Cannes Film Festival: It’s a wrap- 10 highlights

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

It’s always risky bringing a blockbuster to a cineaste’s paradise like Cannes and this finale to the Indiana Jones series certainly provided divisive. True, there were one too many chases in this helter-skelter tale, as an ageing Indy pursues Archimedes’ Dial, a device rumoured to pinpoint rips in the space-time continuum. But it was great to see Ford back in the fedora, bringing an unexpected (but apt) emotional dimension to the character. As Indy’s goddaughter Helena, Phoebe Waller-Bridge did what she does, readily armed with quips smarter than Indy’s whip, while Mads Mikkelsen chilled as the ex-Nazi adversary.

Killers of the Flower Moon

The hot ticket of the festival was Martin Scorsese’s epic true-crime tale about murders that took place within the oil-rich Osage Native American community in 1920s Oklahoma. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro were sublime as relatives drawn into this world, although Lily Gladstone maybe eclipses them both as Mollie, the Osage wife to DiCaprio’s Ernest, who watches as members of her family are picked off one by one. Running at three-and-a-half hours, it’s an absorbing study of America and, perhaps, the closest thing Scorsese has come to making a western.

The Zone of Interest

The critics’ choice, you’d be hard-pressed to find a reviewer on the Croisette who didn’t have Jonathan Glazer’s competition entry at the top of their list. A haunting Holocaust drama, it tells the story of Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant who designed and built Auschwitz. Set in the confines of the Höss family home, the notorious concentration camp is just the other side of the garden wall, with Glazer conveying the horrors contained within with real innovation. That the film is a loose adaptation of Martin Amis’ s 2014 novel felt all the more poignant, given Amis’s death a day after the premiere.

Club Zero

Austrian director Jessica Hausner follows 2019’s Little Joe with another British-set film, this time in a private school, where Mia Wasikowska’s teacher has been hired to promote “Conscious Eating” classes. As her devoted students learn to consume less, their parents get increasingly concerned. With meticulous production and costume design, it’s another heightened study of human behaviour from Hausner. It’s also brutally funny in places, with a script that doesn’t spare the privileged elite.

May December

Todd Haynes teamed up once again with Julianne Moore, his semi-regular muse ever since they made 1995’s [Safe], for this sly look at scandal and the process of acting. Moore plays a woman who, years earlier, was incarcerated after having an affair with a 13-year-old. Years later, they’re still together and now an actress (Natalie Portman) is about to play her in a movie. Typically, Haynes draws from a wide range of cinematic references, from The Go-Between (with a judicious use of Michel Legrand’s score) to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.

Asteroid City

A Cannes regular, Wes Anderson delivered another colourful confection with this 1950s-set tale that comes packaged with an insanely starry cast. Led by Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks and Margot Robbie, it’s a teleplay-within-a-movie, all set around a junior stargazing convention in a desert town straddling the California-Nevada border. Scripted by Anderson and Roman Coppola, it’s a film about otherness measured out with the director’s usual immaculate aesthetic precision. You might call it a doodle with hidden depths, as Anderson meditates on grief and loss in his own inimitable style.

Black Flies

French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire doesn’t do light and easy. His debut, Johnny Mad Dog (2008), dealt with child soldiers, while A Prayer Before Dawn (2017) wallowed in the depths of a Thai jail. This latest film deals with New York paramedics. Tye Sheridan and Sean Penn co-star as colleagues working shifts across the city. It’s a relentlessly grim watch – there’s rarely a moment to breathe – but Sauvaire captures the psychological toll the job takes on first responders. And if all that wasn’t intense enough, Michael Pitt makes a big-screen comeback as a volatile ambulance worker.

How To Have Sex

Away from the main competition, Molly Manning Walker’s debut How To Have Sex was surely the “buzz” title of the festival. Playing in Un Certain Regard, this stirring look at sexual consent and toxic masculinity told of three adolescent British girls who venture on holiday for a week of sun, sea and you know what. Mia McKenna-Bruce, who featured in the Netflix Jane Austen adaptation Persuasion recently, gives a wrenching turn as Tara, a girl who has yet to lose her virginity. On this evidence, Walker, who previously worked as a cinematographer on the upcoming British film Scrapper, is a fierce talent to watch.

Firebrand

Set in the last years of English king Henry VIII’s life, this moody period drama from director Karim Aïnouz casts Jude Law as the ailing king and Alicia Vikander as his sixth wife, Catherine Parr. Aïnouz and screenwriters Jessica and Henrietta Ashworth (Killing Eve) do a fine job of scene-setting, with Law’s monarch riddled with paranoia about heretics. A solid British cast – Eddie Marsan, Sam Riley, Simon Russell Beale – add to the texture, although Erin Doherty (who played Princess Anne in The Crown) almost steals it as the radical Anne Askew, a childhood friend of Catherine’s, who preaches for a more open and tolerant religion in the country.

The Sweet East

Appearing in the Director’s Fortnight strand, Sean Price Williams’s debut was a bizarre odyssey that gave a fantastic role to Talia Ryder, the young American actress who previously appeared in the excellent abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Scripted by American film critic Nick Pinkerton, there’s a whiff of Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! about this picaresque look at America, as Ryder’s character runs away from home and meets a gallery of colourful characters, from punks to far right extremists.