Cannes 2023
Killers of the Flower Moon, Asteroid City, and more of Richard Lawson and Rebecca Ford’s most anticipated titles.
By Richard Lawson and Rebecca Ford
The 76th Cannes Film Festival kicks off on Tuesday, beginning an 11-day parade of top-shelf Hollywood films, international prestige cinema, and (one hopes) some surprising oddities. What will be the buzziest films, perhaps destined for awards glory? Richard Lawson and Rebecca Ford talk it out below.
Richard Lawson: Last year, three future best-picture nominees—Elvis,Top Gun: Maverick, andTriangle of Sadness—premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, shoring up the annual film bacchanal’s position as an important awards launching pad. (Maybe not quite as fruitful as the Venice Film Festival, but still a more than worthy destination.) So one of the many questions about this year’s lineup is whether or not there’s a major Oscar contender lurking among its ranks.
The most obvious candidate is an out-of-competition film:Martin Scorsese’sKillers of the Flower Moon, an adaptation ofDavid Grann’s nonfiction book about the murders of many Native Americans in early-20th-century Oklahoma. With that director, that grave and urgent subject matter, and a sterling cast—Leonardo DiCaprio,Jesse Plemons,Robert De Niro, andCertain Women breakoutLily Gladstone—Killers of the Flower Moon is probably the flashiest prestige Cannes has on offer this year.
Scorsese’s last feature,The Irishman, received a bunch of Oscar nominations in its year, but failed to win any—no doubt a significant disappointment for its “distributor,” Netflix. Scorsese has since decamped to Apple, which has similarly deep pockets, but in contrast to Netflix, a commitment to theatrical release. Might that be a crucial factor in the Academy’s ultimate assessment of Flower Moon?
Also helping matters, potentially, is that Scorsese’s new film finds him working in an entirely new milieu. Some viewers thoughtThe Irishman’s mob story was too close in theme and tone to some of the director’s past efforts (though I’d disagree on the tone part). The ongoing murder and displacement of Native Americans is a far cry from fuhgeddaboudit. Plus, Apple already has a best-picture win under its belt—2021’s CODA, a sleeper hit that stealthily crept up on front-runner status. The Academy was perfectly willing to give Apple its biggest trophy, which cannot be said of Netflix.
Regardless of howKillers of the Flower Moon eventually fares during awards season, it’s poised to be the buzziest film at Cannes. How big do you think it’s going to be, Rebecca? And what other films might challenge its status as the biggest movie on the Croisette?
Rebecca Ford: The fact is, a Scorsese movieora Leonardo DiCaprio movie is going to instantly be a part of the Oscar conversation—so when their powers are combined, we must take it very seriously. I agree it’s probably the buzziest movie as we head into the festival, though there’s a lot of promising fare in competition that we should take a close look at. And one of them is actually premiering on the same night asKillers of the Flower Moon. I have my eye on Todd Haynes’sMay December, which stars Natalie Portman as an actress who is studying the life of a woman(Julianne Moore) she’ll be playing in a film. That woman is in a relationship with a much younger man (played byRiverdalestarCharles Melton), hence the title.
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Haynes has only been nominated for one Oscar himself, for original screenplay for Far From Heaven. ButCarol, which premiered at Cannes in 2015, earned six Oscar nominations. AndFar From Heaven, which starred Moore, earned four nominations. The film doesn’t have a distributor yet, but if it’s bought out of the festival, I could see it landing at the fall festivals on its way into Oscar season. Plus, Moore has five previous acting Oscar nominations (with one win) while Portman has three (with one win), so we are talking about heavy hitters here.
Speaking of returning American directors, we also haveWes Anderson back in the competition lineup, withAsteroid City. It’s a star-studded ensemble cast—Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, andMargot Robbieamong them—set at a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention, which feels like a promising premise.
Two of Anderson’s other films,Moonrise Kingdom andThe French Dispatch,both premiered at the festival, though onlyMoonrise went on to get an Oscar nomination, for screenplay. So we’ll have to wait and see ifAsteroid City is going to make it into that stratosphere. Richard, do you find both of those films promising? What else from the main lineup might be a part of the awards conversation?
RL: I certainly have high hopes forMay December, what with its risqué premise and intriguing cast. Sometimes I feel that the brilliant Haynes’s films put their audiences at a little bit of a distance—I loveCarol, but there’s a chilliness to it that makes the experience of watching it almost more academic than visceral. Which is fine! But sometimes one wants the big gush of feeling at Cannes—and during awards season.
I have of late felt a similar aloofness from Anderson’s movies. The last one I really connected with wasMoonrise Kingdom, which actually seems to share some DNA withAsteroid City, troupe of precocious kids and all. So maybe this one will get me back on the Anderson train. But I do wonder if, barring some major swerve toward the mainstream, Anderson has become too much of a curio for the Academy.
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So perhaps we’ll have to continue sifting through the lineup to find Oscar gold.Alicia Vikander, already a winner with the Academy, plays the last wife of Henry VIII (who is played byJude Law) in Brazilian directorKarim Aïnouz’sFirebrand. Costume dramas aren’t Oscar sure bets the way they used to be, but maybe Aïnouz has found a different approach to the genre, much likeYorgos Lanthimos did withThe Favourite.
There is also, of course, the international-feature category to consider—Cannes is a huge feeder festival for that particular competition. We’d be wise to keep our eyes on, among others, Japanese masterHirokazuKore-eda’sMonster; revered Turkish directorNuri Bilge Ceylan’sAbout Dry Grasses; and perhaps evenThe Zone of Interest, a rare film from art house favoriteJonathan Glazer. Though Glazer’s film is about Nazis falling in love while working at Auschwitz, which sounds like a tough sell.
The biggest surprise breakout at the festival last year wasCharlotte Wells’sAftersun, an intimate father-daughter drama that premiered in one of the smaller sidebar selections on its way to winning a raft of prizes throughout awards season and nabbing a best-actor nomination forPaul Mescal. It’s incredibly hard to identify such phenomena ahead of time, but I’m going to ask you to try anyway, Rebecca. Do you see anything outside of the main competition that could maybe catch fire likeAftersun?
RF: You may live across the country from me, but I feel like you know exactly what I’ve been doing the past couple days—just combing through all the sidebar lineups, looking for those hidden gems. I’m curious about a few tiles in the Directors Fortnight sidebar, includingThe Sweet East, which is helmed bySean Price Williams, the cinematographer ofGood Time. It stars Talia Ryder and featuresSimon Rex, Jacob Elordi, Jeremy O. Harris,andAyo Edebiri, all buzzy performers. There’s alsoThe Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, which is directed byJoanna Arnow(who won a prize in Berlin for a previous work) and executive produced byThe Florida ProjecthelmerSean Baker.
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Critics Week, which is the sidebar that featuredAftersunlast year, has a film calledSleep, which is described as a Korean horror-esque movie about newlyweds. It’s directed by Bong Joon Ho’s former assistant Jason Yu and starsParasitestarLee Sun-kyunandTrain to Busan’sJung Yu-mi—so that may be one to keep an eye on, even if it’s not likely to be awards fodder. What’s catching your attention, Richard?
RL: Back to the main competition, I’ve been hearing whispers aboutSean Penn’s performance inJean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s thriller,Black Flies. In the film, Penn plays a New York City paramedic who’s been paired up with a newbie, played byTye Sheridan. It doesn’t exactly sound like Palme d’Or fare, but Penn could be a contender in the acting competition. Just a few years ago,Diane Kruger won the Cannes best-actress prize for the thrillerIn the Fade—so there’s certainly precedent.
Grabby titles are an easy sell at Cannes, soHow to Have Sex, the directorial debut ofMolly Manning Walker, is likely to be a hot ticket. LikeAftersun, it’s about people from the British Isles on holiday in the Mediterranean, but in this case it’s teenage girls engaging in some spring break–esque bacchanalia. Manning Walker, who is all of 29, is not so far in age from her protagonists, so we should probably expect something frank and closely observed.
I’m also quite curious aboutThe New Boy, an Australian film from directorWarwick Thornton. The film is set in the 1940s and centers on an Aboriginal boy living in a monastery—under the stewardship of a nun played byCate Blanchett. That’s pretty much all I know about the film, though. Which is sort of the point of festivals like Cannes: to see the obvious flashy stuff, yes, but also to discover something unexpected. May this be a year of great discoveries!
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Chief Critic
Richard Lawson is the chief critic at Vanity Fair, reviewing film, television, and theater. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. Richard’s novel, All We Can Do Is Wait, was published by Penguin Random House in 2018. You can... Read more
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