Cannes Film Festival 2022 preview: 12 movies not to miss
Now in its 75th year, the Cannes Film Festival continues to mark the start of the summer season with a host of splashy seaside photo calls, glittering premieres, and jet-lagged movie stars. Below, the 12 films that promise to be le talk of La Croisette (the city's famed promenade) when the festival kicks off today for its 11-day run on the French Riviera.
Elvis
There are biopics, and then there is the mad, dazzling work of Baz Luhrmann. Nearly ten years after his last feature, The Great Gatsby, the Australian magpie returns with his take on the King — played here with a megawatt sneer by Austin Butler and viewed through the lens of his spherical svengali Colonel Tom Parker (a heavily altered Tom Hanks).
Crimes of the Future
Director David Cronenberg (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises) has already said he expects walkouts when his body-horror provocation Crimes — starring Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart, and Léa Seydoux — bows at Cannes; believe the man who gave you Crash and Existenz.
Moonage Daydream
It's a folly, maybe, to even attempt to capture David Bowie in full on film; documentarian Brett Morgan (The Kid Stays in the Picture, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) knows his way around a tricky subject, though, and the early buzz on Daydream — featuring reams of previously unseen footage — has already built to a fever pitch.
Armageddon Time
Anne Hathaway, beloved Succession sadboy Jeremy Strong, and Sir Anthony Hopkins travel back to circa-1980s Queens in this semi-autobiographical New York coming-of-age drama from writer-director James Gray (Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z).
Men
No one combines sleek science fiction with the mysteries of the natural world quite like Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation). His surreal, cerebral latest — starring recent Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley as a young widow trapped in an Airbnb country-house nightmare — swerves into straight-up horror, with some heavy toxic-masculinity subtext.
Stars at Noon
French arthouse icon Claire Denis (Beau Travail, High Life) adapts Denis Johnson's lauded novel of the same name about a young American woman on the loose in 1980s Nicaragua with a prime Young Hollywood cast that includes Joe Alwyn and Maid's Margaret Qualley.
Showing Up
Michelle Williams reunites with Portland auteur Kelly Reichardt (First Cow, Wendy & Lucy) on what promises to be another low-key realist masterwork. Come for Williams as a sculptor on the verge of a breakthrough; stay for supporting turns by the great Hong Chau (HBO's Watchmen) and André Benjamin, a.k.a. Outkast's André 3000.
Broker
A longtime favorite of the festival, the gifted humanist Hirokazu Kore-eda (he won a 2018 Palme d'Or for the scammer-family gem Shoplifters and a Jury Prize for 2013's Like Father, Like Son) returns with a painfully timely portrait of so-called baby boxes, the South Korean tradition that allows for the safe, anonymous surrender of unwanted newborns.
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Tilda Swinton is a lonely scholar traveling to Istanbul, and Idris Elba is the intriguingly coiffed genie who promises to grant her three wishes in a fantasia written and directed by Mr. Mad Max himself, George Miller.
Decision to Leave
South Korean legend Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Stoker) returns with his first film since 2016's certifiably bonkers romantic thriller The Handmaiden. This time, a detective investigating a possible homicide comes up against the dead man's wife (Lust, Caution's Tang Wei); murder-mystery madness ensues.
Triangle of Sadness
Aspiring influencers, gird your loins; the great Scandinavian prankster Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure, The Square) makes his English-language debut with this sun-baked tale of two models (Harris Dickinson and South African actress Charbli Dean Kiek) at a professional crossroads. What role will Woody Harrelson play in it all? Only Cannes can tell.
Final Cut
The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius — it's still the only French film to date to win an Oscar for Best Picture — tilts into a serious vibe shift with his remake of the 2017 Japanese export One Cut of the Dead, in which a film crew on the set of a zombie movie are rudely interrupted by (zut alors!) real zombies.
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