Cannes Film Festival Preview: 9 Movies We Can't Wait to See

Hollywood is getting ready to hit the French Riviera for Wednesday’s opening of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. While some big-name productions are getting lavish, out-of-competition premieres at the Grand Théåtre Lumière — including Woody Allen’s Café Society, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster, Steven Spielberg’s The BFG, and Shane Black’s The Nice Guys — the real focus is on the competitive lineup, a proven early stomping ground for future Oscar contenders in the fall. (Just for reference, last year’s festival saw the premiere of eventual awards-season favorites Carol, Amy, and Son of Saul.) Yahoo Movies will be on the scene in Cannes this week to bring you all the latest. Here’s a look at the titles we’re most excited to see:

American Honey
Director: Andrea Arnold
Cast: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Riley Keough
A young teenager (Lane) falls in with a hard-partying crew — which includes a ring leader played by LaBeouf — who travel the Midwest selling magazine subscriptions in this drama from director Arnold, best known for her gritty 2009 drama Fish Tank and the 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

Elle
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Isabelle Huppert
Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers) has spent recent years working in Europe and is bringing his new thriller to Cannes: It’s about the head of a video game company (Huppert) who’s assaulted in her home, and who responds by relentlessly tracking down her attacker.

It’s Only the End of the World
Director: Xavier Dolan
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel, Gaspard Ulliel
Puckish Canadian director Dolan (Mommy) was on the Cannes jury last year. This year, he’s back in-competition with his new French-language drama about a terminally ill writer (Ulliel) who tries to reconnect with his long-estranged family.

Julieta
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Emma Suárez, Adriana Ugarte
The Oscar winning writer-director of All About My Mother and Talk to Her is bringing this, his 20th feature film, to Cannes. A drama adapted from three Alice Munro short stories from the collection Runaway, it follows a recent widow (Suárez) who’s desperate to find the 18-year-old daughter who left her.

The Last Face
Director: Sean Penn
Cast: Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem, Jean Reno
Penn directed this drama about the romance between two international aid doctors working in Liberia. Perhaps more interesting to casual celebrity fans though, will be who plays one-half of the onscreen couple: Penn’s ex, Theron (paired with Bardem). The Last Face was their final collaboration before she broke off their engagement last summer, though they later reunited for reshoots.

Loving
Director: Jeff Nichols
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Michael Shannon
Nichols has impressed critics with his string of genre-oriented indies like Take Shelter, Mud, and this year’s Midnight Special. With Loving, he takes on a heftier drama that seems especially made for awards attention: It’s the real-life story of Richard and Mildred Loving (Edgerton and Negga), the interracial couple from Virginia who married in the late 1950s when their union was still illegal, and then spent 9 years fighting a fierce — and ultimately seminal — legal battle to simply live in their hometown.

The Neon Demon
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Cast: Elle Fanning, Abbey Lee, Christina Hendricks, Jena Malone
Refn, the director behind 2011′s moody, stylish Drive starring Ryan Gosling delivers what sounds like another moody, stylish thriller at Cannes this year. Fanning stars as a young, aspiring model who moves to Los Angeles and almost gets eaten alive by the vampiric fashion world. Demon is being billed as a horror movie, so we suspect Refn will be more literal about “eaten alive.”

Paterson
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Method Man
In a movie that sounds light years away from his villainous turn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Driver plays a New Jersey bus driver whose modest, unchanging life is punctuated only by the scraps of poetry he jots down throughout his day. Indie stalwart Jarmusch (who last delivered the languid vampire drama Only Lovers Left Alive) wrote and directed this character study.

Personal Shopper
Director: Oliver Assayas
Cast: Kristen Stewart
Stewart will have a big presence at the festival this year: She costars with Jesse Eisenberg in Woody Allen’s Café Society and also stars in this in-competition title from French director Assayas. It’s her second collaboration with him — their first was her career-redefining role in 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria, which landed her a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for playing the lowly assistant to Juliette Binoche’s aging movie star. Here, she plays another fame-factory worker, the personal shopper of a Paris media personality.

(Photos: Courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival)