Cannes: THR's Chief Film Critic's Top 10 Must-See Competition Titles
From left: 'Fatherland,' 'Fjord' and 'The Man I Love'
Cannes Film Festival (3)
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All of a Sudden
Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi dazzled Cannes in 2021 with his symphonic meditation on grief, regret and human connection, Drive My Car, which went on to receive four Oscar nominations, winning for best international film. His French-language debut casts Virginie Efira as the director of a nursing home in the Paris suburbs, who adopts the compassion-based “Humanitude” treatment method with her patients despite discord among her team. Her life changes when she meets a terminally ill Japanese playwright played by Tao Okamoto. The two women develop a spiritual bond as they fight together to overcome systemic constraints and transform the care facility into a symbol of resistance.
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‘All of a Sudden’
Cannes Film Festival
Coward
After kickstarting his career with Girl and Close, two intimate contemporary queer stories that both took home awards from Cannes, Lukas Dhont tackles his first period drama and his most ambitious project to date. Described by the Belgian director as “a film about love and death, creation and destruction,” it’s set on the frontlines of World War I. A newly arrived soldier eager to prove his valor meets a comrade who decides to lift the company’s spirits by putting on a theatrical show behind the trenches. In an atmosphere of violence and brutality, the two men find ways to escape, even if only momentarily. Newcomers Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne head the cast.
‘Coward’
Cannes Film Festival
Fatherland
In what is becoming a major year for Sandra Hüller — a blockbuster hit with Project Hail Mary; a Berlin best actress win for her gender-switch role in Rose; Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Tom Cruise-led Digger coming in the fall — the brilliant German actress joins Hanns Zischler and August Diehl in Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski’s continuing exploration of post-WWII Europe. Following Ida and Cold War, and again shot in richly textured black and white, the new drama accompanies Thomas Mann and his daughter on a road trip across a Germany in ruins, marking the Nobel Prize-winning author’s first time back in the Fatherland since fleeing to safety in the U.S. during the war.
‘Fatherland’
Cannes Film Festival
Fjord
One of the major figures to come out of the Romanian New Wave of the mid-2000s, Christian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or in 2007 for his breathless abortion drama, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days. His new film promises to be another provocative piece of social realism in the director’s customarily rigorous style. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play a Romanian-Norwegian couple who relocate with their kids to the mother’s birthplace in remote Norway. They form close friendships with a neighboring family but face severe scrutiny and legal entanglement when suspicions of child abuse arise. Mungiu reportedly drew inspiration from real-life stories relating to Norway’s controversial child protection system and its family investigations.
Hope
Ten years after launching his cult horror hit The Wailing in Cannes, Na Hong-jin returns with this large-scale science fiction thriller, reportedly the most expensive Korean film ever made. It’s set in the remote village of Hope Harbor, near the Demilitarized Zone, where alarmed locals alert the outpost police chief to sightings of a tiger on the outskirts of town. As the village erupts into full-scale panic, the emergency evolves into a darker mystery, forcing the cop to confront a seemingly impossible reality. Alongside the Korean principals, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender also appear.
Paper Tiger
It’s a sore point among many admirers of James Gray’s work that despite five previous competition entries, the writer-director has never won a major award in Cannes. Perhaps his sixth contender will change that. Miles Teller, Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver star in the gritty 1980s-set drama about two brothers chasing the American Dream, who find their mutual loyalties tested as they navigate a dangerous world of corruption and violence, leading to the terrorization of their family by the Russian mob. While not strictl