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\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Cannes Film Festival, MUBI, DR, Adam Newport-Berra\n <\/p>\n
This year\u2019s Cannes may not have been one for the record books, but even a muted version of the world\u2019s glitziest and most revered film festival features plenty of stuff that\u2019s worth knowing about. This year\u2019s Cannes may have been short on Hollywood A-listers, but it was queer as hell, from Jane Schoenbrun\u2019s joyful riff on slashers and sexual liberation Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma to directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi\u2019s ode to Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca\u2019s legacy The Black Ball. More on those two and six more of the movies we loved this year.<\/p>\n
Sebastian Stan makes an unexpected turn as a conservative evangelical patriarch in this new film from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days director Cristian Mungiu. It\u2019s unexpected not just because he performs half the role in Romanian, but because he leans into the character\u2019s brusque unlikability. Fjord is a squirmy drama in which Stan and Renate Reinsve play a married couple who move with their five children from Romania to Norway to be closer to Reinsve\u2019s mother, only to draw the interest of child protective services when a teacher at school spots bruises on one of the kids. Mungiu, always brilliant at depicting what it\u2019s like to run up against a perverse and indifferent system, achieves something intentionally, provocatively uncomfortable here.<\/p>\n
In a year rife with two-and-a-half hour epics, Pawe\u0142 Pawlikowski\u2019s 1949-set black-and-white drama stands out for running just 82 minutes, and for being nearly perfect. At its core is an incredible Sandra H\u00fcller as Erika Mann, who accompanies her famous father Thomas (Hanns Zischler) on a trip across a recently divided Germany to receive the same Goethe Award from both the West and East Germans. It\u2019s a deliberate narrow aperture from which to look at this immense moment in history, when the country was trying to contend with what it did by either wallowing in denial about collaborating with the Nazis or throwing the past away entirely in pursuit of an already fracturing utopian rebuild.<\/p>\n
This marital thriller is based on the same 1969 Claude Chabrol film that Adrian Lyne\u2019s Unfaithful was based on. It represents a welcome comeback for Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev, who almost died after having a rare bad reaction to the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, for which he had to be hospitalized for almost a year. Zvyagintsev, who remains unflinchingly critical of corruption and abuses of power in his homeland, shot Minotaur in Latvia, but set it in a provincial Russian city in which Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) is a local big shot. The reveal that Gleb\u2019s stunning wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) has been cheating on him isn\u2019t a surprise \u2014 what is is the masterful way that Zvyagintsev adjusts the original story to a Russia that has just invaded Ukraine, so that the movie shifts from tragedy to an almost subliminally dark comedy.<\/p>\n
Jordan Firstman\u2019s directorial debut became the biggest sale at Cannes this year, sparking a bidding war before ultimately going to A24. But the revelation of Club Kid, in which Firstman stars as a mess of a party promoter who has to get his act together when the kid he never knew he had gets dumped on his doorstep, isn\u2019t that Firstman is (obviously) capable of being very funny. It\u2019s that he\u2019s also good at crafting what is an inherently commercial film about arrested development, a delayed coming of age, and what it means to learn to take care of someone else (as well as yourself). Club Kid runs right up to and then darts around so many potential cliches in a way that\u2019s really satisfying.<\/p>\n