The Highlights and Potential Breakouts of This Year’s Cannes Lineup (2024)

Last year’s Cannes Film Festival fielded three eventual Oscar nominees for best picture: Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, and Killers of the Flower Moon. The year before that, Triangle of Sadness won Cannes before getting Oscar noms for best picture, director, and screenplay. Look further back toward other recent Oscar-winning international breakouts, like Parasite or Drive My Car, and the origin story remains the same: a premiere on the Croisette.

It’s why, on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen below), we can’t help but put on our end-of-year-awards glasses when it comes to our deep dive into the 2024 Cannes lineup. This year’s festival features the usual heavy hitters, like Yorgos Lanthimos’s star-studded Kinds of Kindness and George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga—the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, which screened in Cannes before its Oscar-winning run in the US. But the ones to really pay attention to are likely those we can’t quite put our finger on yet. After all, The Zone of Interest’s Jonathan Glazer was considered far too art house for the Academy before his latest movie won the Grand Prix, while Anatomy of a Fall seemed like an under-the-radar, unknown quantity all around until it took home the coveted Palme d’Or.

We should perhaps start with Neon, the distributor that has rather remarkably backed the last four Palme winners, shepherding three of them to the Academy’s best-picture class (to say nothing of what the Tom Quinn–led company may acquire over the next month—Neon bought Anatomy of a Fall just days before it won the Palme). They’re headed to the Croisette this year with Anora, the latest from Sean Baker, who’s found wide critical success with his features Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket. This drama appears to be a vehicle for Mikey Madison, a scene-stealer in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood whose best showcase to date came as Pamela Adlon’s eldest daughter in the FX series Better Things. Anyone who watched that knows we’re talking about a ferocious talent here.

Several Cannes favorites will return to the competition this year, including Jia Zhangke (A Touch of Sin) with the fiction-documentary hybrid Caught by the Tides; Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank) with the Barry Keoghan–Franz Rogowski two-hander Bird; and David Cronenberg (Maps to the Stars) with what’s being described as his most personal film to date, The Shrouds. If any of this group delivers with a standout film, watch out for them to charm this year’s jury, which is being headed by Greta Gerwig. Jia has been consistently underrewarded at Cannes despite his prominence at the festival, while Arnold is returning with her first narrative feature in nearly a decade. Cronenberg’s mid-2000s films A History of Violence and Eastern Promises featured Oscar-nominated performances from the late William Hurt and Viggo Mortensen, respectively, and this piece is said to feature rich work from Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger. For a director who’s been working for more than 50 years—and won his first Cannes prize nearly 30 years ago—the ingredients are there for an embrace.

This year’s lineup is filled with more big names primed to make an impression. The Apprentice, written by VF special contributor Gabriel Sherman, stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump and focuses on his relationship with Roy Cohn, portrayed by Emmy winner Jeremy Strong. (Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova also stars as Ivana Trump.) Revenge director Coralie Fargeat returns with the body-horror entrant The Substance, top-lined by Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley (who also appears in Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness). Kevin Costner is premiering his epic Horizon cinematic saga out of competition. And Oscar nominee Paul Schrader (First Reformed) has a new film, Oh, Canada, adapted from one of the final novels by the late Russell Banks and starring Richard Gere.

Finally, there’s the matter of Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed epic that has been the subject of much speculation, curiosity, and concern ever since it went into production. Early murmurs out of screenings here in Los Angeles have been mixed, to put it mildly, and the movie appears to be headed into Cannes without a distributor. (It carries a reported budget north of $100 million.) But this is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, back with his first movie in more than a decade, led by Oscar nominee Adam Driver. Whether it’s a disaster or a masterpiece, it’ll be a hell of a story to come out of Cannes—one of many we’ll be watching closely.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14 to 25.

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