After a virtual event in 2020 and a slimmed-down festival last year, the 75th Cannes Film Festival has announced a lineup packed with past Palme d’Or winners and festival favorites for what will hopefully be a return to full capacity – and maximum buzz.
The competition features new films by Ruben Östlund, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Cristian Mungiu, Michel Hazanavicius and the Dardenne brothers, all of whom have already triumphed at the festival.
Meanwhile, Croisette favorites such as David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Park Chan-wook and James Gray will also be in contention for the award.
So far no UK director has been announced with films playing in either the official competition selection or the sidebars. But at least one film is set in Britain: Silent Twins, which stars Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance as June and Jennifer Gibbons, twins from the only black family in a small town in Wales in the 1970s, who are brought to Broadmoor after a crime to be sent Spree.
Only three of the 21 directors with films in the competition are female, meaning the festival falls well short of the gender parity pledge signed in 2018.
The festival opens on a bloody note, with a French remake of the acclaimed Japanese director’s zombie film One Cut of the Dead, directed by The Artist. Hazanavicius’ Final Cut stars Romain Duris, Bérénice Bejo and Simone, Bejo and Hazanavicius’ daughter.
The horror theme continues with Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg’s visceral, body-shredding sci-fi about the future of human evolution. Viggo Mortensen plays a notorious avant-garde artist who, along with his partner (Léa Seydoux), “publicly displays the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances”. Kristen Stewart is a National Organ Registry investigator who makes an uncomfortable discovery.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker is set in a world where infants can be placed in baby crates and left anonymously for care by others, while Park Chan-wook directs the story of a detective who falls in love with a mysterious widow in Decision to Leave.
Cristian Mungiu, whose abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d’Or in 2007, returns to the festival with RMN, a long-awaited multi-track drama set in present-day Romania.
Two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return in Tori and Lokita, about two African refugees whose friendship is tested when they settle in Belgium.
Joe Alwyn and Margaret Qualley play a couple struggling to escape the Nicaraguan revolution in The Stars at Noon, a romantic thriller directed by Claire Denis.
‘Triangle of Sadness’, the latest film from ‘Force Majeure’ director Ruben Östlund, is a social satire about a group of famous fashionistas who, along with their yacht’s Marxist captain (Woody Harrelson) and crew, are shipwrecked on a deserted island.
Two US directors made it: James Gray, whose autobiographical drama about his childhood in Queens, Armageddon Time, stars Anne Hathaway, Anthony Hopkins and Jeremy Strong; and Kelly Reichardt, back with her fourth collaboration with Michelle Williams. Showing Up is billed as “a witty portrait of an artist on the fringes of a career-changing exhibition.” Judd Hirsch is a co-star.
Out-of-competition documentaries include Ethan Coen’s study of Jerry Lee Lewis and The Natural History of Destruction, Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s third film to explore the tragedies of 20th-century European history.
Previously announced is a Tom Cruise career retrospective and the premiere of the belated sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. The film will premiere a little over a week before its US premiere.
Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness. Photo: ©Platform ProductionCruise, who will turn 60 shortly after the festival at the end of May, will address a panel audience on the Croisette about his 40-year career.
Cannes’ loving relationship with blockbusters reached a peak some seven years ago with the premiere of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which received rave reviews before winning six Oscars the following spring.
Miller’s follow-up to that film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, is also making its debut at the festival.
Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby opened Cannes nine years ago and repeated the Moulin Rouge trick in 2001.
This year the stage is set for the premiere of Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley biopic, starring Austin Butler as singer and Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker.
Notable premieres elsewhere in the lineup include Saim Sadiq’s Joyland, the first Pakistani film to be officially selected and set in Un Certain Regard. The Midnight Screening section will premiere Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae’s first film, Hunt.