The Best and Worst Movies of Cannes 2024, and the Likeliest Oscar Contenders Among Them

The 77th Cannes Film Festival concluded on May 25 at an awards ceremony that bestowed the Palme d’Or to Sean Baker’s free-wheeling tragicomedy Anora and split best actress among the four stars of the wild musical melodrama Emilia Pérez—including American actors Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez. It was a merry conclusion to a festival that, as some on the ground grumbled, felt a little lackluster until the very end. So was it, in fact, a bad Cannes? Or did some late-breaking premieres and worthy winners redeem the whole thing? Here are Vanity Fair Hollywood correspondent David Canfield and chief critic Richard Lawson to break it all down.

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races” class=”external-link external-link-embed__hed-link button” data-event-click='{“element”:”ExternalLink”,”outgoingURL”:”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/award-season”}’ href=”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/award-season” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>A guide to Hollywood’s biggest racesArrow A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races” class=”external-link external-link-embed__image-link” data-event-click='{“element”:”ExternalLink”,”outgoingURL”:”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/award-season”}’ href=”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/award-season” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>

Richard Lawson: David, you and I just spent almost two weeks running up and down the Croisette, gulping champagne and hosting luncheons and, oh right, seeing movies. It was perhaps a slightly fraught year for the latter activity: about a week into the festival, I was beginning to worry that we’d have very little good stuff to discuss. There were certainly some films to crow about—Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is a loopy knockout, Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is an artful and arresting spin on the #MeToo narrative (and really should have been in main competition)—but the air was less charged than it should be at a festival like Cannes, where bold and exciting visions are meant to be unveiled every day.

Maybe that feeling of disappointment was to be blamed on the twin high-profile flops that are Francis Ford Coppola’s dreary boondoggle Megalopolis and Kevin Costner’s even drearier Western epic Horizon: An American Saga. These supernova messes cast a pall over the whole festival—typical American hubris ruining everything.

Or, at least, threatening to ruin everything. While the mood on the scene was a bit sour for a few days, in hindsight, I actually do think it was a good year for Cannes. Though there wasn’t an immediately obvious breakout like last year’s Anatomy of a Fall, some quieter fare that debuted later on the schedule packed a punch. I was particularly taken by Mohammad Rasoulof’s grim but galvanizing Iranian drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a movie as powerful as the story surrounding it. This is truly courageous filmmaking: Rasoulof is facing an eight-year prison sentence, while his cast members have been interrogated and censured by the Iranian government.

There was also Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, a small and soulful character drama set in and around Mumbai. It’s an intimate film that whispers volumes about far bigger things. I’m glad it won second prize at the awards ceremony, and I’d hope it will become the rare Indian film in the Oscar conversation in the coming months.

David, what’s your take on this year’s festival? This was your first time there, and I’d hate for it to have been a letdown. Were your Cannes vibes off? Or did you find enough to celebrate?

David Canfield: Certainly, we had a rough go of it there at the beginning—you may know better than me why so many of the competition lineup’s clunkers were stacked at the front of the calendar, when most festivals operate in the opposite manner—but I’ll admit to being fascinated by the whole enterprise, uneven as it was. Rare is the week where you come out of multiple movies wondering what the hell you just watched. That happened to me on back to back days with Megalopolis and Emilia Pérez, and appropriately, my opinions on them couldn’t be further apart. (Let’s just say you and I are aligned.)

This was a festival of huge swings, of revered filmmakers stepping far outside of their comfort zones. The results weren’t always successful, or even always tolerable, but they spoke to the pulse of filmmaking in a way I found gratifying, as so much doom-and-gloom continues to swirl around Hollywood. This went for actors too: Ben Whishaw (in Limonov: The Ballad), Demi Moore (in the buzzed-about body-horror The Substance), and both Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice) particularly, took me out with work so tremendously beyond anything they’d done before.

This definitely wasn’t the sort of year where we had the likes of Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, and May December all in the same competition. I’m staying glass half-full, though, as a first-timer who got (increasingly!) great weather, had fascinating conversations looking over the Croisette with the likes of Kevin Costner and Selena Gomez, and made some real discoveries of directors and performers who weren’t on my radar (On Becoming a Guinea Fowl certainly made me a Rungano Nyoni fan for life.) As someone whose relationship to Cannes, until now, was based on observing which films lasted in the conversation beyond it, I’m shamelessly already trying to piece some Cannes-to-Oscars narratives together.

We’ve got to start with Anora there, right? This is the fifth Palme d’Or winner in a row to be backed in the U.S. by the indie distributor Neon, and many of those past films (Parasite, Anatomy) went on to great awards success. Sean Baker’s indie darling status and Mikey Madison’s revelatory breakout performance alone have me feeling like we’ll be adding this one to the club. Am I too optimistic?

Richard: One of the many pleasures of spending time with you at Cannes this year, David, was your enthusiasm. Where you see a truly credible Anora awards campaign, I see something a bit more uncertain. Sure, Willem Dafoe scored a supporting actor nomination for The Florida Project—meaning Baker’s films do have an Oscar track record—but that’s Willem Dafoe! And he was in a movie that is a lot sweeter, and thus perhaps more accessible, than Anora. There is certainly heart there, and in Madison’s dexterous performance—but might the comedy be too crass, too antic for the Academy? Maybe the film’s arresting final scene, which I won’t spoil here, will convince voters that Anora is more than a seedy tour of Brooklyn’s outer edges. But I think it’s going to be a steep hill to climb.

I felt a similar skepticism about the awards buzz for Demi Moore. She’s certainly great in The Substance, but this is pretty hard genre stuff we’re talking about. If there is still such a thing as typical awards fare, The Substance isn’t it. Moore probably needed to win best actress at Cannes to kickstart any real awards campaign—though some love from critics’ groups in November and December could insist her back into the conversation.

Limonov might be too alienating—and too much about a guy who became kind of a fascist—for Whishaw to get any traction, but he is remarkable in the film. He’s playing a pretty unlikable guy, yet the many whirring pieces of his performance keep you invested. (The film is still seeking U.S. distribution, as is The Apprentice.) The great Jesse Plemons, who won best actor at Cannes for Yorgos Lanthimos’s nasty triptych of short stories Kinds of Kindness, faces a similar problem of likability: the Academy did embrace the bleakness of Lanthimos’s The Lobster, but they seem to prefer when he goes a bit more traditional in his partnerships with the writer Tony McNamara. Kinds of Kindness is a true “one for me” movie for Lanthimos, and Plemons may fall by the wayside because of it.

What I’d really like to see is a big push for Zoe Saldaña, a major franchise star who has never gotten the chance to do what she does in Emilia Pérez. She sings, she dances, she acts the house down—it’s a true triple-threat performance, deserving of a run at awards glory. Netflix bought the film, and they certainly have the resources to mount a serious campaign. But is Emilia Pérez—a musical about a trans drug kingpin—too out-there? Maybe I’m being unfair to the ever-evolving Academy voting body.

We can at least count on Cannes to premiere the majority of any given year’s international feature nominations. David, which Cannes films do you think are at the top of that heap at the moment?

David: Well, Emilia Perez feels like the only way to start that conversation. The film would be the French submission, technically, and while the country has performed superbly on its home turf in Cannes, the Academy’s French selection committee has repeatedly whiffed; last year, its pick The Taste of Things was snubbed while Anatomy of a Fall surged in the main categories, and another past Palme winner that was selected, Titane, was similarly ignored by the Oscars. As Emilia’s director is a national treasure in Audiard, I can see this being a canny way for France to get back into the main race. But again, the movie is Spanish-language and without any French actors, so it’s a tough choice. But a worthy one, I think.

This gets to a larger question that came up a lot in my time in Cannes: Can this year’s strongest international titles challenge the Academy’s rule that the country submit a single movie for consideration? You mentioned Seed of the Sacred Fig, which I cannot wait to see (damn you, final-day premieres!) and which was universally acclaimed. Yet its director has quite literally fled his country, which is brutally critiqued in the movie. The same may well go for Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, sharp-edged in its portrait of Indian patriarchal politics and culture. India did not even select RRR a few years back, despite it being a box-office smash (and eventual Oscar winner for original song)—so while this is one of the best films overall, I’m not sure if that will translate to candidacy for the international-film race.

You’ve got other potential players in Guinea Fowl (which I believe would go to the U.K., as Nyoni’s last movie did, but Zambia and Ireland are also listed as production companies), The Girl With the Needle (Denmark), and Motel Destino (Brazil). Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope was hammered by critics, but Italy rarely bets against him (and A24 is backing the film Stateside). Romania’s Three Kilometers to the End of the World moved some audiences with its harrowing tale of homophobic violence and trauma. Lots to work with. But my hope is that because the Academy is changing so quickly, expanding its international membership and proving more willing to accept risky arthouse fare, that these movies don’t get boxed into that international corner. They’ve proven they can stand on their own at one of the world’s most prestigious global festivals. Certainly the searing story behind Sacred Fig, or the delicate beauty of All We Imagine, are elements the Academy can get behind.

And sure, that extends to my optimism for the likes of Anora, Emilia Perez, even the gloriously gory The Substance going forward. These aren’t easy movies, it’s true. But as this jury—the majority of whom just happen to be Academy members, including president Greta Gerwig—affirmed, give them a chance and they’re worth it.

Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.