story of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is transposed to contemporary Nigeria in this painterly and sophisticated movie, shot on film and starring a supremely great Sophie Okonedo.
Club Kid
Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut is a stupidly funny, surprisingly touching knockout about a gay guy discovering he’s accidentally fathered a child. One of the best of the year. Read my full review here.
Coward
Close director Lukas Dhont grows up, and takes us into the Belgian trenches of WWI for a gay love story. Follows a farmer and a seamster as they bond while staging campy performances to entertain the soldiers. A gorgeous gutpunch.
Fatherland
Frosty, heady, and good looking, the Oscar-winning director of Cold War’s galaxy-brained take on a daddy issues movie. Earns more points for being under 90 minutes.
Fjord
Romania’s king of seriously depressing cinema Cristian Mungiu makes a movie about an evangelical Christian couple (an unrecognizable Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve) moving to Norway and being accused of mistreating their kids. Dense and gripping.
Gentle Monster
Lea Seydoux and the director of Corsage team up for a heavy, if fascinating story of a woman contemplating her marriage—and everything she knows about her husband—after he’s arrested for a heinous crime.
Her Private Hell
After a 10 year break from feature films, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn returns with a sci-fi slasher. Strange and impossible to decipher. Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, love you forever.
Hope
The true litmus test of this year’s festival. A banger of a Korean monster movie featuring Taylor Russell as a PS2 alien. Some booed, others (me) wouldn’t be mad if it won the Palme. Read my full review here.
I’ll Be Gone in June
A beguiling debut feature (produced by Wim Wenders) about a German student arriving in Texas just before 9/11 happens, and spending a year in a world shaped by othering, American jingoism, and her own listless coming of age.
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
A coming-of-age film for those who’ve reached their 30s and realize adulthood is still out of reach. About a group of friends in Birmingham, England navigating life’s disappointments. Brutal, but breathtaking.
La Bola Negra
The Spanish historical queer odyssey that swept everyone up here, about the interlinked lives of three gay men across a century. A beautiful behemoth. Read my full review here.
La Gradiva
An understated French debut following a group of teenagers on a school trip to Naples and Pompeii. Free of cliche, impressively formed. All newcomer actors. It won the top prize at Critics’ Week.
Low Expectations
Girl in Red makes a pivot from music to film for this tale of a successful artist dealing with burnout. Modest and tender, shot on stunning 16mm. One for the Norwegian movie heads. You can read my interview with Girl in Red here.
Minotaur
The most Cannes movie that ever Cannes-d, but maybe also a masterpiece. Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s grand indictment of his homeland, about a woman cheating on her husband and how he chooses to deal with it. A tome of male aggression.
Paper Tiger
An old school New Jersey crime thriller starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller. Familiar and smells a little too much like an Oscar movie for me, but there are two god-tier scenes that make it worth seeing.
Tangles
A sweet, sad, and lovely queer animation about an illustrator at a niche press in late ’90s San Francisco experiencing her first real love, all while caring for her mother with dementia. Sobbed so hard the tears reached my bellybutton.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
As Jane Schoenbrun does best—a queer horror movie that answers the existential questions of our existence, and being understood for the first time. Gillian Anderson as a Tennessee Williams southern belle? Sublime! Read my full review here.
The Devils
A sexy, violent, blasphemous horror film so controversial when it was first released that the original version was never screened. Now it’s coming to cinemas in October, restored in 4K. Gloriously offensive—a masterpiece.
The Man I Love
Ira Sachs (Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day) makes a short but heartswelling film about a gay New York theater artist during the AIDS crisis, and the beautiful men that fall at his feet. A weepy one.
After years of slumming it on budget airline flights, stuffing clothes into suitcases that never shut and praying they meet the weight restriction, I had a journey to Cannes so bougie and beautiful that I’ll remember it until I’m 83.
The Venice-Simplon-Orient Express, a brand synonymous with luxury, invited me aboard the 2:30pm service from Paris to Cannes, staying in the Budapest Grand Suite. Beforehand, a neatly presented document laid out the rules: collared shirts only, no trainers or denim. I’m low-key one of those 31-year-old guys who can’t stop dressing like a toddler, so this struck fear in me at first. When I put on a tuxedo I feel like one of the penguins from Mary Poppins. But I brought two suits on board and, because the setting demanded it, I felt like a little star wearing them.
My friend Max and I boarded and walked straight into our grand suite, replete with petit fours, champagne, and caviar. It feels like a studio apartment from the early 20th century, Japanese varnished wood on the walls, a double bed, sofa and seating area for breakfast. There was an en-suite bathroom with a tiled floor, replete with cosmetics and creams and gels, half of which I took home with me. The train departs from Paris, chugs through the suburbs, then bursts into nature as you slip through France’s gorgeous green midriff. For most of the journey, I sat horizontal on the bed, looking out the window as the world whizzed by, repeatedly saying variations of: “We’re on a fucking train.” It felt simultaneously like going back in time but also sort of discombobulatingly futuristic: How had they mastered comfort and luxury aboard a carriage that was hurtling through France? Either way I loved it.
We opted for a late dinner, eating variations of lobster and artichoke, filet du boeuf and ratatouille, then a tiramisu in the shape of a train. I wore my Calvin Klein 205W39NYC tux (bring back Raf!). After dinner, drinks in the cocktail bar, as a pianist and a singer serenaded those on board.
As night fell, a storm hit, and we had the gorgeous kinetic equivalent of being inside a cosy house as rain lashed against the windows. We rode it out, swathed in luxury bedding, and woke up to clear skies. Outside, the waters of the Côte d’Azur glistened as we pulled into Cannes. I left wanting to take this train everywhere.
who would I be without this???? honestly, the only cannes review I was waiting for.
Great review, can't wait to see them! Thanks for being our feet (eyes) on the ground (screens).