Every Festival de Cannes is special, but there was something in the air this year as we looked at the Covid years, for the most part, in the rear-view mirror. The Croisette was busy and many of the movies felt—although festival hype often encourages this anyway, but stay with me—like all-timers. 

How could we have expected anything else with new titles by Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Jonathan Glazer and so many more? The masters turned up, and so did many other bright new stars, confirming an ongoing understanding that Cannes can be about more than the glamor, more than the standing ovations, queues, beach parties and restless French locals who miss what their sleepy seaside town once was. You just have to dig deep enough. 

This year, the festival gave us bold new stories about betrayal, discrimination, infidelity and tragedy, but there were also pockets of light, with filmmakers turning an eye towards young women and the sexual experiences that define who they are, as well as 19th-century cooks and foodies who find one another in the kitchen through their own language of love. 

If it’s overwhelming up close, it can all seem a little impenetrable from a distance—but that’s why we’re here: to pick up tips from ordinary Letterboxd members. Like, how to see thirteen films in three days with no official accreditation. 

Our esteemed team of correspondents—Ella Kemp, Isaac Feldberg, Rafa Sales Ross, Iana Murray, George Fenwick—sifted through the overwhelming programme, the dizzying array of stars, and reviews from fellow Letterboxd members, to bring to you ten watchlist-worthy titles and a few special mentions.

Tiger Stripes

Written and directed by Amanda Nell Eu

Hell is a teenage girl as the saying goes, and in Amanda Nell Eu’s audacious debut Tiger Stripes, puberty becomes a visceral body horror spectacle for a young girl, as what seems to be an extreme case of teen acne elevates to something inhuman. Rachel Dare summarizes it simply: “Finally an accurate representation of what it’s like to have a period.”

Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) is your average middle-schooler, filming dances for TikTok and having adventures down by the local river with her friends. But once she menstruates for the first time, she experiences more than just growing pains: scarlet rashes cover her entire body, and claws grow where nails should be. She recalls the ravenous transformation of Julia Ducournau’s flesh-eating heroine in Raw, as both films explore how becoming a woman feels simultaneously isolating, liberating and terrifying for the repressive forces working against them.

Jons had particularly high praise for the performances, writing: “It’s surprisingly very funny despite all the physical and emotional abuse it lays bare, and it has a hell of a cast. The true star is lead actress Zafreen Zairizal, who plays the protagonist Zaffan with such confidence, vulnerability and unbelievable mania.” Stay out of her way, indeed. IM

How to Have Sex

Written and directed by Molly Manning Walker

One year since the much-loved Aftersun, the British package holiday is back on screen at Cannes, this time rendered as a sweaty, intoxicating, technicolored journey through the vulnerability and terror that is coming of age as a young woman. How to Have Sex, this year’s Un Certain Regard winner and the debut feature from Scrapper cinematographer Molly Manning Walker, follows three teenage girls heading to Malia, Crete, for a post-exams blowout, but for Tara—an outstanding Mia McKenna-Bruce—the excess and euphoria is punctured when her first sexual experience takes a harrowing turn.

Beautifully shot and painfully real, Walker handles Tara’s experience, and the horribly isolating fallout, with unwavering grace and care. Watching Tara try to understand and recover while also pretending everything is fine is utterly heartbreaking, and Walker deftly analyzes not only how the experience deflates Tara’s spirit, but how it impacts her relationships with her two best friends, usually (and often in the film still) defined by great joy and fearlessness.

Comparing it to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Mollie Robertson says How to Have Sex “goes further to make this film not necessarily about sex itself, but the ways the exploitation of it can harm a nuanced female friendship, one tainted by the male gaze and the struggle to discuss the abuses they face.” I couldn’t put it better than Ajespe, who writes: “Sexual assault and consent are explored with visceral and psychological acuity in this drama that’s humorous, horrifying, but above all, sensitive.” GF

There was a collectively held breath at the Debussy Theatre before the world premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorcese’s sprawling epic about the horrific murders of the oil-rich Osage Nation in Oklahoma in the early 20th century. Perhaps the most anticipated title of this year’s festival, Killers of the Flower Moon did not disappoint, with Scorsese delivering an intelligent and hugely moving examination of power, greed and exploitation, largely through the lens of one marriage that captures just how deep the layers of betrayal against the Osage people ran.

Scorsese’s technical prowess as a director is as brilliant as ever, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are outstanding, but audiences at Cannes were universally in agreement that Lily Gladstone is the film’s beating heart as Mollie Burkhart. Gladstone is captivating as a woman who carries an unbearable amount of pain as she loses her family one by one, and whose marriage to Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) is an enraging example of the insidious legal mechanisms that stripped Native American people of their agency. 

It’s “monumental, scary, breathtaking, devastating,” says Robin,” while Tasha, “in awe at how brilliant Lily Gladstone is,” calls the film “beyond striking in its cinematography and also its phenomenal performances”. Honeymoondream goes even further: “DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, oh my god, created one of the saddest and most mesmerizing couples in the history of American cinema.” GF

May December

Directed by Todd Haynes, written by Alex Mechanik and Samy Burch

From the moment Julianne Moore breaks all tension by exclaiming that she has no hot dogs, it’s clear that there is more to May December than its melodramatic artifice. As Julian puts it: “Haynes has dipped his toes as far into the well of camp as he could possibly allow himself to, mining just as much of his typically rich thematic ideas—the true value of the faces we put on for others—out of a genuinely disturbing premise that nonetheless would feel right at home on a daytime soap opera channel.”

At once deliciously hilarious and deeply harrowing, Todd Haynes’ drama details a fraught meeting between Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore), a former teacher who served time for romantically pursuing—and ultimately breaking up her first marriage for—her son’s thirteen-year-old best friend, and Elizabeth Berry, the cool but overeager actress set to play her. 

With shades of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, the distinctions between imitation and embodiment fade as Elizabeth exhumes Gracie’s dark past, while her poking and prodding splits open the forgotten cracks in Elizabeth’s relationship with now-husband Joe (Charles Melton). Portman and Moore are unsurprisingly transcendent, but it’s Melton who truly astonishes. Despite his hulking frame, Joe is gentle and achingly fragile, as if frozen in time since he was the boy trapped within Gracie’s orbit. IM 

Setúbal is at the start—and the heart—of Filho’s first documentary in thirteen years, a loving ode to his hometown and its place as one of Brazil’s greatest cinematic hubs. Split into three chapters, Pictures of Ghosts expands from the director’s personal spaces to the public spaces that have shaped his cinephilia, meshing a wealth of personal archives with images of the center of Recife both during the olden days of regal street cinemas on each side of the riverbank to current times, where only one of the city’s many theaters still stands. 

“In its concentric subject matter, the hometown and the house where the filmmaker grew up, this film could alienate the audience unattached to Recife, Brazil, but the musings the filmmaker expresses touch upon universal longings,” writes Nikola Rukavina, commenting on Filho’s touching ability to observe the ethos of human nature through the often sterile corners of urban spaces. A rare feat, rarely so beautifully done as it is here. RSR

The Pot-Au-Feu

Written and directed by Trần Anh Hùng

Never has the lack of affordable restaurant options in Cannes felt more apparent than watching The Pot-Au-Feu, a decadent and heartbreaking culinary delight sure to go down as one of the greatest food movies of all time. Love blossoms by the stovetop, as celebrated cooks Eugenie (Juliette Binoche) and Dodin (Benoît Magimel) dance around each other in their sun-dappled kitchen, crafting vol-au-vents and baked Alaskas for friends and dignitaries with equal dedication. Olive Blair hails the film as “a love letter to people who make art through food, to people who consume it thoughtfully, to tedium for the sake of perfection, to history, to tradition, to food as a love language.”

Without a score, the film fills silence with knives meeting chopping boards and the bubbling of sauces and stews in a sensorial feast. (If only cinema had conquered smell!) Writer and director Trần Anh Hùng luxuriates in the process, reveling in the art of the methodology, but in The Pot-Au-Feu, food is merely the apéritif to a crushing love story. In Eugenie and Dodin’s idyllic haven of flavors and companionship, love and food are interchangeable. The act of cooking is an intimate display of affection. Like discovering the endless possibilities of a new ingredient, embracing love thrillingly elevates their symbiotic relationship. IM

Asteroid City

Directed by Wes Anderson, written by Anderson and Roman Coppola

With Asteroid City, Wes Anderson goes west, but as anticipated for a filmmaker so fastidiously attentive to detail, the film is not nearly so simple as it sounds. Constructing in diorama-esque fashion a desert town in the American Southwest where five prodigious junior stargazers and their families are gathering for a life-changing astronomy convention, Anderson simultaneously looks east, to observe the inner workings of a theater company mid-preparation of a play called “Asteroid City”. 

Between these two sides of 1955 Americana, the filmmaker devises a deeply poignant, intricately layered meditation on grief, family, romance, the unknowable sprawl of the cosmos, and the role performance has to play in helping us make sense of it all. At Cannes, Jing called the film “a marvelously colorful ride from start to finish—with precise framing, dolly-ins, and of course, whip pans,” while my fellow correspondent Iana Murray declared it to be “about as wonderful as any Wes, but also one of his saddest.” 

In a five-star rave that describes Asteroid City as a 1950s B-movie, Kino; the nonbinary james gunn writes that “every shot looks like a bleached out postcard from 1950s Arizona in the best ways possible,” calling it “a study of the meaning of life oozing with stereotypical Wes charisma.” Speaking of charisma, Asteroid City brought a dazzling ensemble to the festival, including Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Adrien Brody, Hope Davis, Rita Wilson, Maya Hawke and Rupert Friend—enough stars, in fact, that they arrived at the premiere’s red carpet in their own private bus. IF

The Zone of Interest

Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer

Festival hype can be a wretched thing. The pressurized circumstances of this summer camp-type environment can force many to rely on hyperbole to convince those buying and those at home to pay attention, when often these films fade slightly once the excitement has ended. But I truly believe The Zone Of Interest will stand the test of time as nothing short of a masterpiece. It’s a Holocaust film unlike any other I’ve seen; something of a horror film unlike anything anybody’s ever made. 

Glazer’s first feature in ten years follows Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig (a chilling Sandra Hüller) as they go about their business, raising their family and tending to their pristine garden, while on the literal other side of the wall of their home there are thousands of Jewish people losing their lives—because of them—every day. Ashes are raked, black smoke billows. 

It’s an incredibly hard film to talk about, or process (after the screening ended, I sprinted to the McDonald’s in Cannes to collect my thoughts for a while, before simply breaking down in sobs) but I love Hannah’s distillation of the film’s black heart with a Hannah Arendt quote: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Many Letterboxd members call The Zone of Interest “extraordinary”, and Jackson sums it up best: “monumental in its own quiet way.” We use these words a lot, but it just demands to be seen. History-making cinema that’s a horrifying privilege to experience. EK

Special mentions 

Looking through Letterboxd reviews of films I missed (it’s humanly impossible to see them all), a couple of smaller titles have made their way to the top of my watchlist, including Weston Razooli’s Riddle of Fire from the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, which Douglas Greenwood describes as “like a ’70s live action Disney adventure movie for people who love psilocybin and pay money to see Caroline Polachek in concert”. I don’t know if I am all of those people, but still. 

Another beacon of light from the Cannes lineup is Chicken for Linda!, one of those smaller film festival titles that tend to get lost among the Big Directors, but for those who make the time, definitely pays off.

Chicken for Linda! frames a mother-daughter relationship through beautiful, ingenious animation from French filmmakers Sébastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta (who dare to bring a sense of humor to the Croisette!). Ettore Dalla Zanna calls it “a little gem discovered by pure luck”, and if that’s not what film festivals are all about, I’ll burn my lanyard. Just kidding—à l'année prochaine! EK