The Cannes film festival looks set to cement its reputation as the world’s ultimate springboard for serious films with an eye on box office success, with new works by auteur heavyweights Wes Anderson, Ari Aster, Kelly Reichardt and Richard Linklater all set to premiere on the Croisette this May.
Cannes delegate general Thierry Frémaux and president Iris Knobloch announced this year’s lineup at a press conference in Paris on Thursday morning.
In the main competition, Anderson’s star-studded The Phoenician Scheme – featuring Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Tom Hanks, Benedict Cumberbatch and Scarlett Johansson – will compete for the Palme d’Or against Midsommar director Ari Aster’s western black comedy Eddington, which stars Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Pedro Pascal.
Rising British actor Josh O’Connor plays the lead in two competition films, US film-maker Kelly Reichardt’s Vietnam war-set The Mastermind and South African director Oliver Hermanus’s gay romance The History of Sound.
Before Sunrise maker Linklater makes his second major festival appearance of the year with Nouvelle Vague, telling the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Linklater’s new film Blue Moon, a biopic of musical writer Lorenz Hart, premiered at the Berlin film festival in February.
Also in the running for the Palme d’Or are Sentimental Value by Norwegian director Joachim Trier, who was nominated for best film in 2021 (when lead Renate Reinsve won the best actress award) for The Worst Person in the World, Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi with A Simple Accident, and influential Belgian arthouse titans Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, with Jeunes Méres.
Last year’s Palme d’Or winner, Sean Baker’s Anora, walked away from the Oscars with five gongs 10 months later, and films that premiered on the French Riviera last May ended up racking up a total of 31 Oscar nominations and nine wins, underscoring its status as the world’s premier film festival.
This year’s Un Certain Regard category will see actor Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut with Eleanor the Great, as well as British director Harry Lighton’s queer romance Pillion, starring Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling, best known as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films. Urchin, another drama by an actor-turned-director – Babygirl’s Harris Dickinson – also premieres in the sidebar.
Tom Cruise will walk the red carpet in Cannes to promote Christopher McQuarrie’s latest in the Mission: Impossible franchise, The Final Reckoning, which is screening out of competition.
Russian stage and film director Kirill Serebrennikov will be in Cannes for the second year in a row with The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, about the notorious Auschwitz doctor, after his Ben Whishaw-starring Eduard Limonov biopic got mixed reviews last year. Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, whose Head On was a major hit 20 years ago, will premiere second world war coming-of-age tale Amrum, based on the childhood of screenwriter Hark Bohm.
Source: theguardian.com
