Festival de Cannes is done and dusted for another year, leaving in its wake a number of films to get giddy over as awards are handed out and the word “snub!” is chanted in unison. You can check out the exhaustive list of winners here, but we’ve gone ahead and chosen seven films – winners and supposed snubs – that you’ll want to know about.
The official national release dates for the following films are still pending…
Personal Shopper
Winner of Best Director (tied with Cristian Mungiu for ‘Graduation’)
Partnering up with filmmaker Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria) once again, Kristen Stewart leads this ghost story as a high-fashion personal shopper / spiritual medium reeling over the death of her twin brother. Residing at his Paris home, she attempts to reconnect with him.
Though Assayas scored a joint win as director, the film split audiences down the middle. Time Out London reckoned it was “bewitching, brazenly unconventional” and that “Kristen Stewart has become one hell of an actress.” However, The Times saw it as “an episode of Scooby-Doo, add product placement by Chanel, plus a soupçon of French existentialism, and you have some sense of the sheer bonkersness of Personal Shopper.”
American Honey
Winner of the Jury Prize
This coming-of-age road movie, written and directed by Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank), follows a teenage girl who throws caution to the wind and somewhat becomes the wind as she travels across the Midwest with a magazine sales crew. On her journey, she encounters hard partying, law bending, young love, and Shia LaBeouf.
Although the jury seemed pretty chuffed with American Honey, outside critical reception seemed a bit flip-floppy. One man’s “engrossingly active, sparking” is another man’s “completely chaotic, unstructured.”
It’s Only the End of the World
Winner of the Grand Prix
Xavier Dolan (Mommy) does his own version of The Most Fun You Can Have Dying.
Despite winning an award for It’s Only the End of the World, plenty of critics have been slamming the 27-year-old filmmaker’s drama. In retaliation, Dolan rang emergency services and asked for the wah-bulance.
I, Daniel Blake
Winner of the Palme d’Or
Veteran director Ken Loach claims a second Palme d’Or (the first being The Wind that Shakes the Barley) with this intimate drama about a 59-year-old carpenter in North-East England who falls ill and requires state assistance for disability.
Unlike the other award-winners we’ve mentioned, I, Daniel Blake has been getting a hugely favourable response. Variety says it’s “one of Loach’s finest films,” Time Out London calls it “powerful and urgent,” and The Hollywood Reporter states “[Loach’s] films can still have the power to grip us in an emotional chokehold.”
Toni Erdmann
Probably should have won something
Writer/director Maren Ade (Everyone Else) commands this German comedy about a father trying to reconnect with his adult daughter. He doesn’t appear to be doing it all that well.
The press has been buzzing about this one. Even the chief film critic over at The Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy, who found Cannes to be an overall disappointment this year, gave a lot of praise to the “funny, witty, strange” Toni Erdmann.
Paterson
Probably should have won something
The latest observational feature from Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive) stars Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) as a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, named… well… Paterson. He hears whispers of conversations, writes poetry, gives his dog a healthy about of attention, and adores his dream-heavy wife.
Jarmusch has his fanbase, and Paterson will be right in their alignment according to critical reception. The film “offers discreet pleasures to longtime fans of the New York indie-scene veteran” says The Hollywood Reporter. Time Out London adds that the film is a comment on the “fragile, fruitful and occasionally fraught relationship between creativity and everyday life.”
Elle
Probably should have won something
This rape revenge thriller from Paul Verhoeven (yes, THAT Verhoeven who made Showgirls and Starship Troopers) stars Isabelle Huppert as the head of a leading video game company, laser focused on tracking down the unknown man who attacked her in the middle of the night.
Verhoeven juggles nuclear material that somehow doesn’t blow up horribly in his face, if critical reception is to be believed. In his 5-star review for The Guardian, Xan Brooks calls Elle “a film that runs boldly up and down the tonal bandwidth, zig-zagging from pitch-black horror to devilish satire to light domestic comedy and then back again,” with Variety adding that “high-risk material yields unexpected rewards in this remarkable rape-revenge drama, a possible career high for Paul Verhoeven.”
