The best and worst films of Cannes 2024

Palme's favorite: Sacred Fig Seed

Early talk suggested that it would be a bad year at the Cannes competition, which was filled with rainy days, trifles old legends (Shrader, Cronenberg, Coppola) and lucky breaks for a few newcomers. Once the sun came up, things warmed up: from the middle on, the quality went up and up, with the two Palme d'Or favorites listed below featured in the final two days. There were sharp political statements, startling comebacks and mesmerizing sentiments — if you hang on long enough.

Best of Cannes 2024Seed of the Sacred Fig

The title of this Iranian Palme favorite might suggest quiet poetry, but no: it's a morbid, paranoid thriller about frayed family relationships, with such a dark view of patriarchy that it's no wonder the country's authorities want director Mohammed Rasoulof jailed. Iran has won the palm before, but never in car chases.

Substance

No sensation here generated more thunder than Demi Moore's return in Substance, an outrageously grotesque dive into full-on body horror about stardom. best before date. Margaret Qualley, as a younger clone, crawls out of Moore's spine to resume her career, but then they get into a terrible war over the serum that keeps them going.

Flow

What a balm it was in a grueling battle. This wordless animated film, suitable for all ages, is about a cat who gets lost in the wild during a flood. Help comes from the most unlikely of sources: a retriever, a raccoon, a capybara and a giant white bird, depicted with charmingly accurate personalities against a backdrop that will take your breath away.

Everything we imagine as light

The first Indian film to enter competition at Cannes in 30 years is nothing short of stunning: A Symphony of the City of Mumbai, which follows two migrant nurses with almost opposite romantic problems. One was abandoned by her husband, and the other was secretly in love with a Muslim guy. The exquisite tapestry of their lives gives 38-year-old Payal Kapadia an exciting chance to win the Palme d'Or.

Anora

Anora, the latest from Sean Baker («The Florida Project»), is making head-turning acclaim here in a thrilling, gritty comedy about a throwaway Las Vegas wedding between a Coney Island lap dancer (Best Actress favorite Mikey Madison). ). and the young scion of a Russian oligarch. As soon as Dad's thugs come to break them up, he runs away — and finding him to cancel the contract turns out to be a nightmare.

Grand Tour

There's still a place for high art in Cannes, and here it is: a mysterious travelogue of the Far East that dances through time from 1918 to the present. Portuguese art-house darling Miguel Gomez (Taboo) sends an escaped British attaché from one pillar to another — to Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Shanghai — while his bewildered fiancée pursues him, always one step behind.

And the worst thing: Oh, CanadaOh my God. With O Canada, Paul Schrader capped off his erratic form with the filmed memoir of a narcissistic bore documentarian played exasperatedly by his American gigolo muse Richard Gere (opposite Uma Thurman as his wife). Gere and Schrader's reunion brings surprisingly little epiphany or revelation, and he finds Gere falling asleep in his own memories (with his younger self played by Priscilla star Jacob Elordi).

Partenope

Paolo Sorrentino gives his name to the main character ( Celeste Dalla Porta) after the Greek siren then concentrates only on her enchanting beauty in Saint Laurent fashion, in the absence of anything that could be called history. «Partenope» is the director's sunniest love letter to Naples, but it also resembles a 140-minute perfume commercial in which all the models are on the verge of tears. Even Gary Oldman, who makes a brief appearance as American writer John Cheever, can't save it.

Marcello Mio

Take the funkiest episode of Call My Agent imaginable and stretch it out over an hour to the point of complete conceptual burnout. Voila: it's Christophe Honoré's tedious meta-comedy about the movie business, in which Chiara Mastroianni (playing herself) explores the intricacies of childhood stardom while briefly portraying her iconic father Marcello.