For 12 days this week, the eyes of the movie world will be on the Cannes Film Festival, a tightly controlled parade of red carpets, premieres, juries, and honorary prizes where the industry’s gatekeepers decide what gets elevated and what gets ignored. The Côte d’Azur event will begin on Tuesday and host some of the most anticipated movies of the year, while Hollywood studios are mostly on the sidelines this year.
Cannes has for more than 78 years been a showcase for some of the best in cinema, but the machinery around it remains the same: prestige concentrated at the top, access rationed, and attention distributed by a small circle of institutions. Last year’s festival included Oscar nominees such as “Sentimental Value,” “The Secret Agent” and “It Was Just an Accident.” In recent years, movies like “Parasite” and “Anora” have launched at Cannes and gone on to win best picture at the Academy Awards. The festival’s influence is not subtle; it is a pipeline for cultural authority.
Who Gets to Decide
South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook is presiding over the jury deciding the Palme d’Or this year. At the opening ceremony Tuesday, Cannes will also bestow an honorary Palme d’Or on Peter Jackson, and later Barbra Streisand will get one, too. The awards structure is the whole game here: a hierarchy of recognition dressed up as celebration.
The HBO series “The White Lotus” has come to the Croisette to shoot its fourth season. Even the television world, when it wants the glow of legitimacy, comes to the same shoreline and the same ritual of visibility.
The Films in the Spotlight
Among the films expected to stir Cannes are “Hope,” a long-gestating sci-fi thriller from Na Hong-jin that Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux said “constantly changes genres,” with Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell in the cast; “Paper Tiger,” James Gray’s Queens-set drama about two brothers, played by Adam Driver and Miles Teller, who become mixed up with the Russian mafia, with Scarlett Johansson co-starring; and “Fjord,” Cristian Mungiu’s latest, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a Romanian-Norwegian couple who move to the wife’s remote Norwegian hometown.
Also on the list are “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” by Jane Schoenbrun, starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson and playing in the Un Certain Regard section, about the making of a slasher film; “Fatherland,” by Pawel Pawlikowski, starring Hanns Zischler as the German author Thomas Mann on a road trip following World War II, with Sandra Hüller as his daughter; and “All of a Sudden,” the French-language debut of Ryusuke Hamaguchi, starring Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, about a nursing home director and a terminally ill Japanese playwright.
The lineup continues with “Sheep in the Box,” by Hirokazu Kore-eda, about a couple grieving the loss of their son who adopt an infant humanoid robot; “The Man I Love,” by Ira Sachs, starring Rami Malek as an actor with a life-threatening illness in 1980s New York preparing for what could be his final performance; “The Unknown,” by Arthur Harari, about a photographer who, after photographing a woman at a party and then following her, wakes up in her body, starring Léa Seydoux; and “Minotaur,” by Andrey Zvyagintsev, about a business executive in crisis in rural Russia after a near-death experience during the pandemic.
What the Festival Packages as Prestige
Also included is “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” Steven Soderbergh’s documentary about John Lennon’s final interview, granted at the Dakota in New York just before he was killed, which drew headlines after Soderbergh acknowledged using artificial intelligence to illustrate some of Lennon’s more philosophical musings. The festival’s prestige machine has room for documentary, drama, sci-fi, grief, aging, and AI-assisted reconstruction, as long as it arrives wrapped in the right aura.
And then there is “Bitter Christmas,” Pedro Almodovar’s multilayered melodrama about filmmaking, grief and aging, back in his native Spain after making his English-language debut with “The Room Next Door.” The titles change, the stars rotate, but the structure stays intact: a global cultural summit where the powerful decide what counts as art worth seeing.
The article also notes that Jake Coyle is a film critic and covered the movie industry for The Associated Press since 2013 and is based in New York City.