The best and worst films of Cannes 2024
The early chatter suggested an off year in the Cannes competition, which was front-loaded with rainy days, duff stuff by elderly legends (Schrader, Cronenberg, Coppola), and lucky breaks for a few newbies. Once the sun came out, everything warmed up: from the midway point, the quality rose and rose, and the two favourites for the Palme d’Or, listed below, screened on the last two days. There were robust political statements, startling comebacks and mesmerising mood pieces – if you stuck around long enough.
The best of Cannes 2024
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
The title of this Iranian Palme favourite may suggest tranquil poetry, but nope: this is a bruising, paranoid thriller about fraying family relations, which takes such a dim view of the patriarchy, it’s no wonder the country’s authorities want the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, incarcerated. Iran has taken the Palme before – but never with car chases.
The Substance
No sensation here landed with a bigger thunderclap than Demi Moore’s comeback in The Substance, an outrageously grotesque plunge into full-bore body horror about stardom’s shelf-life. Margaret Qualley, as a younger clone, comes crawling out of Moore’s spine to rejuvenate her career, but then the two go to war, horrifically, over the serum keeping them going.
Flow
What a balm in the frazzling melee this was. This wordless animated feature – one for all ages – centres on a cat lost in the wild as the world floods. Succour comes from unlikely sources – a retriever, a raccoon, a capybara, and a giant white bird, all rendered with adorably precise personalities against backdrops that take your breath away.
All We Imagine As Light
The first Indian film in Cannes competition for 30 years is a stunner: a Mumbai city symphony focusing on two migrant nurses with near-opposite romantic problems. One has been abandoned by her husband, while the other is secretly in love with a Muslim boyfriend. The exquisite tapestry of their lives gives 38-year-old Payal Kapadia an exciting shot at the Palme.
Anora
Giddy acclaim has greeted Anora, the latest from Sean Baker (The Florida Project), who mounts an exhilarating, tough comedy here about a spur-of-the-moment Vegas marriage between a Coney Island lap-dancer (Best Actress favourite Mikey Madison) and the young scion of a Russian oligarch. As soon as daddy’s goons come to break them up, he bolts – and finding him to annul it proves a nightmare.
Grand Tour
There’s still space reserved for high art at Cannes, and here it was: a richly mysterious Far East travelogue which dances through time from 1918 to the present. Portugal’s art-house darling Miguel Gomes (Tabu) sends a runaway British attaché from pillar to post – Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Shanghai – while his baffled fiancé chases him, always a step behind.
And the worst
Oh, Canada
Oh dear. With Oh, Canada Paul Schrader ended his precarious run of form with the on-camera memoirs of a narcissistic bore – a documentarist tetchily played by his American Gigolo muse Richard Gere (opposite Uma Thurman as his wife). Gere and Schrader’s reunion yields shockingly little in the way of insight or revelation, and finds Gere falling asleep in his own flashbacks (where his younger self is played by Priscilla star Jacob Elordi).
Parthenope
Paolo Sorrentino names his title character (Celeste Dalla Porta) after a Greek siren, then concentrates on little but her bewitching beauty in Saint Laurent couture, to the deficit of anything you might call a story. Parthenope is the director’s sunniest love letter to Naples yet, but also resembles a 140-minute perfume advert, with all the models on the verge of tears. Even Gary Oldman, who appears briefly as American writer John Cheever, can’t save this.
Marcello Mio
Take the in-jokiest episode of Call My Agent imaginable and stretch it an hour beyond total conceptual burnout point. Voilà: that’s Christophe Honoré’s grindingly tiresome film-biz meta-comedy, in which Chiara Mastroianni (playing herself) explores the convolutions of nepo-baby fame by dragging up as her iconic father Marcello for a bit.
