Cannes 2024: The 15 Movies We’re Most Excited to See

A musical involving drug cartels, gender identity, and Selena Gomez. A Brooklyn sex worker’s fairy-tale romance involving a Russian oligarch’s son. An Italian director’s tribute to his hometown, via the sort of go-for-baroque filmmaking that’s become rarer and rarer, and a woman named after a siren from The Odyssey. A French filmmaker’s tribute to his own career, filled with past heroes and villains from a rich back catalog. The return of a New Hollywood legend. A high-octane sequel from an Australian New Wave legend. A harrowing yet uplifting doc on Ukraine. A biopic on Donald Trump: The Younger, Pre-Fascist Years!

These are just a few of buzzier titles set to be unveiled once the Cannes Film Festival kicks off on May 14, and we haven’t even got to Cate Blanchett communing in a forest with a giant brain yet. An omnivorous moviegoer’s dream come true, the big event on the fest-circuit’s spring calendar kicks off with the latest from auteur/agent provocateur Quentin Dupieux — a Louis Garrel/Léa Seydoux comedy titled The Second Act — and over the next few weeks, will premiere everything from the first half of Kevin Costner’s new Western (Horizon: Part 1) to new works from Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg, Yorgos Lanthimos, Paul Schrader, Andrea Arnold, Jia Zhang-ke, Leos Carax, and a whole lot more.

We’ve skimmed the cream of this year’s Cannes crop, and come up with 15 movies we’re dying to see during the 2024 edition’s run.

‘Anora’

Writer-director Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) hits the Croisette with a rom-com centered around a Brooklyn-based sex worker (Better Things‘ Mikey Madison) who finds herself in a real-life Cinderella story when she meets a rich, Russian Prince Charming. It sounds like a dream, until, well … you remember what happened to Cinderella when the clock struck midnight, and the carriage turned back into a pumpkin?

‘The Apprentice’

Have you heard the one about the real estate mogul who became a reality-TV star, then decided to go into politics? Holy Spider director Ali Abbasi takes on the rise of one Donald J. Trump, right as this Queens native starts making power moves with the help of a longtime power broker. Sebastian Stan plays the younger Donald (!); Borat’s Maria Bakalova is Ivana Trump (!!); and no less than Jeremy “I’m the Eldest Boy!” Strong is Trump enabler-slash-Prince of Darkness Roy Cohn (!!!). There will be controversy around these screenings. Bet on it.

‘The Balconettes’

French actor Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Woman on Fire, Tár) reminds you that “writer-director” is also part of her ever-growing resumé, courtesy of this dark comedy about a trio of women — played by Merlant, Sanda Codreneau, and Soheila Yacoub — who begin interfering with their neighbors’ lives during a massive heat wave. Then they take things too far, and suddenly, what started as way of alleviating boredom becomes, per the press notes, “a bloody affair.” Bonus: Her Portrait director Célinne Sciamma co-wrote the script.

‘Bird’

If you’ve seen British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s work, then you know she has a knack for finding poignancy in hardscrabble lives, and moments of tenderness within the toughest of coming-of-age circumstances. Her latest sounds like it falls within her Fish Tank-type sweet spot: A 12-year-old girl (Nykia Adams) lives in Kent with her father (Barry Keoghan) and brother (Jason Buda). A mysterious stranger (Passages‘ Franz Rogowski) soon enters the picture.

‘Emilia Perez’

There’s a lot of buzz around the new film from Jacques Audiard, whose extraordinary body of work includes everything from a remake of James Toback’s Fingers (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) to a weirdo Western (The Sisters Brothers) to the greatest prison movie of the past 20 years (A Prophet). All we know about this latest project is that it involves a lawyer (Zoe Saldana), a cartel drug lord yearning “to become the woman he has already dreamt of being,” and Selena Gomez. Also it’s a musical. We’re so ready for this.

‘Furiosa’

Mad Max: Fury Road had a massive, out-of-competition gala screening at Cannes (one day before it was released) back in 2015, so it’s no surprise that George Miller would premiere its follow-up prequel — which gives us the origin story of Max’s female cohort, the mighty Imperator Furiosa — at the festival. Anya Taylor-Joy steps into Charlize Theron’s battered, dusty boots to play a younger version of the postapocalyptic anti-heroine. Also along for the ride(s) are: Chris Hemsworth, playing a character with the A+ name of Dementus; The Souvenir‘s Tom Burke, as the toughest road warrior in town; and a shit-ton of stunt people risking their lives in the name of analog, go-for-broke screen mayhem. To the gates of Valhalla!

‘The Invasion’

Ukrainian filmmaker Sergi Loznitsa has been chronicling his country’s ongoing civil war with Russia for years, in films like Maidan (2014) and Donbass (2018). His latest documents the nation’s current life during wartime in the face of bombings, on-the-ground combat, and constant hardship. It refuses to pull punches — his films never do — yet this time around, he’s said he wanted to keep focus on the population’s resilience in the face of Putin’s aggressive campaign against them.

‘It’s Not Me (C’est Pas Moi)’

Trust a filmmaker like Leos Carax (Holy Motors) to make a self-portrait and then call the thing It’s Not Me. In other words: classic Carax! French cinema’s reigning enfant terrible-slash-oddball genius has concocted a 40-minute featurette of experimental autofiction, casting his longtime collaborator and screen counterpart Denis Levant to play both the director and what we’re told is a host of past characters from Carax’s movies. Mind — blown!

‘Kinds of Kindness’

Yorgos Lanthimos’ follow-up to Poor Things was supposed to come out right on the heels of that Oscar-nominated juggernaut, under the title And…, last year. Thank god that we got a chance to catch our breath before his next round of disturbing absurdism hits us and likely leaves us reeling. It’s a triptych of stories that features a to-die-for cast — including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Hunter Schafer, and Mamadou Athie — many of whom play different roles in all three chapters. “Kindness” is always a relative term in Lanthimos’ universe, so take that word’s inclusion in the title with a boulder-sized grain of salt.

‘Megalopolis’

For close to 40 years, Francis Ford Coppola has been chasing a story built around the concept of utopias, visionaries, and the rise and fall of empires. Now, the maestro has finally caught his white whale and turned a dream into a reality. The early word on Coppola’s epic featuring [deep breath] Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, the Midnight Cowboy duo of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, SNL‘s Chloe Fineman, Kathryn Hunter, and Coppola family members Talia Shire and Jason Schwartzman has been divisive, to say the least — responses range from “masterpiece” to “dude, WTF?!” But there’s no film we’re looking forward to seeing more at this year’s Cannes than this tale of artists vs. politicians, and the fact that Coppola is premiering this late work at the same festival that gave Apocalypse Now its inaugural, “in-progress” bow feels like a full-circle moment. Good or bad, it’s undoubtedly going to be unforgettable.

‘Oh Canada’

It’s hard to think of a living Hollywood filmmaker who’s had such a major third-act rejuvenation as Paul Schrader; ever since First Reformed suggested that the New Hollywood lion-in-winter had experienced a creative second wind, the 77-year-old has delivered bold, uncompromising dramas about complicated characters working their way out of existential ruts (The Card Counter, Master Gardener). Now, Schrader tackles another work from the late, great novelist Russell Banks, the same author who gave him the source material for 1997’s Affliction. A writer (Richard Gere) decides to make peace with his past as an American who moved to the Great White North to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War. His decision to tell all does not sit well with his friends and loved ones, however. Uma Thurman, Michael Imperioli, and current It guy Jacob Elordi co-star.

‘Parthenope’

Greek-mythology scholars and fans of The Odyssey will be quick to point out that Parthenope is the name of a siren who attempted to sing Homer’s hero to his death, and ended up in a watery grave herself. The new film from Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, The Hand of God) features a character who shares this legendary figure’s name, but per the man himself, “is neither siren nor myth.” Instead, she’s something like a tour guide to Sorrentino’s love letter to the region that he grew up in, and one that will likely contain his signature mix of surreality, capital-R Romanticism, and his flair for gloriously over-the-top cinematic flourishes. You may love or hate the man’s work, but you’re never bored by it, and a new film from this major Italian filmmaker is always a big deal.

‘Rumours’

From the moment that the first still from Guy Maddin’s new movie hit the internet — featuring two folks crouching next to a giant brain in some hallucinogenic forest — you could tell that this was going to be severely cracked even by the Canadian cult filmmaker’s standards. The logline of this dream-like fable (co-directed by Maddin’s longtime collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, and produced by Ari Aster) is that a group of world leaders has gathered for the annual G7 summit. Then the night before a presentation, they all get lost in the woods, and … who knows what happens next. Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Charles Dance are among those stuck in this waking nightmare; if it’s even half as wonderful as My Winnipeg, we’re in for a treat.

‘The Shrouds’

When David Cronenberg was promoting Crimes of the Future after its premiere at Cannes in 2022, he mentioned a project that he’d envisioned as a series for Netflix, before the streaming service passed on it. The Canadian director said that he hoped to turn it into a feature soon. The fear was that it would just become another what-if work left without a home or a patron saint, but the man made good on his word — and we now have another unsettling, dread-inducing thriller about a man (Vincent Cassel) who’s trying to franchise technologically advanced graveyards around the world. Then a mysterious event occurs at his flagship location, which sets off a chain of events that reverberates in a number of ways. Given how Cassel’s gray mane makes him a dead ringer for the director — and Cronenberg has talked about this was inspired by his grief over the death of his wife in 2017 — this sounds like one of his more personal films.

‘September Says’

French-Greek actor Ariane Labed — you likely know her from her husband Yorgos Lanthimos’ films such as Dogtooth and The Lobster — makes her feature directorial debut with this story about two sisters, September (Pascale Kann) and July (Mia Tharia), who travel with their mother for a vacation in Ireland. Except the bond between those two siblings has been fraying of late, and going abroad together has more or less pushed their simmering tensions to a full boil. 

From Rolling Stone US.