Cannes Film Festival 2024 Preview: 22 Must-See Films To Watch

Ghost story, body horror, feminist comedy and a freshly minted edition of that very French subgenre, How to Get Rid of a Troublesome Corpse: Noémie Merlant, familiar as a fine actress from Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, packs a good deal into her sophomore feature as director, The Balconettes. The message is essentially Time’s Up, maxxed out to include revenge killings; the medium is Mediterranean color. Sciamma co-wrote the script with Merlant, which may come as a surprise given that this swirl of blood and wackiness, complete with a running gag about a severed penis, is about as far from the restraint of Sciamma’s own films as could be.

Cate Blanchett blew kisses to the Cannes Film Festival audience as her new film, “Rumours,” earned a four-minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night. The crowd welcomed the film’s dark humor, laughing throughout the entirety of the late-night screening. While some of the auditorium emptied out while the credits rolled, the majority of filmgoers waited patiently to pay their respects to the film’s stars.

It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Jim Henson came up with the concept for an immersive video dome long before Sphere bubbled up in Las Vegas.

On paper, it looks mad as a loose wheel. A largely Spanish-language musical about a Mexican druglord having a sex change, featuring onetime Disney teen star Selena Gomez as a gangster’s wife: nobody could deny director and writer Jacques Audiard’s giddy determination to do something different, but how could Emilia Pérez be anything but a hot mess? But here is it is on the screen, a musical marvel. Of course it’s crazy, but Audiard has set up his impossible conjuring trick and made it work.

Stalwart Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke leads his partner and muse, Zhao Tao, on a decades-long romantic odyssey in Caught By the Tides, which tries too hard to play with time and form for the connection between its leads to be its central preoccupation.

Diaries are written in secrecy, free-flowing thoughts anchored to the page as if the ink could stop memories from vanishing through the hands of time. Filmmaker Paul Schrader understands the lingering, often quiet desperation of journaling like few filmmakers do.

Nicolas Cage is stepping out to promote his new movie!

Hard to believe it has been 44 years since Paul Schrader and star Richard Gere last worked together on 1980’s seminal American Gigolo, a film that became not just a keystone in Gere’s celebrated career but also one for one Schrader’s as one of his earliest directorial credits. Of course he has written some of the great screenplays, particularly in his collaborations with Martin Scorsese on Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Taxi Driver. But it is what interests him now a half century later as a writer-director that continues to fascinate.

When Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea) is beaten up outside the one dance club in the village where he grew up, his father takes up the cudgels, chivvying the local police chief into finding out who did it. It would be obvious enough to anyone but dad Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache) that this is a straight-up case of gay-bashing, which would seem to signal that Emanuel Parvu’s Cannes Competition title Three Kilometers to the End of the World, a slice of Romanian life, will be a worthy but familiar story of a boy’s coming out to a hostile world. Indeed, bloodied Adi with his black eyes and traumatic lesions is soon being punished, locked in his room by his parents as his desperate mother prays to the icons on the wall for guidance. We have undoubtedly been down this donkey-track before. 

arrived at the premiere of Kinds of Kindness, her third film in collaboration with writer and director Yorgos Lanthimos, dressed in a stunning shimmery Louis Vuitton gown in the deep-V silhouette she's all but made her signature. The intricate beading almost created the illusion of velvet or chenille, adding to the overall uber luxe vibe.The rich burgundy color complemented her auburn hair, which she wore in loose waves that just brushed her collarbone.

James Franco and his girlfriend Izabel Pakzad made a rare public appearance amid the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Barry Keoghan strikes a pose with his Bird costar Jackie Mellor on the red carpet at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

The cast of Megalopolis took to the red carpet at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on Thursday (May 16) to attend the movie’s premiere.

Rithy Panh has dedicated the lion’s share of his career to interrogating the genocidal Khmer Rouge era in his native Cambodia, and it is no trivial obsession. Panh fled Phnom Penh when he was just 11, and after his family was devastated in the Killing Fields, he escaped to a Thai refugee camp at 15. Now 60, Panh has been committed to keeping the memory of the impact of Pol Pot’s tyrannical regime alive in documentary, narrative and animated film.

“Mommie Dearest” actress walked the red carpet at the premiere of the action film “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” starring Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy. She was joined by Laurent Bouzereau, 62, who is the director of her new documentary that is premiering at Cannes, and her son Liam Dunaway O’Neill, 43, who appears in the HBO doc.The Hollywood icon wore a black blazer over a white shirt with black pants.

Omnes Films has a goal. “Our mission is to fill a void in modern cinema,” says its website. “Our films are passionate, ambitious works made by friends that favor atmosphere over plot and study the many forms of cultural decay in the 21st Century. Whatever the subject or genre, we seek projects that are original in conception and feel like they’ve never been made before.” It sounds wildly ambitious, and maybe it is, but Cannes audiences will be the judge of that when two of its films — Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point by Tyler Taormino and Eephus by Carson Lund — premiere in Directors’ Fortnight.

Anya Taylor Joy is hard at work during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival!

Anya Taylor-Joy, Heidi Klum, and Helena Christensen were among the stars who arrived at the Opening Ceremony and the screening of “Le Deuxieme Acte” at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 14, 2024.This year’s jury members, including Greta Gerwig, Eva Green, and Lily Gladstone, are tasked with deciding the winners of the various awards.The Opening Ceremony was highlighted by the presentation of the Honorary Palme d’Or to Meryl Streep, awarded in recognition of her illustrious career and contributions to film.The 2024 Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14 to May 25, 2024.

The Cannes Film Festival always has incredible fashion on the red carpet and the opening ceremony just kicked off the next week of amazing looks!

The Second Act