10 Best Movies at Cannes 2023

Going into the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, most would-be Cassandras could pick out which big-name movies would bring the crowds to the Croisette, what new works from world-cinema MVPs would delight critics and how the fest might handle the controversy around certain …let’s say surprising guests. It was a given that Johnny Depp’s presence would suck up most of the oxygen around the opening night selection Jeanne du Barry, unofficially billed as his “comeback” movie, and that the ensuing press conference might venture into celebrity-car-wreck territory. (Spoiler alert: It did.) And it wasn’t surprising that some of the bigger titles, like Martin Scorsese’s epic, intimate Killers of the Flower Moon, would remind attendees that Cannes has always run on red-carpet star power in addition to a buffet of filmmaking from the four corners of the globe. Besides, they’d say, cinema is dead, isn’t it? Haven’t we all just given up and accepted that streaming is now the de facto way we watch movies?

But after 11 days of hopping from theater to theater along that gorgeous stretch of the French Riviera, we can confirm that there is still an abundance of life left in the seventh art. Here are the 10 best movies we saw at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, from Scorsese’s sprawling historical drama to the much-talked-about How to Have Sex. Each of these entries proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the traditional idea of film as a way of expressing joy, pain, sorrow, righteous anger and a sense of communal connection isn’t going away any time soon. Cinema isn’t dead yet. It’s not even past.

(Honorable mentions as well to: the Chinese cop procedural Only the River Flows; the French courtroom drama The Goldman Case; the Japanese drama Monster; and Wang Bing’s three-and-a-half hour documentary about sweat-shop workers, Youth (Spring).)

‘Anatomy of a Fall’

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Filmmaker Justine Triet drops us into a mystery involving a German writer (Toni Erdmann‘s Sandrine Hüller, having a very good festival indeed with The Zone of Interest as well), a remote house in the French Alps, and a corpse. The dead man is her husband (Samuel Theis). The main suspect is the author herself. Whether her spouse fell or was pushed from the top floor of their dwelling becomes a matter for the courts to decide, at which point we begin to find out more and more about the couple’s highly mercurial history. A colleague described this as “Marriage Story but as a thriller,” which tracks — especially once an audio recording of an argument turns into a scathing, screaming, take-no-prisoners set piece. Neon picked this one up after its premiere, so expect to hear about it a lot this fall. Bonus points for the most passive-aggressive use of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P” ever.

‘The Animal Kingdom’

CANNES FESTIVAL

This year’s opener for the fest’s Un Certain Regard sidebar asks the question: What if a pandemic caused human beings to slowly mutate into animals? A cook (Romain Duris) and his son (Paul Kircher) have fled from Paris to the country after the boy’s institutionalized mother transforms past the point of recognition. Once local prejudices against the hybrid species flare up and the teen begins experiencing his own “changes” — say, are those coarse hairs sprouting on his back, and and claws growing underneath his fingernails? — things become even more dangerous for the duo. French director Thomas Cailley turns a high-concept scenario into something that goes beyond the heavy “are we not men?” metaphor, embedding crack VFX into what eventually becomes a coming-of-age story. And serious kudos to Kircher: the way the young actor adds an unstable physicality to his performance as his body continually “evolves” is key to making this whole fantastic, fairy tale-like parable work.

‘The Delinquents’

MUBI

It’s the “perfect” crime: A bank employee (Daniel Elías) steals a duffel bag’s worth of money from his job. He then asks a co-worker (Esteban Bigliardi) to hold on to it. His plan is to turn himself in, do a brief prison sentence, retrieve the cash, and then happily retire. After all, isn’t that better than working a soul-crushing gig for the next 25 years for the exact same payoff? His friend reluctantly agrees. Eventually, he stashes the loot deep in the countryside. And what happens after that turns Argentine writer-director Rodrigo Moreno’s debut feature into something way more thought-provoking, playful, and philosophical than your average heist movie. Does one live to work or work to live? What is your freedom worth to you? And where can I find a vinyl copy of the soundtrack, featuring the kick-ass ’70s South American rock band Pappo’s Blues? This was our major left-field discovery out of this year’s festival.

‘Eureka’

MUBI

If you’re at all familiar with the work of Lisandro Alonso (and if you aren’t, we advise you track down 2008’s Liverpool ASAP), then you know that the Argentine filmmaker has a knack for weaving a spell on viewers. His latest convinces you that you’ve actually entered someone else’s dream. Kicking off with a black-and-white revenge Western featuring Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni, the movie sets you up for a genre exercise before abruptly switching narratives — first to a Native American cop working on the Pine Ridge reservation, then to an indigenous tribe in Mexico and the story of a fugitive who panhandles for gold in the South American jungle. Some characters disappear into thin air (literally); others magically turn into birds. Digs at colonialism add a political element, while deliberately paced scenes of people wandering through landscapes are pure arthouse bliss. It’s stunning.

‘How to Have Sex’

WILD SWIM FILMS

Imagine a straight-no-chaser version of Spring Breakers, and you’ll have a sense of how Molly Manning Walker’s party-all-the-time drama initially plays: Three British teens head to Greece for a week of nonstop drinking, clubbing and hooking up. One of them, a young woman named Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), is determined to lose her virginity. Then she makes a bad decision, and the movie suddenly takes a sharp left turn. It’s a poignant take on a familiar coming-of-age story, directed with extraordinary sensitivity and anchored by one of the single best performances we saw in this year’s cream of the Cannes crop. The movie took home the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section. It was well-deserved.

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

APPLE

Yes, the word “masterpiece” is overused a lot. But what else can you call a work that finds Martin Scorsese, considered by many to be our greatest living American filmmaker, turning a sprawling, three-and-a-half-hour drama involving power, corruption and our nation’s toxic past into an intimate story, without sacrificing its depth or scope? Less a straight adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller than a complement to it, this throwback epic about a murder epidemic in the oil-rich Osage Nation circa the early 1920s narrows its focus on the love story between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife Mollie (the extraordinary Lily Gladstone). She’s watched her mother and sisters perish via both a mysterious “wasting illness” and outright murder; the fear is that her husband and his big-shot uncle (Robert De Niro) are after her family’s wealth and land rights, and she’s next. Scorsese’s extra emphasis on the clash between jazz-age modernity and traditional Osage culture, as well as the threat of 20th century white supremacy, makes this a partial corrective to decades of movie mythology, and it’s the closest thing he’s made to a Western. And if the rapturous reception at the movie’s premiere to Gladstone’s performance is any indication, she is about to level up in a massive way. (Read our full review here.)

‘May December’

NETFLIX

Did someone bet Todd Haynes that he couldn’t make a superior Lifetime Channel movie? If so, the Carol filmmaker has now handsomely won that wager. He reunites with Julianne Moore for this story of a thirtysomething woman who once had an affair with a 13-year-old boy. She then went to prison — while pregnant with the youngster’s baby — and the story inspired national outrage. Cut to decades later, with the now happily married couple living in the suburbs with their family. A famous actor (Natalie Portman, in a career-best performance) wants to shadow the woman for a biopic on the tabloid-friendly scandal. From the moment Haynes zooms the camera in to a close-up of Moore worrying that there aren’t enough hot dogs for a BBQ, the movie sets the tone: this is high melodrama, delivered with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Yet he and the cast never tip everything into parody, and somehow don’t let the irony weigh everything down. This was one of the more delightful movies to play on the Croisette this year, and a hat-tip to Netflix for immediately picking this up.

‘Robot Dreams’

NEON PICTURES

And now for something completely different: an animated movie about a dog and his robot best friend. Spanish filmmaker Pablo Berger (Blancanieves) adapts Sarah Varon’s graphic novel, set in a New York filled with anthropomorphic animals, that follows a lonely canine going about his daily routines. When he mail orders a mechanical buddy, his dreams of companionship and connection come true. Then a beach trip gone wrong separates the duo, and as seasons pass, the chance to reunite moves further and further away. This is a nine-Kleenex-box movie, and the surprise highlight of the Director’s Fortnight sidebar. You’ll never hear Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” the same way again.

‘Strange Way of Life’

SONY PICTURE CLASSICS

Pedro Almodóvar’s answer film to Brokeback Mountain (a movie he was originally approached to direct) imagines a wild, wild West love affair between a frontier-town sheriff (Ethan Hawke) and a stranger (Pedro Pascal) who rides into town. It seems these two men knew each other, in the biblical sense, way back when. Whether the unfinished business between them will remain unfinished or not depends on what happens with a murderer the lawman is pursuing. Clocking in at a lean 30 minutes, the Spanish auteur’s spin on the horse opera is way too short. But it’s also sumptuously cinematic, purposefully cine-meta, and simultaneously breaks new ground while building on the back catalog of a major world-cinema player. Not to mention that both Hawke and Pascal make a helluva couple. Let a thousand ‘shipping fan-fiction flower bloom. (Read our full review.)

‘The Zone of Interest’

A24

The closest thing to a consensus pick for the best movie to play in competition this year, Jonathan Glazer‘s take on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel is a portrait of hell from the periphery. An S.S. officer (Christian Friedel) and his family live in the housing area surrounding Auschwitz; they throw pool parties and take afternoon tea with friends while chimneys belch black smoke in the distance. Glazer strips away the imagery we now associate with Holocaust dramas and puts his high-formalism style to perfect use, presenting an absolutely chilling look at how normalization works — at some point, you simply stop hearing the barking dogs, gunshots and human suffering happening right outside your own backyard. This is what the banality around the banality of evil looks like. And Sandra Hüller, playing the officer’s raging wife, once again convinces you that she’s one of the most fearless international actors working today.

From Rolling Stone US.