10 Must-See Cannes Films
Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die Will Open
This year’s upcoming Cannes Film Festival features several of the world’s leading auteurs including Pedro Almodóvar, Terrence Malick, Jim Jarmusch and Ken Loach. Almodovar’s latest Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria) features Antonio Banderas in his first leading role for the director since 2010’s eerily sexy The Skin I Live In (inspired by the 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face). The trailer teases us with a nearly nude Banderas drifting in a swimming pool (this harkens back to the days when he played tortured—but incredibly good looking—young men in Almodóvar’s 1987 Law of Desire and 1986 Matador). Almodóvar is up for Best Director this year at Cannes (an award he hasn’t garnered since 1999 with his masterwork, All About My Mother).
The festival will be kicked off with Jim Jarmusch’s highly-anticipated zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die while Terrence Malick is back with his latest, A Hidden Life—a historical drama starring the late Bruno Ganz and Michael Nyqvist in their final acting roles. Malick’s last film shown at Cannes was 2011’s hit The Tree of Life starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain. If A Hidden Life is anything like Malick’s earlier films from the 1970s such as Badlands and Days of Heaven, festival goers are in for a real treat.
Ken Loach’s latest film, Sorry We Missed You—which examines the economic crisis in modern-day Britain—is nominated for the Palme d’Or this year (Loach previously won this award for his 2006 The Wind that Shakes the Barley and 2016’s I, Daniel Blake). Quentin Tarantino will join the festival just in the nick of time with his tale of Los Angeles in 1969; a television star (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double (Brad Pitt) attempt to navigate Hollywood as it changes irrevocably in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Starring Margot Robbie as the heartbreakingly beautiful Sharon Tate, Al Pacino and the late Luke Perry, this cast is a surefire attempt at acquiring acclaim.
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire explores an 18th-century romance between a painter and the woman she is commissioned to paint for a wedding portrait. Starring two exotically beautiful and quintessentially European actresses Valeria Golino and Adèle Haenel, Sciamma’s latest will hopefully set the silver screen alight with passion. While we’re exploring incredibly sexy couples on screen, Alice Winocour’s Proxima will also debut at Cannes with Eva Green playing the role of the only female astronaut among a crew filled with men that includes the always handsome and charming Matt Dillon.
We also have Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman starring Taron Egerton as a young Elton John right at the precipice of his major stardom and breakthrough fame. This fantastical biopic will surely be engaging, funky and filled with enough glam rock to sate any viewer who was begging for more after last year’s Bohemian Rhapsody. For those who have had enough of space oddities a good political thriller should entice you and that’s exactly what is being promised with Benedict Andrews’s Against All Enemies starring Kristen Stewart and Vince Vaughn. Finally, our 10th pick for most highly-anticipated film debuting at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival is the British documentary Diego Maradona about the Argentine footballer directed by Asif Kapadia.
