Cannes this 12 months had a lot to reside as much as after final 12 months’s award-winners, headline-grabbers and social media meltdowners Anora, The Substance and Emilia Pérez. It makes studying the indicators now that bit tougher: the weird occasion on the Croisette boulevard this 12 months was a palm tree falling over. If it occurred in a film, the metaphor can be insufferable.
Whether 2025’s Cannes films are going to spark a new burst of overwhelming pleasure stays to be seen, although this 12 months’s classic feels good – usually glorious, though even the most important names can get it improper: former Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau introduced an incoherent drama called Alpha.
This was a Cannes competitors whose nice films have been about political cruelty and tyranny. Jafar Panahi’s A Simple Accident was about a fortuitous occasion that unearthed horrifying recollections in Iran. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s superb, sprawling, Elmore Leonard-esque film from Brazil, The Secret Agent was in regards to the Seventies dictatorship – apparently, each movies confirmed petty officers taking bribes. Filho’s wretched cops are purchased off with some cigarettes – Panahi’s crooked safety guards carry a debit card reader to allow them to take contactless funds. But for sheer existential grandeur of evil nothing may contact Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors – in regards to the Stalin 30s, with its Dostoyevskian and Kafkaesque moments of despair.
And to go along with these views of the patriarchy, there have been daddy points. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value confirmed Stellan Skarsgård being unbearable together with his daughters – the preening Egyptian film star performed by Fares Fares in Eagles of the Republic infuriates his son, and Josh O’Connor’s hapless artwork thief in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is a very neglectful dad. And within the Dardenne brothers’ compassionate and poignant film Jeunes Mères, about a care facility for teenage moms, the fathers have been conspicuous by their absence.
So listed here are my prize predictions, adopted by my additional Cannes Braddies, my private awards in different sections which ought to exist, however don’t.
Palme d’Or The Secret Agent (dir Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Grand Prix Two Prosecutors (dir Sergei Loznitsa)
Jury prize A Simple Accident (dir Jafar Panahi)
Best director Carla Simón for Romería
Best screenplay Mascha Schilinski for Sound of Falling
Best actor Josh O’Connor for The Mastermind
Best actress Yui Suzuki for Renoir (dir Chie Hayakawa)
Braddies for prize classes that don’t exist however ought to
Best supporting actor Stellan Skarsgård in Sentimental Value (dir Joachim Trier)
Best supporting actress Tânia Maria for The Secret Agent (dir Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Cinematography David Chambille for Nouvelle Vague (dir Richard Linklater)
Production design Roger Rosenberg for Eagles of the Republic (dir Tarik Saleh)
